Reality Check: Civ 4 mod Ultima style RPG

[yakinikuman]

Hi, aspiring hobbyist game designer/programmer here. I have an idea to create an Ultima style RPG using Civ 4. Tell me if I am crazy or not... For the record, I am pretty experienced with C++ and Python, but I haven't tried to mod Civ 4 at all. (Hence this exploratory post.)

-There would be a map with cities, roads, etc, but everything would be static. No new cities would be created, tech levels stopped.
-Player would control a single unit, be able to move around the map. Still would keep a set number of movement points per turn.
-There would be enemies wandering around the map as well. When player meets monster, we leave the world map and go to a separate, small battle map. Player (and party members) are randomly placed in one corner, some monsters of the same type placed in the other corner. In this map, combat is same as in normal Civ 4. When combat is over, we return to the main world map.
-If player goes to a city, player can "enter" and talk to city members, go to a shop, engage in subquests, etc. I think this would be easiest to accomplish through the diplomacy dialogue system - like a old school text based adventure.

Has anyone done anything like this? Is it possible with the modding hooks provided by Civ 4?

 

[phungus420]

Check out the Afterworld mod. It's an official mod similar to what you describe, just not as in depth. The split screen issue is where you diverge. I know this is difficult to do, but possible to accomplish.

What you propose is possible. Civ is remarkably moddable, almost everything is exposed in the SDK. I think there are some opening menu things, and the actual model rendering stuff that's hardcoded in the .exe, but most everything else is controled by teh gamecore.dll

 

[salaminizer]

I thought of this idea reading your post, so it's just an untried suggestion. one thing you could do is have a "fence" impassable feature, something like that, which you would add to the terrain surrounding the hero and the monster within a certain radius. you could activate this at a distance, kinda like a zone of control or even with the unit's sight range.

there's the issue of multiple monsters at the same time, but once you figured that out, you could spawn party units and other monsters and reposition them and the border of the "fence". I guess it could be done with direct encounter too and you could turn the units that won't participate in the battle invisible and "hold" them until the combat is over.

you'd probably need to save the old hero position and keep track of the spawned monsters so you know when to remove the fences.

hopefully that made sense

 

[EmperorFool]

Someone was working on a dungeon mod for Fall from Heaven 2 that would allow you to enter single-tile dungeon markers on the main map and move you to a new map representing the underground dungeon. I would check with that person to see how they did this.

One way is to set aside a portion of the main map where you do the zoomed-in battle. The problem is that then the map won't be able to wrap through it, and you'll have to setup that map each time and it will be visible on the minimap. Maybe the person above found a better way.