Survey Time: Which Civ3 tools would you kill for, on which Mac OS?

[AlanH]

Thanks to Bob Morane, beta tester par excellence, it was discovered that my hacked text editor couldn't even open my own Installer Readme.rtf files ... or any .rtf files.

Sorry about that . I've uploaded a fixed version and the new link is in the post above. Bob gets the prize for spotting the first bug in my offerings, just as soon as I figure out what the prize is

 

[AlanH]

By the way. Having produced the TextEdit hack for all you Mac Civ modders, I have just revisited Apple ProjectBuilder's preferences. You may be interested to know that you CAN select the line endings to use for your new files, just go to Preferences/Text Editing.

It is a global change, applied to all new and/or existing files, unlike the per-file facility I have provided, but it is there and it's free. Of course you may not want to do an entire development tools download and run a complete IDE just to mod a few test files.

 

[MCueball]

Personally, I would like to see the 1 turn research and add 10,000 gold options that are in many of the Windows trainers.

Having both a Windows box and a Mac, the other thing I would like is a way to play a single game on both platforms. Are these ideas feasibly possible?

 

[AlanH]

The 10,000 gold is presumably just a variation on the idea of being able to give yourself extra gold, as offered in the Civ2 cheat menu. In which case, if I can do one you'll be able to use it to do the other.

One turn research, I guess , removes the 4-turn minimum in the standard game. Shouldn't be too difficult.

When you suggest being able to play the same game on two machines, do you mean simultaneously?
Are you looking for two human civs? I don't think this is an option.
Or one civ played on two keyboards? Very unlikely, but why?
Or the ability to edit the game from the PC and play it on the Mac? The last option is possible now. If you have a save file editor for 1.21 or 1.29 files you can edit a file on the PC and play it on the equivalent Mac release.

 

[cracker]

Alanh,

Just a reminder that any external utilities that can be used to alter a game should be deifined to meet the proprietary game security standards that we have set in the GOTM to provide detection for when they are used to alter the progress of a game. Stay in contact with Ainwood to make sure you have this detection marker process well defined.

Any utility that might be relased without these marker functions built in would be a severe liability to the community and could result in elimination of support for availability of the games in the software versions where these utilities could be used to alter game progress.

This doesn't mean the utility cannot be built, it just means that we need some protections in place to make sure that the utility is not "used for purposes of evil."

 

[AlanH]

@Cracker:

Glad to see you are keeping a weather eye open

For clear statements of my policy IF I were to produce any such cheat facilities, see my posts at:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=1206307#post1206307

and

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=1183671#post1183671

These posts indicate my intent with respect to competition game security, and I would have been in touch with you prior to any such tool release to see what could be done to assist you with cheat detection. I saw no reason to open that dialog until I started to do something concrete since, as you say, such information is proprietary and I currently have no "need to know" it. I shall, of course, be happy to work with Ainwood to ensure that game security and integrity is as good as it can be.

 

[ShiplordAtvar]

Originally posted by MCueball
Personally, I would like to see the 1 turn research

In the windows scenario editor, there is a way to change the min/max on tech research. I don't recall exactly where it is. Having just installed the Mac scenario editor, I haven't messed around with it enough to see if/where there is such a feature.

 

[greenie]

Surely a positive factor for game developers and Mac salespeople especially is that most of us have bought the latest OS (X.1 and higher). Surely we can translate that into more up to date products for us loyal mac-sters?

 

[CivIIIiMacguy]

Alan im a little confused...so what kind of editor is this going to be? I am in OSX2.6 now so that platform is cool with me im just curious as to what is going to be included and that the actual editor is going to be. I was hoping for a saved game editor where u can edit the basics, gold, turns, advances, etc... These guys seem to want to get a lot more in depth. I'm just a casual Civ player if such a thing exsists, I have been playin since Civ I so I guess maybe I'm not, but anyways I'm just looking to return to the good old days with Civ I and II where if you wanted to just kick some ass you could... Thanks for your time.

 

[AlanH]

Originally posted by CivIIIiMacguy
Alan im a little confused...so what kind of editor is this going to be?

