[TOT] The Test Of Time Patch Project

[McMonkey]

Just a quick suggestion. Could aircraft carriers capacity be limited like transport ships?

 

[TheNamelessOne]

I saw this thread in the Technical Support subforum. I'm not getting my games bounced on a LAN, but the lack of a 'Start on Pre-made world' option (@MAINMENU2) for any of the multi-player modes (@MAINMENU2M) is worth a look.

Never noticed that option missing there before. It looks intentional, but I'll restore it if possible.

If I were to make a request too, I would ask to be able to add text to terrain tiles and improvements, the way it is done for cities. Like river/ region X, village Y, mine/ airfield Z etc.

I'll add it to the list. This would need the extension block to store the text in the saved game, but other than that it shouldn't be too much trouble.

(Oh, and when you start a fantasy game with the move debug thing, the selection "loops" and doesnt let you load the 4 maps.)

It even crashes the game for me (access violation). I'll see what's up, but usually Move Debug isn't that useful anyway

So, as an example, maybe it (barbarian tracking) could be customizable, such as under @COSMIC2? So that one can set whether to limit or turn off the tracking any one of the barbarian actions (unit moves, attacks, and/or city captures) they so choose.

Doesn't holding Shift down prevent those moves from being rendered? The game code seems to suggest that anyway.

@ The Nameless One:

Is it possible to deactivate the healing process outside of cities? Or to slow it down and have something like a healer-unit who can restore your health (like an allied city does)?
And I would like to be able to enter an allied city to help my allies keep their city.

The healing process is dependent on quite a few factors (presence of fortress, unit domain, proximity to a city, presence of barracks in that city, etc.). I'll put it on the list though.

Being able to enter allied cities would also mean disabling their healing effect. Healer units are probably a bit out there.

Just a crazy thought:

Would it be possible to enable settlers/engineers to create rivers on terrain?

I've never looked into adding new engineering orders yet. So I can't say for sure atm.

what about turning it into ocean, so you could build a channel. Or turn sea into terrain (like in Dubai?) Even bridges/railroad over ocean (after a special tech) would be funny.

This should be possible, as long as adjacent cities are updated to account for ship building/building of coastal improvements.

MORE IMPORTANT: An adjustable technology progress rate for each government - just like fundamentalism. I always thought a democracy's research rate was far too fast.

Applying a modifier is possible, I'm not sure if it would render correctly in the city window though. I'd have to take a look.

I'm sorry to report that I've hit a glitch. I've been using the patch as I've been developing my scenario "Burma Campaign". Everything worked as advertised, but at some point certain features stopped working. Specifically, rail movement is again unlimited, despite being set at 3. Road and river movement is 1, as set. Also, the river movement for designated naval units has stopped working. All other set functions of the patch seem to be functioning, eg. stackable terrain in combat. Can you help?

Sure, could you attach the relevant files (saved game, rules, etc.)? I'd be happy to take a look.

Just a quick suggestion. Could aircraft carriers capacity be limited like transport ships?

Carrier and submarines do not actually "carry" units like transports do. The carrying unit is not stored with the carried unit for instance. When moving a carrier or submarine, the game just moves up to 20 air units with it that happen to be on the same tile.

I'd go as far to state that transporting unit stacks is one of the poorest implemented aspects of the game (technically, that is). There's certainly a lot of magic involved (moving unit stacks to negative map-coordinates temporarily for instance). I'll probably end up rewriting it entirely so we can also have land/air transports and other such goodness.

For 0.12 I'm finally finishing the "Extra units" patch, which will allow up to 127 unit definitions. Of course, the pain is in the saved game format, which has a couple of places where there's only room for 80 units (defence minister stats for instance). These will have to be moved to the Extension block. But besides that it's working well enough in-game.

 

[techumseh]

Sure, could you attach the relevant files (saved game, rules, etc.)? I'd be happy to take a look.

Thanks. Here you go.

 

[TheNamelessOne]

Did you recently upgrade to 0.11? From now on, the movement multiplier patch needs to be enabled with the 'MovementMultipliers' key. Take a look at the description in the launcher.

