[RaRE] RaR Extended: a combined modmod for the RaR modification

I have only used the transport route system so far where you have to check the appropriate boxes for each good you want to transport in both the sending and the receiving city. These checks are apparently saved with the game. So are the amounts of goods to stay in the city or the max storage in the receiving city.

Some bad news:
I had two CTDs during game play. Both happened in the same turn when I hit the next turn button. After playing that turn a third time with multiple savings in between I could finally get to the next turn.
It was not reproducable so I have no save game.

Pretty regular is the behaviour that after Alt+Tabbing out of Col into another program Windows Explorer crashes. Fortunately Windows 7 these days just restarts it. Still, it is a bit unnerving as you always half expect a full crash.

 

There isn't much I can do about "CTD I can't reproduce". I can't really do anything without a savegame. I'm not sure I can do anything about alt+tab either. It seems more like a colo vs windows issue than a mod issue. I can't remember crashing while alt+tab though. Maybe it's related to the GPU driver and the fullscreen code or something else, which seems computer specific.

I just realized what might be causing this. The problem is not the all buttons, but rather auto export. On each turn start and a few other times, it turns exports on or off depending on how much is stored in the colony. If threshold is set to 0 and the colony has 0, it disables exports, but remembers auto export. The only way to see this setting is to look at the checkbox in the import/export menu.

The issue is best described with an example. Say you have a colony with no fur production, yet the natives donates to you once in a while and you want to move the fur to a specific colony.
In RaR, the solution is to just export the fur and import at the target colony. The transports will ignore this when there is nothing to transport.
In RaRE, the RaR setup still works, but it can also use auto export. This will create the traderoute when needed and delete it when it's no longer needed.

The difference is the number of traderoutes. RaR has revealed that leaving a lot of "idle" traderoutes slows down the game, particularly when making a ship leave Europe. Auto export is meant to counter this while still using the system where colonies can export whenever they gain something. It does however mean they might not show yields as being exported even if they are. It's not a savegame issue if this is your problem. It's just a less than perfect GUI.

 

I know it#s virtually impossible to find a bug that you cannot reproduce. Just saying to let you know all is not well.
The Alt+Tab crashes aren't a real problem, as I said. They did never happen, though, with the same PC and same setup with RAR v1.4(? the last version with a 2 plot city radius), which I played a lot.

 

@Nightinggale
I fully understand the principle of the auto-export, heck I love it, but that doesn’t answer if the game can’t save (yet correctly) the auto-export box checks ([ ] Import, [ ] Export, [ ] Import feeder, =>[x] Auto-export). That means that the auto-switching is turned off on load and sticks to the last used/auto-checked export settings forever as long as you don’t manually turn auto-exporting on again.

I’ve tested this with a good by checking the auto-export, removing a good and proceeding a turn. Afterwards the export-box was correctly empty with the auto-export box still showing the check. Then I have saved and reloaded the same turn.
Now the auto-export box is unchecked (like any other auto-export one). I’ve added the same good again to the city, but on the next turn the export wasn’t automatically turned on again. That would mean there is no GUI display bug and the auto-export settings are lost whenever you load a saved game.

 

You don't even have to start a new turn. I figured out what happens, but not why.

1. Enterprise moves to Salem
2. 30 sheep is picked up
3. Enterprise moves to New Haven
4. 20 sheep is dropped off as New Haven has 80 already and a user set cap at 100
5. Enterprise moves to Jamestown
6. Enterprise unloads into... what? The sheep might vanish
7. The cycle repeats

Everything is fine until it reach step 5. Clearly the problem is that Enterprise wants to unload, but there is no colony in the list, which accepts sheep. Why it decides on Jamestown is currently a mystery. Jamestown is the first colony in the player's city list, which is likely why it is picked, but it doesn't explain why it decides on a city not mentioned in the traderoute list. As I haven't touched this part of the code, I highly suspect this bug is present in RaR 2.4 as well.

Fully automating all transports should work though. Just set what you want in each colony and then set all transports to be fully automated. You will get sheep to New Haven, but you can't be sure it comes from Salem.

Tips: have at least one colony with unconditional import. An easy to manage setup is to use a port colony for all yields and then export to Europe from this one. This will ensure that the scenario where a transport has nowhere to go shouldn't exist.

Using feeder service to maintain a threshold gives the colony higher priority than a colony with no import threshold.
This is useful in case you produce say 20 tobacco each turn, but only 6 cigars. The cigar producing colony will maintain 50 tobacco and the port colony imports with no limits. The result is that fully automated transport should view the cigar producing colony as a better destination for tobacco and only export when the domestic needs are filled.

