The end of all new civ disputes?

[Spatula]

I had this idea late last night and I was worried I might forget it.....thankfully I haven't.

We've all seen the endless amounts of threads full of people asking for this or that civ to be included (or even taken out). And then an idea struck me: patches.

What if the same civilizations that you already get were kept (if you really don't like them, no-one's forcing you to play as them or put them in the drop-down boxes), and new civs were available to download as a kind of patch? That way people could have all the extra civs they wanted, and people who didn't want particular ones wouldn't have to have them taking up their hard drive space. There could even be a mod pack for people to make their own civlizations (a TLOTR fan could make Gondor or the Noldor for example)!

Any thoughts?

 

[awcabot]

Somewhere, in the PPT document the main Civ4 developer leaked on the web, it stated that almost everything was going to be done defined in XML, so as to enable pretty much everything to be modified by the end user.

Not a programmer, but I think this means the possibilities are close to endless.

 

[Spatula]

XML

*The noise of something going over my head*

 

[warpstorm]

Somewhere, in the PPT document the main Civ4 developer leaked on the web...

Wow, you make it sound like it was done sneakily. This was the transcript of a speach he gave before hundreds of other games programmers.

Yes, if XML is used (as it says in the doc) it will be very flexible. You won't really need any tools except Notepad to make some mods.

 

[warpstorm]

Oh yeah, even if XML is used for most of the data, some of it will have to be in Gamebryo friendly formats. In particular, the 3D models and animations come to mind.