The annoying holes in civilopedia entries

[Civinator]

Many Civ 3 modders know this problem: The automatic formatting of Civ 3 civilopedia entries sometimes rips annoying holes in words of such an entry. Here is a cure to that problem that, as far as I can see, was not posted yet.

In front of the ripped word, simply press the space key each time for every letter before the automatic formatting rips the hole in the word of the new entry. In the screenshot below, the hole is ripped in the word famous after the first two letters.

When pressing the space key two times before the word famous, this problem in the new civilopedia entry is fixed:

Edit: The astonishing result is, that these additional space keys (in this example two) are not only not using more space for the text, but in some cases can even save place in that entry. In the example shown in the screenshots, the word Battle now fits into the same line as the fixed entry, while before, it was the first word in the next line of that entry. In these cases the text must be controlled again, if this fact rips a new hole in the following text.

 

[Chalito]

Great find! Thanks!!

 

[Quintillus]

Do you happen to know when these holes are ripped into Civilopedia entries? Is it after a certain number of characters without a newline, or some other pattern? Or seemingly random? I'm guessing it's at least consistent across launches of the game?

I haven't actually noticed this myself, or I'd look myself... or perhaps I have seen it but assumed it was just a typo and didn't think about it much. But now that you've identified a fix, it occurred to me that a feature I could add to my editor would be to automatically detect, and possibly fix, this issue, so long as there's also a pattern to when it occurs. Not that I'm likely to get around to that... but it would be an interesting feature to work on and would service some purpose.

 

[Civinator]

Those holes are ripped by the formating of the civilopedia text. Unfortunately until now I have no pattern how this formating is working. I repair these holes "by sight".

Firaxis was aware of this formating problem, too. They fixed it by adding partly very big masses of empty text to the entries. Here is an example of the civilopedia text for the civ America done by Firaxis (the problematic parts are marked in red) - but my solution is much shorter:

 

[Quintillus]

Interesting. To me that suggests that it's a bug in some toolkit Firaxis is using for the formatting. I see similar line breaks in the Japanese, Zulu, and Persian entries in the base game, in both cases shorty after the #DESC_RACE section, and in both that section and the main #RACE_ section for the English. Yet the Iroquois have at least as long of paragraphs as the English in their first-page description, so why isn't it necessary there?

We may never know... I'd be curious if there are other known examples in mods though.

 

[Civinator]

I'd be curious if there are other known examples in mods though.

There are many other examples in the civilopedia file. Even when you write or copy and paste some text into the civilopedia, there is a good chance to produce one or several "holes" in the text. The formating of the text for introducing scenarios is strange, too.

 

[Vuldacon]

This all applies to Chart Lists too, makes it difficult to align