[Religion and Revolution]: Mod Development

[raystuttgart]

Hi guys,

I currently cannot build a DLL anymore.

Until I got this issue solved, I cannot support with bugfixes.
(I could not test them.)

 

[Marla_Singer]

I've committed some Pedia bugs corrections.

However I've noticed one I wasn't able to find how to correct. It is about the profession Whale oil cooker. The graphics of the profession doesn't appear in the pedia.

I'm clueless where the Pedia gets its NIF files for professions. It seems to be defined nowhere. I guess it comes from units but I haven't been able to find out where the junction is done.

 

[Nightinggale]

However I've noticed one I wasn't able to find how to correct. It is about the profession Whale oil cooker. The graphics of the profession doesn't appear in the pedia.

The implementation of the whale oil seems to not really follow internal standards. I recall something like special code needed to handle the yield icon. The correct solution would be to make it comply to standards, but as long as it works ingame, it is just a modder issue and I will not touch it.

I have no idea why the pedia page is broken, but I could try to investigate. It doesn't sound like a game breaking problem, but it should still be fixed if possible.

Likewise I may soon take a look at the makefile in svn. I'm not happy with the modder unfriendly design, but if that is what it takes to make ray able to compile again, then so be it.

 

[raystuttgart]

Likewise I may soon take a look at the makefile in svn. I'm not happy with the modder unfriendly design, but if that is what it takes to make ray able to compile again, then so be it.

Thanks, but please don't waste your time.
My vacation is over in a few days anyways.

I really only wanted to help with a few bugfixes.
(And most bugs reported are fixed again.)

We will have a bit of testing in the next 2 weeks and then we could publish Release 2.3.
(After the release I consider myself "retired" again.)

By the way:
I wish all of you guys a great New Years Eve.

 

[Marla_Singer]

The implementation of the whale oil seems to not really follow internal standards. I recall something like special code needed to handle the yield icon. The correct solution would be to make it comply to standards, but as long as it works ingame, it is just a modder issue and I will not touch it.

I have no idea why the pedia page is broken, but I could try to investigate. It doesn't sound like a game breaking problem, but it should still be fixed if possible.

Don't waste too much time on that one. That's excessively minor.

After all, I get used to the globe view getting dark whereas I used it a lot when I was playing Vanilla to plan my settlements strategy (using the line drawing and text features). In the end, I realized I simple didn't need that feature. However it's true that I've changed my globeview parameters to make it possible to zoom out a lot more on normal view.

Once we know we have the power to correct stuff, it can become an obsession to find solutions, but in the end, it doesn't really matter.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Oh now that I think about it, in my latest translation commit. I've made some changes in the English text regarding the demographics screen.

I've replaced "GDP" by "Treasury" and "Mfg. Goods" by "Hammer Production". These are more accurate descriptions for the figures shown. I've also changed the Production units from "millions of tons" to just "tons" which looked more realistic to me.

If a hammer represents a ton of raw material used in building, then a tobacconist's house weights 90 tons and a Colonial congress weights 3,000 tons. That makes sense. At least more than if it were "millions of tons". For the matter, the World Trade Center A and B buildings weighted 500,000 tons, and they were much bigger than the RAR Colonial Congress.

And as I'm talking about the Demographics screen, I always thought the fact that each citizen was representing 100 inhabitants was some kind of unplanned bug. That makes your military troops more populated than your cities, even if they represent much fewer units. If we consider one citizen represents 10,000 inhabitants, then the demographics population makes much better sense.

At first demographics census in 1790, the population of the US was of 3.8 million people, which would make in RAR terms 389 citizen units (if we consider each one represents 10,000 people). That's stunningly realistic. In RAR terms, the population of the 13 colonies would then be Virginia (75), Pennsylvania (43), North Carolina (39), Massachussetts (38), New York (34), Maryland (32), South Carolina (25), Connecticut (24), New Jersey (18), New Hampshire (14), Maine (10), Vermont (9), Georgia (8), Kentucky (7), Rhode Island (7) and Delaware (6).

Sorry but that fascinatingly fits with their RAR gameplay different stages of development!

