[TOT] The Test Of Time Patch Project

[Blake00]

Well if it does become possible then the ability to create extra custom buildings and wonders that have different bonuses to the norm would certainly be another holy grail addon. People could come up with all sorts of crazy new stuff haha! Not to mention steal ideas from later Civ games.

 

[Blake00]

oh and I'm back again as I just got another message from our old exiled buddy Nicheal over at civforum.de that he'd like me to pass on to you @TheNamelessOne as he's worried you missed his Sprites.Mask.bmp suggestion I posted for him earlier in the thread and he also had some other issues.

"I think, TNO missed that Mask.bmp stuff, perhaps you repeat that.
Incredible that TNO pushed the boundaries even further to 250 tecs and 189 units!
I tried the v18.1 and had crashes while loading save games or trying to open up mods or games and was angry, cause all the other dudes seemed to have no problems at all. I thought that might be the missing of a long list of units.bmp, or the missing of a Describe.txt entry - cause if you enlarge Terrain slots or Unit slots you def NEED to enlarge the numbers in Describe.txt too, they have to mirror exactly or the game crashes.
Problem is, that the DirectShowMusic has to be disabled, dont know why. It always worked enabled but not used, now I read, needs a "Music" folder and all of these mp3s, but I faked all of that and didnt work either.
Would be great if TNO would follow my suggestion to create a Units.bmp for 189 PLUS a Masks.bmp for these too.
Plus, once I was able to create Title.gifs, they need a special palette or bit rate or whatever, I once had an old software to do that, but that knowledge got lost - three years later. Would be great if Title.gifs would just work no matter the bits or palettes, just like a brute jerk, just getting the job done."

Sprites Mask suggestion was posted here.
If you're not using mp3s is there any benefit to using DirectShowMusic? As I'm guessing he believed there was and had it on in older versions.
Also it sounds like he wants to make high colour Title BMP pictures instead of the MGE style palette limited gifs. I too had wondered if ToT supported title bmps just the other day and did a test which sure enough didn't work. If such a change is not possible I still use Paint Shop Pro 7 to do my MGE palette conversions for gif files so I'll let him know about that.

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[JPetroski]

Well if it does become possible then the ability to create extra custom buildings and wonders that have different bonuses to the norm would certainly be another holy grail addon. People could come up with all sorts of crazy new stuff haha! Not to mention steal ideas from later Civ games.

I don't want to hijack this thread too much but with Lua you can give any improvement or wonder basically any perk you want. See Medieval Millenium for examples. While that doesn't 'add' improvement slots it does free up ones that are otherwise useless in most scenarios (SDI, most of the pollution reducers in many scenarios, etc.)

 

[JPetroski]

Back on track, I'm curious if Lua could one day be given a command to add or remove the text that we can now add to the map? I'm also curious if there's any way to add an image to the map (though I suppose I could work around this, to a limited extent, by adding various tile improvements I don't otherwise need).

We can pretty much "split" civs now given we have the unit slots and canBuild settings necessary to make regions unique. The flags on cities remain the only real obstacle left to immersion so I was hoping to be able to "draw" a flag next to the city (and remove that drawing if it is conquered) instead.

 

[CurtSibling]

Just wondering if someone can outline what situation the "CitySpritesPerTribe" would be used?

Is this so certain tech discoveries will not affect city GFX?

 

[CurtSibling]

I don't want to hijack this thread too much but with Lua you can give any improvement or wonder basically any perk you want. See Medieval Millenium for examples. While that doesn't 'add' improvement slots it does free up ones that are otherwise useless in most scenarios (SDI, most of the pollution reducers in many scenarios, etc.)

I'm going to post you in SL forums and ask more details about this, sir!

 

[Prof. Garfield]

Problem is, that the DirectShowMusic has to be disabled, dont know why. It always worked enabled but not used, now I read, needs a "Music" folder and all of these mp3s, but I faked all of that and didnt work either.

If you're not using mp3s is there any benefit to using DirectShowMusic? As I'm guessing he believed there was and had it on in older versions.

