RFC Europe: Extending/Fixing City Name Maps

[sedna17]

New Versions of WBSaves posted Dec 22 Small bug fixed, the signs should show up now.

Several of you have indicated your willingness to help out on extending/fixing City Name maps. These are the maps which control what a city is called when settled or renamed when captured by a particular Civilization. We have a large number of these maps mostly complete, but some Civilizations were only ever sparsely filled in, and there have been some changes to the map which necessitate revisions. I have generated WorldBuilderSaves for each Civ's settler map. These contain signs/landmarks which show what a particular Civ's city founded on that spot will be called. If you're interested in helping out, here is the procedure:

1. Post in this thread to say which city name maps you are working on.
2. Download the pack of WorldBuilderSaves attached to this thread.
3. Open up the map which is named after your civ. For instance, the Arab City Name Map is called Arabia_CityNameMap.CivBeyondSwordWBSave. On my computer, simply double-clicking on one of these file will cause it to launch correctly in Civ 4.
4. You will arrive at the starting game menu. Pick one of the first nations (Burgundy) and start a game.
5. Once the game loads enter WorldBuilder
6. You should be able to see the signs with city names.
7. Click on the "Landmark" tool in WorldBuilder and add/delete/modify signs to your heart's content. I think you can't actually modify a Landmark, you may have to erase a current Landmark and make a new one. This will also erase resources below it, but this is ok. Keep in mind that cities can be built with only one square separating them (they can never be next to each other), so it is ok for a 2x2 grid of squares to all have the same name, but it should never be larger than that.
8. In general, cities should be named in their native spelling. Latin-1 accents should be okay now. On my system I have no problem entering Latin-1 accents with alt escape codes http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html, saving as a World Builder Save and then re-opening, but you can also enter accents as html entites: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/latin1.html. This means you'll have to use the best "Westernization" of many Eastern or Slavic names.
9. While still in WorldBuilder, save your map.
10. Upload the map back here, along with a (brief) description of what you've done. I have a Python script which will steal the sign-names out of the file and put them back into the proper place in the mod.

 

[micbic]

I will somehow improve the Austrian map

 

[jessiecat]

I think in several cases one map will serve more than one civ. The original map I did for the Arabs also covered Al Andalus, Arabic obviously being the shared language. I've just had a quick look at it and will make a few corrections being I repost it here. That's 2 out of the way then.
Can we do this with France/Burgundy, Germany/Austria, Venice/Genoa and Moscow/Kievan Rus?
If one map can work for two it will make life easier for everybody.

 

[hendriksen]

I'll try to do some improvements for the dutch..

 

[hendriksen]

one question.. When I open op the worldbuildersave fot the dutch and enter worldbuilder, there aren't any landmarks on dutch terrain. However there is a huge terrain north of the balkans with landmarks and city names... Am I doing something wrong or?

 

[sedna17]

No, you're not doing anything wrong. We've never had a Dutch map (or if we ever did it didn't make it into the code). That map you're seeing is the generic/blank map we have in as a placeholder for Civs without a map. Luckily the Dutch map should be small to create from scratch...

 

[jessiecat]

OK. Just finished revising the England CityNames map. Hows this?

EDIT Revised as per donbot's suggestions

 

[onedreamer]

I'll do the italian merchant republics to begin with, but keep in mind I don't have plenty of time to do this and most of all that the new version of RFC is out

 

[micbic]

Austrian improved version 1

Erased all current names and put in Austria, Czech(not eastern) , Hungary (not eastern), Slovenia, Croatia (seaside and Zagreb), and northern Italy, as well as Bavaria...

 

[onedreamer]

Sedna I have a problem: I followed your instructions, but when I try to load the map saved through worldbuilder the game hangs (it loads forever). Any idea what's wrong ?

 

[donbot]

OK. Just finished revising the England CityNames map. Hows this?

I mostly agree with your map, but I do have a few suggestions.

-Swindon is a railway town and not suitable for the time period of the mod. I suggest moving Oxford one tile south and adding Banbury or Statford in place of Oxfords current tile, or Chippenham and Cirencester were towns in the area of Swindon

-Swap Windsor and Reading, as Reading is further north than Windsor

-I would have Durham rather than Richmond next to Newcastle

-Southampton is west of Portsmouth

 

[jessiecat]

I mostly agree with your map, but I do have a few suggestions.

