Thank You!

[marc420]

Just wanted to say "Thank you!" to the modders who continue to improve Civ IV.

Which means I just did my ritual 'checking-out' of Civ VI. These days, it seems like the question with each new release is what did they remove this time? Well, I won't go on a Civ VI rant, as probably most who are in a Civ IV forum probably agree with me that Civ IV was the peak of this fine game, and its all been downhill ever since. I do think that Civ VI should come with a warning sticker that says "suitable for Ages 10-12" as they continue to dumb down that game.

So, thank you very much to the modders who continue to improve and expand Civ IV, because while I may check out the newer releases to see if the downhill slide continues, I then always come back to Civ IV to play again and again. And I am thus very appreciative of the modders who continue to work on this game. THANK YOU!

 

[keldath]

nice
i join to your thank you

 

[Leoreth]

The great thing about the modding community is that it is a positive feedback loop. Without the work, assets, advice and inspiration from other modders I wouldn't be nearly where I am today.

So I'll gladly pay this thank you forward. Thanks to all the great Civ4 modders here!

 

[Nightinggale]

The great thing about the modding community is that it is a positive feedback loop.

The word positive is the key here. My experience is that people are friendly and supportive. People can say "you completely misunderstood that feature. Here is how it works" without resorting to name calling or anything else of that nature. This is the key to keeping a community alive. I used to work on something else (not civ related), but got flamed frequently and people claimed credit for my work and stuff like that and eventually I just didn't feel like showing up anymore. I then decided to go for civ4col and the only thing I regret is not moving to the civ/colo community earlier. I should have done so when the SDK was released.

Another thing which keeps the community alive is the fact that civ4 is a great game, both for players and for modders. There are levels of modding, right from XML only to total conversions in the DLL and python is somewhere in between. This means you can mod on a level which match your skills more or less regardless of what your skills are.

 

[NikMuazHakim]

Looks like a fun thread! Hello, I also want to say thank you to all the modders, old and new, for making everyone's day. And clicking one more turn..

 

[need my speed]

Indeed. The open and helpful community - freely sharing graphical assets, code, knowledge, anything - has directly contributed to the vast amount of mods, the quality of these mods, the many people still modding, the people still playing and enjoying this game, and so on. If everyone would have hoarded their own assets and worked in their own corner, sharing nothing, then this modding community would have died out half a decade ago (or at least, we would have missed out on many great mods and a far, far smaller amount of people would still happily play this game).

 

[Nightinggale]

If everyone would have hoarded their own assets and worked in their own corner, sharing nothing, then this modding community would have died out half a decade ago

It's a little hard to release a mod and at the same time not share the contents of assets. Since no encryption is used, the only thing, which can be released and not shared would be compiled code. It has happened that the DLL code haven't been released, or released later than the mod itself. Evidently it's a bad idea in the long run because I can't think of any mod worth mentioning, which has yet to release the DLL code. Removing the ability to update to new exe patches and merge with newer modcomps really hurts the lifetime of a mod.

What's great is not that we are forced to share assets, but that we have agreed that it's fine to reuse assets made for another mod. Modding is like making new games based on a game engine (in this case the civ4 engine). There are so many different tasks and skill requirements to making games that it's unrealistic to assume it to be a one person task. This means all the modding teams are too small to make everything themselves. We get around that by borrowing people from each other by "hey that unit looks great. I can use that".

It's actually possible to share everything out of a selfish point of view. If you share, you can expect other people to share and you gain easy access to more resources. The other reason is if you make something great, you will likely want to use it even when you play mods, which aren't your own. For instance I improved performance in some vanilla Colonization code and reduced the turn wait time by almost 20%. Unsurprisingly I prefer that to be present in all mods I play regardless of who made/maintains the mods.

There are also a bunch of non-selfish reasons to sharing. Ideology and just plain being nice to people counts too.

Speaking of Colonization, I like to bust a myth. While Colonization was released as a standalone game, it's not much different from a modding perspective. I would rather call it a big mod than a different game. The exe is lightly modified (adding drag-n-drop to python etc) and then the profession and yield systems have been added. Since the rest is more or less the same (even down to the same typo in the comments), moving modcomps between BTS and colo can be as trivial/difficult as moving between two BTS mods.

Colonization has incorrectly been viewed as a completely different game and this has resulted in two different modding communities. This has seriously hurt the Colonization community, but to some degree also BTS. I wasn't really active here until I realized that 90%+ of the questions here also applies to Colonization. I think it's time to stop thinking "us and them" and instead view both as mods for the civ4 engine.