I'm guessing that the changes to the civ.playMusic function (or the addition of civ.scen.onSelectMusic) have made the game expect to find the music files when the patch is enabled. I know of no reason to enable the patch if you don't have the mp3 files.

You might let Nicheal know that my custom music patch contains mp3 files of all the civ music I know of (probably downloaded from YouTube years ago), even if he doesn't want to apply the patch (and he probably shouldn't apply it at this point, since I'm planning on using the new features to remake it soon).

 

[techumseh]

Thanks John. While it didn't fix my problem, it will (hopefully) be useful for further projects. I'm pretty sure this issue is due to the installation of v.18 not taking effect for the sav and scn files of this project, which was originally created using v.15. I will have to do more experimentation to find out if all of it fails to work or just certain parts do, and also if the problem affects other scenarios as well.

I've had several of these weird failures over the past couple of years. I had to start Burma Campaign over from scratch when old events somehow became embedded in my scn. file and couldn't be changed by new event files. More recently, I couldn't get our MP game to run with v.16 and had to reinstall v.15. I wonder if there's something wonky with my computer, which has Win7 installed. Sigh.

 

[JPetroski]

Thanks John. While it didn't fix my problem, it will (hopefully) be useful for further projects. I'm pretty sure this issue is due to the installation of v.18 not taking effect for the sav and scn files of this project, which was originally created using v.15. I will have to do more experimentation to find out if all of it fails to work or just certain parts do, and also if the problem affects other scenarios as well.

I've had several of these weird failures over the past couple of years. I had to start Burma Campaign over from scratch when old events somehow became embedded in my scn. file and couldn't be changed by new event files. More recently, I couldn't get our MP game to run with v.16 and had to reinstall v.15. I wonder if there's something wonky with my computer, which has Win7 installed. Sigh.

If you want, send me the files and I'll see if I can get it working. I have noticed some weird stuff even in HoF where occasionally, for some reason unknown to me, the opening text for McMonkey's "Fortress Europe" (which is where the map came from) displays.

 

[techumseh]

Sure. In the meantime, I'm going to forge ahead without the extra units to finish the scenario, which is almost done anyway. Good luck, and thanks.

 

[Blake00]

I know of no reason to enable the patch if you don't have the mp3 files.

You might let Nicheal know that my custom music patch contains mp3 files of all the civ music I know of (probably downloaded from YouTube years ago), even if he doesn't want to apply the patch (and he probably shouldn't apply it at this point, since I'm planning on using the new features to remake it soon).

Cheers mate I'll let him know, although I'm pretty sure he's lurking in this thread himself anyway haha.

I've had several of these weird failures over the past couple of years. I had to start Burma Campaign over from scratch when old events somehow became embedded in my scn. file and couldn't be changed by new event files. More recently, I couldn't get our MP game to run with v.16 and had to reinstall v.15. I wonder if there's something wonky with my computer, which has Win7 installed. Sigh.

Yeah I've suffered this one before. When Metro & I were working on the HoMM2 scenario some of the events changes I made weren't applying and the old ones were still happening and Metro explained to me that they sometimes get embedded in the scenario file (presumably because they were embedded into the save file the scenario was created from). I had to start over too but fortunately it was just a test scn file so wasn't a huge loss. I'm Win7 too but I'd be surprised if it's the OS causing that to happen.

.

 

[Dadais]

Release 0.18.1:

Thanks, and sorry for missing your "Lua reference thread" link. Thank Prof. Garfield for giving me (again) this link by the way.

Getting greedy, would it be hard to add functions working the same way as civ.ui.loadTerrain(), yet for cities.bmp (to alter transporters, fortress, airbases too) and units.bmp (to alter form of an identical unit) ?

 

[techumseh]

Yeah I've suffered this one before. When Metro & I were working on the HoMM2 scenario some of the events changes I made weren't applying and the old ones were still happening and Metro explained to me that they sometimes get embedded in the scenario file (presumably because they were embedded into the save file the scenario was created from). I had to start over too but fortunately it was just a test scn file so wasn't a huge loss. I'm Win7 too but I'd be surprised if it's the OS causing that to happen.