-Swindon is a railway town and not suitable for the time period of the mod. I suggest moving Oxford one tile south and adding Banbury or Statford in place of Oxfords current tile, or Chippenham and Cirencester were towns in the area of Swindon

-Swap Windsor and Reading, as Reading is further north than Windsor

-I would have Durham rather than Richmond next to Newcastle

-Southampton is west of Portsmouth

Thanks for your suggestions. See above.

EDIT: Spain CityName map now done.

 

[sedna17]

Sedna I have a problem: I followed your instructions, but when I try to load the map saved through worldbuilder the game hangs (it loads forever). Any idea what's wrong ?

Not yet. Which map are you trying to load? One of the Italian ones?

Is anyone else have this problem?

 

[sedna17]

Thanks for your suggestions. See above.

EDIT: Spain CityName map now done.

Yeah Jessiecat, it's fine to double-up maps if there are no city names where the two civs would disagree. Your England map looks good, but your Spanish one is broken -- there is just one sign in it. Maybe the file got truncated on upload, or else...

EDIT: micbic, the Austria map looks good too. Thanks for filling in that important gap.

 

[jessiecat]

Yeah Jessiecat, it's fine to double-up maps if there are no city names where the two civs would disagree. Your England map looks good, but your Spanish one is broken -- there is just one sign in it. Maybe the file got truncated on upload, or else...

EDIT: micbic, the Austria map looks good too. Thanks for filling in that important gap.

I don't know why but it won't let my save the changes in WB. So this time I've saved it as a saved game which should be OK for both Spain and Portugal. This should open OK. A couple of issues though with this map. To make it work more accurately we need to make the following changes.

1. Move the Toledo indy 1 tile east.
2. Move the Pamplona indy 1 tile east.

 

[onedreamer]

Not yet. Which map are you trying to load? One of the Italian ones?

Is anyone else have this problem?

I loaded your WBS just fine. Modified italian city names based on the work I had already posted in the map thread (but since I didn't produce an excel version, I guess it was never implemented). I then saved the stuff through the worldbuilder save function, and planned to further modify it later to add italian city names abroad. The wbs I saved is the one I can't load. If I double click the icon from Windows the game will load -without the mod- and hang. If I load your WBS again, enter worldbuilder and try to load my changes, it hangs again.
Now that I think about it, I deleted Catania, moved the mountain and built Syracuse through the worldbuilder... might this have screwed something ?


edit:
this link might be of help for compiling city lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_European_cities_in_different_languages

 

[jessiecat]

this link might be of help for compiling city lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_European_cities_in_different_languages

Thanks for that, pal. Now this means I have to change all the names to Arabic on the Arab/Cordoba CityName map (from the Atlantic to the Black Sea). Great!

 

[sedna17]

I loaded your WBS just fine. Modified italian city names based on the work I had already posted in the map thread (but since I didn't produce an excel version, I guess it was never implemented). I then saved the stuff through the worldbuilder save function, and planned to further modify it later to add italian city names abroad. The wbs I saved is the one I can't load. If I double click the icon from Windows the game will load -without the mod- and hang. If I load your WBS again, enter worldbuilder and try to load my changes, it hangs again.
Now that I think about it, I deleted Catania, moved the mountain and built Syracuse through the worldbuilder... might this have screwed something ?


edit:
this link might be of help for compiling city lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_European_cities_in_different_languages

Hey onedreamer,

Can you post your (old) WBS, I can't find it in the map thread? Some change to the mod in the meantime will be preventing it from loading, but I should be able to convert it over and then post the new version from which you can continue tweaking.

Thanks for that link, too.

 

[micbic]

micbic, the Austria map looks good too. Thanks for filling in that important gap.

I plan to a) germanize city names and b) expand the map to poland, transylvania and until belgrad and lemberg

 

[sedna17]

Right, so it turns out that WorldBuilder can display accented landmarks, but not save them. Stupid broken unicode support. I think the BUG people have managed to fix this, so I'm looking into it. I'm also going to have to update the WBS I posted above.


In the meantime:

Civ's unicode support is broken, so you should enter only regular ascii characters (no accents) in the landmark/signs. Since we want our city names to have accents, please provide an additional file describing the replacements that should happen. Like: Leon -> Léon. Even with this, we only have support for latin-1 characters. This means you'll have to use the best "Westernization" of many Eastern or Slavic names.