The "real population" figure is defined by getRealPopulation() on line 3429 of the CvCity.cpp file. That's where it multiplies the getPopulation() by 100. I've done some testing in multiplying there the population by 10,000 and it seems to work well. I won't commit that kind of things though.

By the way:
I wish all of you guys a great New Years Eve.

I wish the same to all of you.

 

[Nightinggale]

I'm not sure about the 100 vs 10,000 people issue. While it sounds right in 1790, it sounds so wrong to have a colony with 70k people in 1550. Port Royal had 50k inhabitants when it was hit by an earthquake in 1692 (I think that was the year). This makes it as big as London and dwarves all other colonies at that time.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I'm not sure about the 100 vs 10,000 people issue. While it sounds right in 1790, it sounds so wrong to have a colony with 70k people in 1550. Port Royal had 50k inhabitants when it was hit by an earthquake in 1692 (I think that was the year). This makes it as big as London and dwarves all other colonies at that time.

Remember that the population of the "colony" is not strictly urban, it's both urban and rural.

When you have 70k people in 1550, maybe only 20k of them are urban (let's say a carpenter and a rum distiller). The other 50k will be a lumberjack, 1 sugar planter, 2 fishermen and a farmer (assuming you don't have only specialists).

But anyway, your point remains correct. Real life growth is exponential which is not the case in Civ games. Just to give an example, in real life, a population will take the same time to grow from 20k to 40k than it will take to grow from 20 million to 40 million. That's clearly not the case in Civ4Col as to grow of just a single unit, you will always need the same food, no matter how populated you are.

I'm actually quite glad about it as a game following real life quantities can only become unbearable (or would require to automatize everything, which is just not fun).

But anyway, you can at least agree that, on the demographics screen, proportions are not correct between the population and the military force. How can you have more soldiers than settlers with a lot less units?

 

[raystuttgart]

Ok guys, let us please come to and end with implementing changes for this release.
(Except further necessary bugfixes or harmless text corrections of course.)

Let us simply try to stabilize the current version and then publish it.
(So no new features or unnecessary balancing changes please.)

I thus suggest:

Release 2.3 on January 17. (Saturday)
On this day we will try to get the Release uploaded.

This will give us enough time to test (also by playing) without stress.

 

[Schmiddie]

There is no need to hurry. We should release 2.3 when we have finished bugfixing and testing...17 January sounds fine.

ray, I hope you could solve your problem with the DLL?

 

[raystuttgart]

There is no need to hurry.

I generally agree.

17 January sounds fine.

It is just a general target date.
(Which should give enough time for testing.)

ray, I hope you could solve your problem with the DLL?

Nope, I did not have any time for that today. (Family visit)
I will probably not even try to setup my workspace again.

I don't have any further bugfixes on my list and only 3 more days of vacation.
Also, it seems like vetiarvind does not need my help for fixing little DLL bugs anyways.
(And Nightinggale would probably support a bit as well.)

After my vacation I will have almost no time for modding again.
So generally I will probably only help a bit with testing one or two hours at the weekends until release.

I still think that we did some good fixes and improvments again.
And it was really nice to see that there are still a couple of people around that care for this mod.

Once again, thanks a lot to everybody.
(And maybe some of you guys might really join forces on a big modmod as a kind of follow up project.)

 

[Marla_Singer]

Alright, I've downloaded the latest version from the SVN and performed some tests with it.

• Bombarding a fort crashes the game.
• The maps I've created may crash the game... or not. It's pretty weird, I'm working on that one to find out what crashes it or not.
• It seems the AI will take over the fort only if it's empty. I believe the fact it is so strong defensively discourages the AI to attack. That's not necessarily a balance issue, maybe that's a feature as the Fort is supposed to behave as a deterrent.

Here's what I could say about my first tests.

 

[raystuttgart]

Alright, I've downloaded the latest version from the SVN and performed some tests with it.

Great. Thanks.

 

[Nightinggale]

• Bombarding a fort crashes the game.

Bombardment is meant to break everything. This just mean the code is too efficient

I'm still working on figuring out precisely how trade groups work, which is kind of tricky without comments. I suspect that it might work in multiplayer, but even if it will not cause desyncs, it will not be saved if it isn't synced.