Also, there's a typo in the RiverMultiplier key (missing an 'i').

The navigable rivers problem is probably related to a labeling mismatch between @UNITS and @UNITS_ADVANCED. These should be in the same order. The unit for which you enabled the navigable rivers flag does not correspond to the 'River launch' unit in @UNITS, which is probably what you intended.

 

[techumseh]

Thanks so much. Everything works perfectly now, and now rivers can be set to provide no movement benefit at all. What a relief!

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Doesn't holding Shift down prevent those moves from being rendered? The game code seems to suggest that anyway.

Source: Just tried it myself.

Maybe I need to time it, so I know when to start holding it down?

 

[Metro Polis]

Being able to enter allied cities would also mean disabling their healing effect. Healer units are probably a bit out there.

OK, then I'd rather skip the healing effect of allied cities. The ability of entering them would be great. Clearly the units have to be thrown out, when the alliance is cancelled.

Skip the healer units, too. But I still think damaged units should only be able to recover in cities and not in open field or fortresses.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

So, umm... Yeah.

This happened.



Admittedly, I forgot if I'm supposed to take any sort of preventative measures, if needed.

Edit: Also, for some reason, city improvements are not being destroyed on city capture. I have the improvement flags enabled, and I set bit 3 to 1, but nothing is happening upon city capture.

 

[McMonkey]

I'll probably end up rewriting it entirely so we can also have land/air transports and other such goodness.

For 0.12 I'm finally finishing the "Extra units" patch, which will allow up to 127 unit definitions. Of course, the pain is in the saved game format, which has a couple of places where there's only room for 80 units (defence minister stats for instance). These will have to be moved to the Extension block. But besides that it's working well enough in-game.

Limited capacity carriers and land/air units that can carry units would open up many new possibilities. I wish you luck with this one!

127 units? Wow! For a WWII scenario that would finally mean we could make full use of Fairline's amazing graphics and have a full on technology race with progressively more powerful units. We can also add special purpose units without having to sacrifice essential slots.

ToTPP is just the shot in the arm Test of Time needed. It has certainly revolutionised my projects and I look forwards to seeing what over marvels you will come up with. Thanks again for the effort!

 

[CurtSibling]

Ho boy! Ho boy!
More unit slots!

Drooling over my chin here...
That is due to old age, but this news too!

 

[tootall_2012]

Hi TNO,

I've been following with great interest the amazing new features you've been adding to your tool. They've inspired me to start re-working on my own project. Thank you so much for all you are doing for our hearty Civilization 2 community!

That said I have 2 questions and a wish:

In response to one of techumseh's technical glitches' you responded:

Did you recently upgrade to 0.11? From now on, the movement multiplier patch needs to be enabled with the 'MovementMultipliers' key. Take a look at the description in the launcher.

This leads me to ask about versioning. As I understand it, and please correct me if I'm mistaken, the TOTPP parameters are not saved in the .scn file but rather exist in the TOTPPciv.exe and rules.txt file. As such, will a player who updated their TOTPP tool to the latest version be able to play a scenario that was designed with an earlier version? Therefore, will the scenario designers have to regularly update their scenarios to ensure it is always in tune with the latest version of TOTPP, or otherwise risk having their games crash for players?

My second question is in relation to air unit movement allowance (and not the range factor which determines how many turns an air unit can remain in the air). At present, as I understand it, the maximum movement points of an air unit seems closely related to the 'Road movement multiplier' (RMM) value entered in the rules.txt file:

60 MP if the RMM is set at 2
40 MP if the RMM is set at 3
30 MP if the RMM is set at 4

That means the maximum range of your air units is directly tied to the RMM and therefore has a direct impact on your ground unit road movement. What if you wanted to have your bomber to have a range of 60 but your ground units have a road multiplier of 3 or 4? Is it possible to dissociate the air unit movement from the RMM?

And finally, my heartfelt wish is to see you successfully implement the transport feature for land and air units so eagerly sought out by our members. It would add so much flavor to my scenario to see the Air Cav infantry being transported to battle by UH-1 Iroquois helicopters!!