What's gone on since I started this thread is I produced the installers for GOTM, and the enhanced 20K Culture calculator, I modded TextEdit to allow people to edit Civ3 text files easily and cheaply, and I tidied up and released my Civ3Backup to capture all your autosaves. I've also been looking at the code from an existing PC utility to see what kind of port I can do for that. My R/L got a bit busy right after I started my survey, as I started doing some voluntary work. All that meant that I failed to finish GOTM#22, and I'm struggling to complete #23.

IF I produce any kind of save game editor it will certainly be at the simple end of the spectrum, tweaking a few parameters, but I haven't started anything yet. I'd have to clear it with the GOTM powers that be as well, to ensure that it doesn't encourage cheating. I'm certainly not going to produce anything as complex as some people have been suggesting.

 

[bloodycelt]

This would prob. require a bit of rescources from the computer, but since OS X is unix based imagine a wrapper program that used Civ 3's autosave and e-mailed it to another computer that would then auto-load the file. Hence a play by email multi-player game.

Anyone with more knowlage of this please spit out some comments.

 

[AlanH]

This sounds like an interesting concept. Forgive me if the following is rubbish, but I've never played a PBEM game, and I'm not at all sure I know how it works. Anyway, here are some first thoughts:

As I understand PBEM, it uses PTW, with each human player set up to play as a different civ, and presumably there will usually be a number of AI civs as well? And I'm assuming the game is passed around from one player to the next and each plays a turn, until all the human turns have been completed for one date. Then the AI turns are executed before it's passed back to the first player to begin the sequence of turns for the next date?

Assuming the above description, our wrapper program would have to fool CivIII 1.29 into working with multiple human players, and produce Autosave files after *each* human turn, not just at the start of the *only* human turn as it does currently. There are also complications like the notifications and dialogs that come out of the AI move phase. These would probably only be seen by the player who hits "next turn" at the end of the human chain, but they *should* be directed to specific, or all, players, and may require a response - diplo requests and ransom demands, for example. How is this stuff handled in PBEM games currently?

Here are some thoughts about the file transfer part of the design.

Email is not very efficient for file transfer, as it expands a binary file into 7-bit ASCII text. But it's probably the only option if we need to have a way to send the file when the receiver may be off line or switched off. Running an SMTP server on each machine is a security hazard, so the receiver may need to poll for the mail using a POP3 client.

Unfortunately, there's no way to trigger CivIII to auto-load a new incoming file, as it has no AppleEvents support that I know of. One clue is that CivIII publishes no AppleScript dictionary. Another is that, if you double click a .sav file CivIII doesn't open the file, even though the Finder will have sent it the file reference in an AppleEvent. The reload would therefore have to be done manually by the player. But because of the way CivIII hogs the display it might be difficult to notify the player when the new file has arrived, so we need to think some more about how this might work.

 

[kf97mopa]

Sound from background apps get through. Either a distinctive sound, or simply Text-to-speech saying "A new savegame has arrived", would be enough to notify the player.

 

[AlanH]

Originally posted by kf97mopa
Sound from background apps get through. Either a distinctive sound, or simply Text-to-speech saying "A new savegame has arrived", would be enough to notify the player.

Yes, I wondered about that as I wrote it. As I rarely have my speakers turned on I hadn't tried it. Sounds like a good plan, though not as neat as having the application load the file as BloodyCelt suggested originally.

 

[senecasax]

Well I went through this thread... Very interesting.. I suppose I could go back to iEditCiv and update the BIC file editing to 1.29... I don't even know if there's a copy of it floating on these forums here anymore... If anyone wants a BIC decompressor utility (the compression is from zlib) I wrote one for X awile back... maybe I can find it round here somewhere... Let me know what you guys want now that I'm alive again...

 

[Startaff]

Dear Alan,

sorry to log into this thread only now (too many threads, too little time to live) but...

... are you still into "some more Mac helping-apps" mood?

Browsing this thread I noticed a few suggestions of things quite intriguing, like something able to record events, etc.

This is something potentially very useful, expecially for "level-challenged" folks like me, who barely get on at "regent"... :-(

Any news?

Ciao

 

[AlanH]

@Startaff:

Yes, I am still interested in developing stuff, hence the list of utilities in my signature. If you'll give me some feedback on the suggestions I made, I'll even try to make them compatible with your OS

There are some suggestions that are just too complex for the amount of time I can spend on them - full Saved Game Editors for example.