Also now there are two import/export thresholds, but none of them has any text. Adding a popup telling which is which would be a good idea.

 

[vetiarvind]

Alright, I've downloaded the latest version from the SVN and performed some tests with it.

• Bombarding a fort crashes the game.

• 
  
  Perhaps it's that "isBombardable" attribute for the improvement that is the problem...I remember the "isFortifyable" improvement attribute crashing the merged mod, although it wasn't crashing in my mod-mod, so i had to remove it.
  
  Maybe for now we can comment out or remove the bombard feature?

 

[raystuttgart]

Maybe for now we can comment out or remove the bombard feature?

That would be completely ok for me.
(Bombarding Forts does not sound important to me. Conquering them is what counts.)

 

[Marla_Singer]

Just so that you know, I'm performing my tests on normal speed, and the game seems to make much better sense this way than on Marathon.

I've taken the habit to play on Marathon from Civ4, and I picked that speed since I've got RAR without really thinking, simply because I believed games would be deeper with it. But the Marathon speed on RAR is almost unbearable.

I've started my current game at the release of version 2.2. After 102 hours of game, I have 42 colonies and 1,041 citizens, and I just reached the 50% citizens necessary to trigger independence despite having 105 statesmen, 8 noblemen and 1 governor. Everything just takes too much time to be built on Marathon speed, you need to build hammers like a freak, I have 90 carpenters.

I've also found out my issue with the founding fathers. Every FF needs 3 times more points to be earned. That's fine regarding religious, trade and political points as you play 3 times more turns. It is not however regarding exploration and military points, as you don't have 3 times more tiles to explore and you already need three times more materials to build a unit so you just can't win three time more battles.

That's the reason why advanced military and exploration FF are just impossible to get in Marathon speed.

 

[raystuttgart]

Just so that you know, I'm performing my tests on normal speed, and the game seems to make much better sense this way than on Marathon.

Just as I said, I had been testing and playing almost exclusively with Gamespeed "Normal".
(Gamespeed "Marathon" always felt much too slow to me.)

I tried to think about other Gamespeeds as well, but some small issues (especially in Balancing) might have slipped through.

I've taken the habit to play on Marathon from Civ4, and I picked that speed since I've got RAR without really thinking, simply because I believed games would be deeper with it. But the Marathon speed on RAR is almost unbearable.

Playing on Marathon is only slower, not deeper.
(With "Normal" you will have much more action going on. Your colonies will simply develop much faster on "Normal".)

There is no "Turn Limit" in RaR if you set up only "Independence" or "Domination" or "Industrialization" as Victory conditions.
(Game will simply last until one nation wins. Simply don't activate "Score after Turn Limit" as Victory condition if you want to have "endless game".)

 

[Marla_Singer]

Oh, and for the matter, when an AI colonial militia or a town guard is on UNITAI_DEFENSIVE. It doesn't hold a fort, it just leaves it and go get a walk, even if all cities are already well-guarded.

That would be completely ok for me.
(Bombarding Forts does not sound important to me. Conquering them is what counts.)

Then I would severely encourage their defence bonus to be reduced at only 50% for normal forts and 70% for great forts? As I can't see the AI attacking a single fortified colonial militia with the current defensive bonus.

And even besides that... such a huge defensive bonus seems to be unbalanced compared to cities. Now that forts grow culture, I'm wondering if we need them to be so defensively strong. Or maybe it wouldn't serve enough as a deterrent to protect from native raids. I don't know, I need your advice on that.

Or maybe that's just that the AI still doesn't care about fort and go get empty ones only because it's on their path.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Playing on Marathon is only slower, not deeper.
(With "Normal" you will have much more action going on. Your colonies will simply develop much faster on "Normal".)

Yes of course.

The reason why I played marathon in Civ4 was because the game was so quick on normal speed that I couldn't yet feel fully involved in a specific era that I was already getting to next one. But this doesn't make sense in a game without tech tree such as Civ4Col where you get better buildings and units is a matter of development and not of innovation.

I've noticed that on the RAR gigantic Americas map, the game is set by default on marathon. I'll correct that to normal.