 

[TheNamelessOne]

Source: Just tried it myself.

Maybe I need to time it, so I know when to start holding it down?

Holding Shift does speed up the AI movement phase, but only affects moves, not attacks etc.

So, umm... Yeah.

This happened.

Admittedly, I forgot if I'm supposed to take any sort of preventative measures, if needed.

Any idea how that happened?

Edit: Also, for some reason, city improvements are not being destroyed on city capture. I have the improvement flags enabled, and I set bit 3 to 1, but nothing is happening upon city capture.

I only see bit 3 being enabled for the SDI improvement. Or is this unrelated to the attached rules?

This leads me to ask about versioning. As I understand it, and please correct me if I'm mistaken, the TOTPP parameters are not saved in the .scn file but rather exist in the TOTPPciv.exe and rules.txt file. As such, will a player who updated their TOTPP tool to the latest version be able to play a scenario that was designed with an earlier version? Therefore, will the scenario designers have to regularly update their scenarios to ensure it is always in tune with the latest version of TOTPP, or otherwise risk having their games crash for players?

Normally I try hard to preserve backwards compatibility, but in this case there were unintended interactions with scenarios employing fractional unit movement. Therefore I had to make an incompatible change this time. But this is the exception rather than the rule. I also prioritize such fixes, so it should rarely take more than one release after the report for such a thing to be fixed.

That means the maximum range of your air units is directly tied to the RMM and therefore has a direct impact on your ground unit road movement. What if you wanted to have your bomber to have a range of 60 but your ground units have a road multiplier of 3 or 4? Is it possible to dissociate the air unit movement from the RMM?

I've considered this when writing the Railroad & River multiplier patch. But it would make movement much more complicated. Instead I changed maximum movement to 255 instead of 127. So range 60 for your bomber with a RMM of 4 (240) will work with the patch, but an RMM of 5 will not.

And finally, my heartfelt wish is to see you successfully implement the transport feature for land and air units so eagerly sought out by our members. It would add so much flavor to my scenario to see the Air Cav infantry being transported to battle by UH-1 Iroquois helicopters!!

I think this is one of the most requested features at this time. But it will be far from trivial, key game mechanics will have to change. For instance loading and unloading should probably be made an order, currently the domain difference between unit and transport makes it clear, but there will be no such thing for e.g. trucks transporting troops.

We'll probably also want to limit the types of units some transports can carry. Not all air transports will be able to carry all ground units for instance. This will have to be expressed in the rules in some way.

So, let's all think about proper transport mechanics that will work in game. It's better to have a bit of an idea about this before starting work on the patch, since it's gonna be a big one. And I'd rather not change half of it again in a future version. I'll start a thread for it.

Also, landmarks:

Spoiler :

 

[Tanelorn]

Amazing! Thanks TNO!

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Holding Shift does speed up the AI movement phase, but only affects moves, not attacks etc.

The Barbarians had almost 400 units in the save game I was playing (because I wasn't paying attention to my events.txt), almost all on a single map. The AI civs had only three cities there because the barbs were so pervasive. Holding down shift didn't speed up the movements either.

Could it be dependent on the speed of my computer? Maybe my computer is too fast to make a difference with shift.

Any idea how that happened?

Sadly no. I loaded up "*_Auto2.save" to see if it happened before the first autosave, but it had apparently been there for a while, since I saw it at population 2. I checked the scenario setup file to see if there were any pre-existing or buggy airbases or fortresses, but there were none.

I only see bit 3 being enabled for the SDI improvement. Or is this unrelated to the attached rules?

Yeah that was it, bit 3 was enabled, but I tried bit 3 for other improvements as well, but they still weren't destroyed upon capture. And during some changes I was making later on in the scenario itself, I noticed that when a city is captured once, none of the improvements are destroyed. When it is captured again immediately, all of the improvements are destroyed, even if it has built every single one of them. So whether it's something in the rules file, I have no idea.