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Thanks. I'm glad it's not just me. I agree with your theory. I am always very careful now not to re-save scn files.

 

[ElderDarkDragon]

could you post the crash details from event viewer here? Your save doesn't crash for me, but I'd still like to see where it crashed. CTD's should never happen, at least not without showing an error first.

The scenario never loaded correctly the first time for some reason. I had never played it before so I didn't realize until starting another game how many units were missing or in the wrong places and other things were off. Whoops haha.
Around 3/4 through the new game now and I haven't had any problems. I can still post the events if you want.
Thanks to everyone for taking a look and I'm so glad to see this patch continuing to improve!

 

[minipow01]

Just wondering if someone can outline what situation the "CitySpritesPerTribe" would be used?

Is this so certain tech discoveries will not affect city GFX?

Partly yes, but the main advantage is that it allows you to specify a unique city style for each tribe. (Normally, you can only assign the first 4 city styles to each tribe through rules.txt.) With CitySpritesPerTibe, you can create a distinct cities.bmp file for each tribe. This means that a given tribe could show a unique progression of city styles as it advances through the renaissance, industrial, and modern ages.

Here is a simple example of how this feature could be executed.

 

[CurtSibling]

Partly yes, but the main advantage is that it allows you to specify a unique city style for each tribe. (Normally, you can only assign the first 4 city styles to each tribe through rules.txt.) With CitySpritesPerTibe, you can create a distinct cities.bmp file for each tribe. This means that a given tribe could show a unique progression of city styles as it advances through the renaissance, industrial, and modern ages.

Here is a simple example of how this feature could be executed.

Thanks for this excellent advice!

 

[TheNamelessOne]

Release 0.18.2:

Features:
- onCanFoundCity now fires for advanced tribes
- LUA: Added tile.hasGoodieHut

Fixes:
- Fixed city production upgrade after a unit type becomes obsolete.
- Fixed a bug in onGetFormattedDate where an incorrect turn was passed for the space ship screen.

This build depends on the Microsoft C++ runtime libraries (Older version for Windows XP). Install this if you get an error on launch.

As always, detailed information about the patches is available in the launcher. For an overview of all patches, as well as installation instructions & requirements, see the included README.txt. For Lua API documentation see the Lua reference thread. Happy gaming!

 

[CurtSibling]

Partly yes, but the main advantage is that it allows you to specify a unique city style for each tribe. (Normally, you can only assign the first 4 city styles to each tribe through rules.txt.) With CitySpritesPerTibe, you can create a distinct cities.bmp file for each tribe. This means that a given tribe could show a unique progression of city styles as it advances through the renaissance, industrial, and modern ages.

Here is a simple example of how this feature could be executed.

Just got my head around what is going on with this feature...Cheers for explaining it.
So its possible create a unique city-set look for each civ, as long as I name the 7 files to correspond with the civ tribe number?

Tribe 1 (for example Russia in my scenario) could have the standard style, renaissance, industrial, and modern too...A very cool idea, and I will be testing this out right away.

Exciting possibilities...!

 

[Blake00]

Just got my head around what is going on with this feature...Cheers for explaining it.
So its possible create a unique city-set look for each civ, as long as I name the 7 files to correspond with the civ tribe number?
Tribe 1 (for example Russia in my scenario) could have the standard style, renaissance, industrial, and modern too...A very cool idea, and I will be testing this out right away.

Exciting possibilities...!

I looked at minis example files and have been thinking about it too. If Metro & I ever end up converting our Heroes of Might & Magic scenario to ToT we can have the proper HoMM castle graphics for every faction (including Barbs in 8th slot) instead of just 6 (using tech tricks). Very cool addon.

.

 

[CurtSibling]

Not sure if this is a bug in 0.18 - But I notice the Fundamentalism govt form is no longer accessible once researched.

Testing a scenario and no logical reason why it is not available. It still can be selected via the cheat menu.