[TOT] The Test Of Time Patch Project

[Tanelorn]

Just in the off chance that TNO is still checking this thread, do you know what would be a good idea: unit exclusion lists.
I mean, cities abilities to build some improvements (hydro) can be turned on/off in civcity.
If you could recreate this with units (like unit1 from the rules buildable yes, unit two no etc.) for each specific city you could have national units buildable only at their respective cities aleviating the need for more civs.
For example, in a WW2 scen, you could have a commonwealth civ build Brit units only in cities in Britain, Indians in India, Canadians in Canada etc.
Or a single allied civ doing the same with US, French, GB and other allied units and just a second civ for all the Axis powers (Nazis, Italians and Japanese).
Or to prohibit certain cities from building industrial units.
What do you think?

 

[Patine]

Just in the off chance that TNO is still checking this thread, do you know what would be a good idea: unit exclusion lists.
I mean, cities abilities to build some improvements (hydro) can be turned on/off in civcity.
If you could recreate this with units (like unit1 from the rules buildable yes, unit two no etc.) for each specific city you could have national units buildable only at their respective cities aleviating the need for more civs.
For example, in a WW2 scen, you could have a commonwealth civ build Brit units only in cities in Britain, Indians in India, Canadians in Canada etc.
Or a single allied civ doing the same with US, French, GB and other allied units and just a second civ for all the Axis powers (Nazis, Italians and Japanese).
Or to prohibit certain cities from building industrial units.
What do you think?

That idea would be a GREAT help in some of the many scenarios I'd like to do in the future, but which are currently still on a nebulous to-do list...

 

[rpg_knight]

Hello everyone, is it possible to apply xbrz filtering to TOT's default sprites and textures like pic related ? You know, currently Test of Time sprites and textures scaled horribly when played in a 1600x900 resolution

 

[EnglishEdward]

This is, thus far, at this point, the final word on, and apex of development and evolution, of all things ToT...

I have ToT up and running now using the ToTPP launcher.

Two minor issues:

(a) The music stops after a few minutes, and Pick Music fails even though the CD is present in the CD reader (my second).

(b) With the previous unlimited patch, I could create maps up to 3K but I cannot do that with ToTPP. The menu screen bounces back

I am running Fantasy World (albeit not MidGard scenario) on Windows 8.1,
Installation in C:\GAMES direct with no ToT sub-folder, with patch 1.1 applied, MidGuard patch, and all ToTPP Loader options ticked.

Any clues?

 

[EtherealEidolon]

I am having some serious problems trying to install this. After I ran the installer and tried to open the game it said I was missing the mcvcr100.dll file so I downloaded this and extracted it into the System32 and SysWOW 64 folders as instructed. Then the error said i was missing the lua.dll file but after a re-installation this problem no longer occurs. Now when I try to run civ2 it says:
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b)

It would be great if anyone could help me out.

 

[EtherealEidolon]

Never mind. I managed to get the game to work with v013.2 instead of the v014.1 I was using although I still wouldn't mind knowing what went wrong in the first place.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Back in I-can't-remember-which-version, a function was introduced to run modpacks without needing to replace the base game files.

Does anyone know how you actually do this? I can't find any instructions on setting it up.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

The instructions are available inside the latest versions of ToTPP. Towards ths bottom of the list in the tottp window, you'll find the "Custom Game Mods" option. It'll show a mini tutorial in the description screen.

My tldr version: First, create a new folder in the main test of time scenario, and copy some .txt and bmp files from either the Original game, Fantasy, or SciFi folders, depending on what kind of mod it is or how you want to start it out, or create them yourself.

Next, in the very first line of rules.txt in your new folder, type @mod. In the kext three lines minimum, there are three options available: name=, gametype=, and maxturns=. There are three more optional parameters to further refine your mod down the line, but I think this is enough to help you get started.

Hope this helps!

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Oops, so there is. I knew there was a check-box in the launcher but for some reason my eyes kept missing it.

Thanks!

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

You're welcome!

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

I found a bug relating to modpacks. When TOTPP parses the rules.txt, it ignores the given Tech Paradigm and assigns the value to 0. This means that research speed grows exponentially for the first ~12 techs to the point it's practically one a turn, only to then roll over and take ~8000 turns for the next advance, meaning technological advance is basically over for the rest of the game.

This can of course be corrected through the cheat menu, but turning every First Turn into a scenario to avoid the flag on game score gets a bit tedious.

 

[Civ2PU]

Hi All,

Have a Happy New Year!

I have an installation of Civ2-TOT + 1.1Patch on Windows 10 and it works (yes! albeit with some few probs). I wish to design and play my own maps, and I need to overcome some limitations of the game:
- Extend gameplay beyond 2020 (preferably disable the retirement process, but it would be OK to shift retirement date well into the future). I'm talking about the "Original" game settings, and normal gameplay, not scenarios (if not possible otherwise, I would consider a minimal "scenario" as well - only setting retirement date). I know the game saves the current year in the gamefile (number of turns at positions 669-670 and display-year at 671-672). Is it possible to achieve a similar effect by modifying these, instead of the .exe or some parameter file? I tried it and it somehow works (setting the year some 20, 25 or 50 turns back and then clearing the cheat flags), but it's awkward, and Civ Score and PowerGraph are inconsistent.
- Make the game not ending if all opponents are destroyed (ie only the human player plus possibly barbarians remain).
- Disable a check running sporadically (randomly? maybe, if you reload the game and try again it may not be triggered!), prematurely ending the game if Civilization Score is high, and the human civ is undoubtedly the most powerful one.
- Can we mod the game (rules.txt?) so that building a hydro plant (incl Hoover Dam) is only possible for cities containing a river or mountain tile within the city view area (±2 tiles off the city), like in older versions? Also Hoover Dam supplying power to cities in the same continent only?
- I'm also interested in making new (random) maps. Don't like CivMapGen (tends to create large continents, usually spanning to the poles ones, therefore all regarded as one continent).