Other options that have come up are mainly simpler saved game editors to provide cheat modes. I could do them, I guess, but I can't get very motivated because I can't really see the point of them. It seems to me there are already cheat modes available - Chieftain and Warlord levels give you an easy time and should be beatable by any half decent player. Either you want to compete against the game as it is designed, with the possibility of defeat, or you play at an easier level to guarantee victory.

The timeline recorder is something I am interested in as well, as I try to record a QSC timeline for each GOTM and it's very time consuming. However, I would rather take code that has been developed in Windows-land and port it to Mac OS. I have been in touch with developers doing this stuff, and they seem to be stalled currently. Either they have no time to complete the task or they have found problems with the implementation.

Actually, having recently played a couple of Succession Games, I have come to realise that the most important timeline data is not capable of being collected automatically. Because it's what goes on inside your head ... the decisions you make and why ... when you make war or peace or choose the next tech to research and the speed to do it at ... or when you irrigate that tile before you road it, or before you mine the other tile ... or what trade deals you negotiate, in what order. Those are the things that most affect how well you play, and you get the most benefit from producing a timeline if you write them down and justify them to yourself. In a Succession Game you are forced to do so because you need to defend your decisions to your team.

If you really want to reach beyond Regent then read some of the SG timelines and the key strategy articles, and apply the principles.

So at the moment I don't have any specific projects in progress, but I'm still open to suggestions. I'm toying with the idea of converting the GOTM starts into scenarios that can be used for random games playing the extra civs and units, but I've been a bit busy playing SGs and GOTM25 for the last few weeks.

@senecasax: As I moved to v1.29 almost as soon as I knew the rules of Civ3 I have never really found out what iEditCiv does, but I seem to recall it allows starting location (SLOC) definition? I know I've seen requirements for that, and I can see that, coupled with a 1.29 compatible Civ3Edit, it would give opportunities for doing the sort of analysis that people like Bamspeedy and Alexman have done on corruption, attitude, war weariness, flips and so on.

There's actually already a hidden .BIC or .SAV file decompressor available in JMapStat. When you Open a compressed file in JMapStat it creates a temporary decompressed version of the file in its home directory that gets deleted once you have run the mapstat analysis. So copy that file while it exists and bingo.

I also have an Objective C conversion of the Java code that's used for decompresssion in JMapStat, but I haven't incorporated it into any completed utility yet.

 

[Startaff]

Alan,

I totally agree on everything you just said.

I wuld never be interested in a "cheating" tool.
I personally think that if one has the need to cheat at a "solitaire" (as you play vs the computer and not other humans)game (or any game...), well, probably he's better investing his money in some cures...

I'm also agreeing that most (and the most intriguing) part of the game is made of "non automatically recordable" things (mainly: thinking).
An automatic events recorder would just be a helpful tool to remind yourself of how things went during your game.
It obviously won't be of any help in analyzing someone else's game/play.
Maybe my opinion about its usefulness is due to the fact I've only played "my" games (no GOTM, no SG, no PTW obviously) up to now.

About the "settings" for my OS and problems I had... well, no time to make tests. I'll have to wait :-(

Thx & ciao

 

[AlanH]

Originally posted by Startaff
About the "settings" for my OS and problems I had... well, no time to make tests. I'll have to wait :-(

Any progress on this yet, Startaff?

 

[senecasax]

A few things. I just got a new job, and now should have a little time on my hands to take a look at my old stuff and see what i can do about updating it.

Additionally, I was reading the "Trade assist" forums and there is a new tool by our new GOTM leader that allows you to see what the AI has to trade - which is pretty sweet. I know AlanH posted a possible OS X conversion (which would be pretty cool). I never really played with the SAV format because i didn't want to make a utility that could screw up the GOTM's support of mac users. After the next GOTM comes out, Alan if you would be interested in working on a port of this I'd love to help out.

As for SLOC definition, I don't think I included that in iEditCiv, but I know the Civ3 1.29 BIC format offers much more in terms of scenario setup, and in the TILE section of the BIC there is a "player start" value included with the "bonuses (binary) section". There ALSO is a SLOC section that sets up the others. So it SHOULDN't be that difficult to add that to iEditCiv if I update it for 1.29, I should prolly add that.

I'm learning more about Obj-C as i go along, but I'd love to help any way I can. Let me know.