I didn't make the import caps and as such I haven't been involved in code design or testing, nor has I used them together with manually assigned traderoutes. Maybe they work ok if you make sure your transport will always have somewhere to dump the cargo if the destination fails to accept.

Also auto export is not really compatible with manually assigned traderoutes. If it stops exporting, it will delete all traderoutes with that colony as source. When it starts again, fully automated transports will use the colony again as they use all available traderoutes. However manually assigned traderoute transports will not regain the lost one. Assign normal export if the colony exports using manually assigned traderoutes.

Fixed and it is still able to read 2.5 savegames. I will upload a new dll once I know I'm not going to fix more bugs anytime soon.

 

Hey Nightinggale,

thank for this great Mod

Sadly i have have to report bug with the RaRE 2.5.

After some turn, the game stops working and will not enter the next turn, after click the next turn Button. This Bug appered for the second time in my second game wis RaRE2.5. Sadly i have just a savegame from the second game the bug appears.

How can i provide you the savegame??

Greetings

 

You can attach savegames to a post in this thread. Alternatively you can use the bugtracker on sourceforge. https://sourceforge.net/p/religionandrevolutionextended/tickets/?source=navbar

A savegame, which freezes the game consistently would be great as it can be used to both find the bug and test if a fix actually works.

 

Here you are! I tried switching in the next turn several times, but the game stops working.

View attachment Benjamin n. Chr.-1575-September.ColonizationSave

And here is the savegame with the same bug from a different game.

View attachment FreezeBenjamin n. Chr.-1585-Mai.ColonizationSave

Is there a way i can help you, maybe some Tests?

 

Fixed. The problem turned out to be a ship loading cargo from Québec. It tried to load until the ship was full or there was nothing left to pick up. It decided the best cargo would be tools, but then it actually picked up those, it ended up with 0 as they were reserved for construction. Next time it tried to pick up something, the conditions were precisely the same, which meant it ended up with picking up 0 tools over and over and it would never finish. This type of bug is generally referred to as "infinite loop" or "stuck in a loop" bug.

I wonder how I can have played with the code in question locally for almost two years and never experienced the game freezing and you did it multiple times. Maybe the AI has an easier time triggering it in marathon games.

 

Good News Thanks a lot for this unbelievably quick troubleshooting. Is there a way, i can fix my savegame with the word builder or by fixing an xml file until a new version of RaRE will be published?

That's for sure!

I prefer playing with marathon speed. I've played RAR for several times without bugs like this. But i've startet two games with RaRE and both ended with this bug (both with marathon speed). So if there are new Versions with bugfixes or new features, i'll probably be a predestinated tester

 

There are two things, i really want to implement for my personal taste, using RaRE as base mod. Therefore i post my ideas for now in this thread.

1) The first thing is more balancing than a new feature. I usually play huge or gigantic Maps with marathon speed and 2-plot-city-radius. By the way, i really love the 2-plot-radius. In the beginning of the game, everything is fine and spezialising cities is usefull. I really like spezialising cities. Due to the fact, that the production of raw-materials increases in the late game, there is no more need for spezialized cities. As a consequence every citie has all production buildings an the cities a really similar.

For my personal taste, this is annoying.

I simply want to increase (double or triple) the consumption of raw-materials producing goods.

How can implment this balancing? Is it simple an xml file or will coding be necesarry?

2) The second thing i dislike is the fact, that there are a lot of bonus-ressources outside my city-radius.

And therefore i want to use the same feature, as for the fishing boat.

- If the Plot is inside the players culture, he can build a improvement (e.g. mine, plantation, etc) at this plot with a pioneer.

- Sending an spezialist (e.g. prospector) to the plot will increase the production

- A new unit ("outpost-Wagon/Cart") can be send to this plot and will load a amount of the produced bonus-ressource each turn. Maybe it will be better to spezialize this unit than using a spezialist to increase production.

That are my first ideas to use also bonus ressources who aren't inside the 2-plot-city-radius...

I don't know, how to implement this feature and i also don't know how much the effort will be.

What do you think about these features??

 

I don't think you can increase it beyond a 1 for 1 basis at the moment, and I think the fishing boat is hard coded in the .dll (complicated).

However both have been talked about and are on a wish list.

 

Hi,

RAR-ext is buggy for me. (Nov 16 version)

RAR is working fine. If I overwrite with RARe the base mod, then the citizen sprites are no longer appearing in the cityscreen. They are fine on the map, as 3D sprite.