Is it possible to mod the game (and how), as I described above?

Thank you in advance

 

[Patine]

You know, I remember having a disk (I might still have it, but it's useless now, because it's DOS-based installation method doesn't work AT ALL on computers beyond Win98 as an OS, and such newer computers won't even acknowledge it) that was a collection of various fan-based pre-MGE Civ2 scenarios gathered in a $10 CAN disk on a rack that was mostly shareware at a department store AGES ago. Anyways. one of those scenarios had ONE playable civ versus barbarians, without crashing or ending, and I never did know how they did it. It would be nice if I could some extract that scenario from the disk (or find it online, but I can't at all remember it's name or author), and figure out how the Hell that was done...

 

[Northerner]

I don't know if you ever drop by NamelessOne, but if you do I just wanted you to know I think you did tremendous work here! You really gave Civilization 2 a prolonged life, a high achievement for a game more than twenty years old!

 

[Tanelorn]

one of those scenarios had ONE playable civ versus barbarians, without crashing or ending, and I never did know how they did it.

Quick guess. Make immobile settler (air?) unit with high defence in the rules. Start scenario. Create said unit somewhere normally unreachable. Home it to NONE. Delete all cities for that civ. Since there is the NONE settler arround, the civ doesn't dissapear. Done.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

I wish I could use this patch, but it won't work on the wine emulator I am using to run Civ 2. It sounds terrific. The wine emulator thinks the patch violates some protocols and kicks out.

If you make a new patch, replace the white grid outline for city borders with RED. Then it would be immediately visible everywhere including the tundra. A one pixel wide white border against the tundra or glaciers is impossible to make out. It may be a tiny change possible with hex editing?

The Civ2 Unlimited patch has no issues on a WINE emulator whatsoever. It loads and allows parameters to be selected, then launches the civ2.exe. For some reason, your patch won't load.
Post #40

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-ii-unlimited.205794/page-2#post-5101371
So by whatever method that patch utilizes versus your patch is where the fault might be. I would guess that the majority of new replayers of Civ 2 will be from tablet folks like me and thus your new potential userbase.

Could the issue be your dll file?

By the way, here is information about the Wine emulator.
https://www.winehq.org

Edit
I tried it again with no luck. I tried either the original launcher or the next version. Both kicked out on errors.

 

[TheNamelessOne]

Hi folks,

I recently found myself playing ToT again, and before long I also started working on the project again. So I think it's time to get out of retirement. I've created a new version of the project, fixing a few bugs:

Release 0.14.2:

• The Lua DLL is now compiled with the runtime library included statically, removing the dependency on MSVCR100.DLL, making installation easier.
• Fixed a crash bug that occurred when starting some scenarios if @TRANSPORTOPTIONS in Game.txt was not correctly separated from the next entry (buffer overflow).
• Fixed a bug in the Defense bonus patch where setting TerrainDefenseForSea or TerrainDefenseForAir to 0 caused such units to defend at half strength.
• Fixed a bug in the Custom game mods patch where the Tech paradigm was incorrectly initialized to 0.

As for my future plans for the project, I would really like to see the Lua integration in action in a well-designed scenario. Have there been any attempts to integrate it already?

Anyway, happy 2018, and it feels good to be back!

 

[TheNamelessOne]

I wish I could use this patch, but it won't work on the wine emulator I am using to run Civ 2. It sounds terrific. The wine emulator thinks the patch violates some protocols and kicks out.

As a Wine user myself, it works fine as long as you install the proper gstreamer plugins for audio/video. Or just disable the DirectShow patches in the launcher!

 

[Civinator]

TheNamelessOne, it´s great that you are back again!

So I´m not a prominent modder of Civ 2, I really appreciate your great work and I´m the first to download the Release 0.14.2 of your project. Thank you very much!

I have only done one Civ2 ToT space mod, but I consider this my best work (even compared with my 'over 300 000 view' Civ 3 mods) and I wonder what here can be done with your great work. Is there a change to have a mutually animated combat animation in Civ 2 ToT, p.e. where the attack animation is triggered for both units in combat and not only for the attacker?

Edit: One link fixed

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Thanks for the fast reply. I'm not directly using Wine but ExaGear which is a port of the Wine project. So the options you mentioned don't show up. Without rooting, Nook owners (and others) can't "sideload" but are stuck using Google Play apps. Anyway that is cryptic since it should obviously work as we both are using Wine.

The launcher never gets far enough to allow me to toggle options but crashes upon execution. I'll do more checking and see what happens. Regardless thanks for the latest version for the community.

Are the gstream plugins dll files? Can you include them as attachments? If so I could add them and see if that makes your launcher run.