Soren comment on Graphic Scaling

[arkammler]

pretty much every art asset has a scale value in xml that can be modded to whatever you like... units, buildings, trees, resources, improvements, etc...

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=135687

 

[Commander Bello]

Quote:
pretty much every art asset has a scale value in xml that can be modded to whatever you like... units, buildings, trees, resources, improvements, etc...

So I know about my first modification, if I get this game sometime.

 

[Crayton]

does that me size scale? Like: make the units a little smaller or the cities a little bigger?

 

[warpstorm]

That's exactly what it means and I see a mod that I'm going to make right away also. No more "Land of the Giants".

 

[Xen]

sweet

I wonder if a mod could be made to, as units will be smaller (and and so more individual figures can be fit in a tile) if the soldire-hit points can have two, or even three soldires representing one hit point; making battles look far more epic then just a few guys whacking each other with swords

 

[Grohan]

I am just wondering that how easy xml is to mod? Is it like html?

 

[CyberChrist]

This is good news indeed

 

[Civrules]

I am just wondering that how easy xml is to mod? Is it like html?

Here area a few short points about it...
http://www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points

I gotta tell ya, XML looks pretty cool. I think I should start learning some of it.
I'm currently looking through here. Some more good stuff can be found there.

 

[Carver]

So now we can shrink the historical units but still have Giant Death Robots near the end of the game, AWESOME!

j/k ...but this is very good news

 

[microbe]

There should also be a global preference to scale units, instead of being an xml file.

 

[TheBB]

So, you have any idea how hard it'll be to find those units with a good zoomed-out view? If you shrink those units to normal size you'll have to play the game on max zoom forever. Good luck...

 

[Own]

That's exactly what it means and I see a mod that I'm going to make right away also. No more "Land of the Giants".

Amen ..........

 

[Joseph Stalin]

epic battles in civ *drewl

 

[BearMan]

So, you have any idea how hard it'll be to find those units with a good zoomed-out view? If you shrink those units to normal size you'll have to play the game on max zoom forever. Good luck...

And i wish you good luck with thinking a little before you wish good luck

1. Notice that the flags aren't a part of the units, and therefore could be used to show positions, even if the unit graphics are small.
2. At larger zooms; the units are not visible even in current scale, they use "icon with arrow" mode that shows where units are in that mode.
3. if they add an ingame scale preference, I'm sure they would make it playable.
4. If not; Warpstorm and the other excellent modders would for sure fix any simple view problems with small figure scale.

 

[BearMan]

I am just wondering that how easy xml is to mod? Is it like html?

It's even simpler, it's just a kind of storage language.
example :

[world]
[europe]
[sweden]
[size]9[/size]
[/sweden]
[/europe]
[/world]

And that size of sweden there could might as well be the scale of the units to change, like many of us would like

 

[vbraun]

Super trees? Sweet

 

[Xen]

Super trees? Sweet

sounds liek intead of making the units smaller, your going to make everythign else bigger

 

[qazxc]

..pretty much every art asset has a scale value in xml that can be modded to whatever you like... units, buildings, trees, resources, improvements, etc...

May we assume that initial “scale values” are set when the game product is installed and customized for a particular graphics environment?
Are all similarly classed assets to scale with respect to each other?
Will there be an initialization “exit” that will allow a “user” to gain control to mod XML values?

q

 

[Snoopy]

Notice he said "buildings and improvements".

Seems to me that means you can make each individual building in a city any size you like.

Infact, I think some wonders are built outside the city, correct? You could make the Pryamids really big.


Just in case people don't see one of the big possibilities in this, I just want to say that if you scaled everything down to say 1/10 or 1/20th of their original size, the land itself (the world) will be/seem to be 20 x larger.

Which is why I said, if you zoom in and tilt the screen, it will feel like you are in a very large world - like world of warcraft.

 

[Chieftess]

I am just wondering that how easy xml is to mod? Is it like html?

It's exactly like HTML, only you make the tags what you want it to mean (and toss in a little database on the side like tables). Here's HTML and XML in action. Suppose you made a mod where you had different types of currency...

<table>
	<tr>
		<td>I'm a cell!</td>
		<td>I'm another cell!</td>
			<table>
				<tr>
					<td>I'm a nested cell!</td>
					<td>I'm another nested cell!</td>
				</tr>
			</table>
	</tr>
</table>


<currency>
	<Berries>
		<Player1Amount>100</Player1Amount>
		<Player2Amount>100</Player2Amount>
			<loan>
				<Player1>
					<LoansTo>Player2</LoansTo>
					<Amount>50</Amount>
				</Player1>
			</loan>
	</Berries>
</currency>

If you ever looked at a Civ2 rules.txt file, you'll see that it's a bunch of data (with a bunch of comments, too) that's pretty much read sequentially by the program. The downside is, it's not easy to tell what the 8th 0 is supposed to do in a line of 20. XML tells you want the data is. It may look more cumbersome, but it's actually like a user friendly idea that came too late for DOS. (granted, you already had similar things in word processors. vbulliten's tags for example, would have worked quite well with WordPerfect).