I'm not deleting any RAR files upon installing, I'm overwriting some of the files by the additional files of RARe, as requested. (I'm in software so I'm not doing something totally weird believe me).

Any idea?

 

Both are good ideas and we talked about those as implementation ideas for M:C. Both requires DLL modifications and can't be implemented overnight. I agree that rebalancing would be good, but without active dll development, it would have to be based on what can be done from xml only.

M:C on the other hand has very active dll development and will likely eventually be able to do what you propose. You are welcome to try to rebalance that mod if you like to do so. Depending on the difficulty of the task, moving the implementation of these features to RaRE might be possible, but since they aren't top priority tasks it will take a while before I look at them. I will however keep in mind that they have been requested.

The idea was to install RaRE and then copy art and sounds. However overwriting RaR should work too. I can think of two issues, which might cause something like this:

1. you have non-English characters in the path, such as é. Get rid of those and/or use the my programs MODS folder
2. you use a 32 bit system and the game runs out of memory

The thing is, while both sounds like candidates for this problem, if they are true, then they should affect RaR too. I did not change anything which could result in something like this. The extra memory usage is at most numYields * num non-AI Cities * 4 bytes. That should not be something, which cause you to run out of memory.

Try to install using the guide precisely. That is, decompress RaRE and then copy the two folders from RaR. If that doesn't help, then try to post a screenshot and I will think some more on what could be the cause.

 

Try the way Nightinggale describes in the install intruduction.

Not copying RaRE files and overwriting the RaR files.
Try instead copying RaR files into the RaRE Mod Folder.

- Install RaRE in a new Mod Folder
- Copy the necesarry Files from RAR-Base mod into the RaRE Mod
- Copy the 1 or 2 Plot DLL in the right folder
- Enjoy

 

Ok, good news it works if one read the installation procedure

I have dropped the 2 plots dll in the assets folder and still the colony (brand new game) has one plot radius, what gives?

Also, where is the changelog about the differences between RARE and RAR? I have searched but except for a few lines for the latest version in RaRE changelog.txt there is nothing, so what is different?

 

You need to own the plots too, which mean you are stuck with the one plot radius until you expand your boarders, just like in RaR.

The changelog lists the differences. I made some changes to play locally and people requested RaR with one plot radius, so I released what I have made. It's not supposed to contain a gigantic list of new features.

There is a few additions to traderoutes. On top of the buttons, there is auto export. It just turns export on and off instead of leaving export on all the time. It's useful for say a colony where the natives give you fur once in a while. It will export the fur, but not have a traderoute to ignore when the colony has no fur. This can greatly reduce the number of traderoutes, which affects performance, particularly in late game as traderoutes can increase in numbers by 2^n, where n is the number of colonies you have.

The game now handles two thresholds. One is the one you set, the other is what is required by the building construction. The intended usage is like setting all colonies to feed and auto export tools and setting the threshold to 0. If a colony builds a building, which requires 20 tools, it will get 20 tools from whatever colony having more than it requires, providing you have a fully automated transport to handle the movement. This makes logistics of the changing demands for building materials easier, but if supply is lower than demand, you do not have any control of where it goes and it could supply each colony with 80% of what they need, meaning no buildings at all. In other words it's a useful tool when used right.

On top of that there are the added buttons to import/export window and bugfixes. Nothing else and I'm now heading for a future release just with more bugfixes. I do not plan to add new features as I mainly focus on M:C. However not making RaRE would kill maintenance/bugfixes of anything RaR related as everybody else left.

 

Have you dropped just one dll. in the asset Folder? In my asset folder is just "CvGameCoreDLL.dll" which i had copied from the 2-plot-folder.

There is a" RaRE changelog.txt" in the mod-folder.

 

I'll install M:C tonight and try the mod.


RaRE is not playable for me until the new Version with the bugfix will be published. I've started another game with the same bug, so i'll have some time vor M:C

If i can help with balancing or translation into german, i would like to help.

 

I'm considering just releasing two new DLL files and the new changelog. I fixed two bugs, both somewhat important. I would like to look into the bug where a wagon train heads for Jamestown without being ordered to do so, but not quite knowing what to do about it, I'm not 100% sure I can fix it within reasonable time. It might be better to just make RaRE 2.5a to give something stable to play. 2.5b can then be released if I fix more bugs. Also by only releasing the dll files, I skip all the bothersome file stuff during a release, meaning it shouldn't be a whole lot of work for me. I can always make a standalone (as is only requires the two RaR folders, not any other RaRE files) once I reached a point where I know I will not make any other releases anytime soon.