 

[McMonkey]

Landmarks huh? Great idea! Will be extremely useful in historical scenarios where an important hill, river, village or mountain pass being highlighted will add a lot of flavour to the game without having to create an actual city to try and represent it. I'm sure there's a ton of other things we could use landmarks for too.

 

[Timoleon]

Thank you for the update TNO.

1) Does anyone know how to change city sprites? I've have set "CitySpritesPerTribe ,1" in @Cosmic2 (no city sprites are being displayed in-game) but honestly I've no clue what to do beyond that point. Also, how CITIEST<x>.BMP files are modified? Do I make copies of cities.bmp or something...?

2) Is it possible to Barbarians to not go extinct as game progresses? That constant fear of Barbarians in the begging of the game is exciting.

3) Suggestion: How cool would it be if a human player could play 2 or more civs at the same scenario?


Thanks in advance.

 

[McMonkey]

Timoleon. Suggestion 3. Can that not be done in hotseat mode?

 

[la raven]

Hello again!
Would be time to create a whole new Test of Time... new skins, new four basic scenarios,
new civ2.exe plus TOTPP, Civilization 2 Test of Time 2 or something.
Or, it would be funny, to give the game the possibility, to enhance the main options in game,
where you can choose Original, Original Extended, Fantasy, Sci Fi, or whatever, which direct
to the files in game, so that you could extend that list to invent some more basic scenarios, whatever.

Currently the question about how to travel all these units, i did an answer already earlier in that thread!!!

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13542553&postcount=323

We have in the units whatever rules.txt list, a 0 til 2 to specify land, air, sea.
If we would have a 0 til 8, like i told, for land 0 1 2, air 3 4 5, sea 6 7 8, we could say
in the rules.txt list, which type carries which type.
For example land, a 0 would be a light trooper like infantry, a 1 light artillery,
a 2 heavy artillery plus tanks. land air sea get their 3 values to differ from light to heavy.

And where that units carry limit appears, that transport limit, there could be just the transport
limit written for all of the transports, if carrier, transport, or whatever! So you have a transport limit
already, it just must happen to be strictly used for all of them. So that you would have to land
an air vehicle by the order sleep ontop of the carrier, and that would include a carry the sleepers limit.

Then you could just say in the units list, carrier would be, a heavy sea vehicle, so 8.
A heavy sea vehicle could carry all of the types air, so 3 4 5 would be noticed later in the list.

A transport truck is a heavy land vehicle, so 2, and could carry the light types, infantry,
plus the middle heavy things like light artillery. One transport truck, a light truck, could just do
the light types, another transport truck, advanced truck, plus the middle heavy types, but never
the heavy types like heavy artillery or tanks or whatever.
So, by these numbers 0 - 8 you could give every types land, air, sea, their light, middle heavy and
heavy types, and could give every type within the units list, their carry options, even the options
for example, that a carrier heavy sea vehicle 8, could carry 0 1 2 3 4 5 - infantry, light artillery, tanks,
fighters/bombers/helicopters, light/heavy missiles, nuclear missiles.

That would be an easy going, which i suggested already!!!

Thanks for that events.txt and amount of units increase!!!

Its a kind of a wonderland now. And if it would be possible, to increase all the gfx,
all terrain squares, all units, all cities, just all in game terrain and units gfx, to a much bigger size,
we could shoot that games gfx into the 21. century! And could leave that... say... a kind of a pity gfx.

Just imagine better rendered terrain gfx, units gfx and cities gfx. Just a higher resolution in game.

 

[Timoleon]

Timoleon. Suggestion 3. Can that not be done in hotseat mode?

WOW. Thanks McMonkey. I wouldn't find it even if another 15 years passed...

 

[CurtSibling]

Not a major priority, but I wonder if we could isolate the code that makes
all the AI tribes hate the player once Space Flight ("SFl" tech) is found...
It is an annoying aspect that ruins alliances and makes no real sense...

It would be nice to have (eventually) an AI tweaks menu, that includes
levels of AI aggression (Ghandi to Stalin) and turning off the SFl fury...