Wild Animals not spawned with 41 AI

[hdd]

Hello there,

First, allow me to congratulate the developers -- great job with this mod!

Now,
When playing, it seems the wild animals are long gone. I like Gigantic maps, so I'll refer only to those. Any scenario, any random generated map -- it does not contain any wild animals. No matter what settings, I've tried over a dozen map starts -- all for nothing.

It's such a shame, fighting them was a great way to get early XP for my units, both land and sea.

Any ideas ? Anyone gets wild animals, though ?

Thanks again,
hdd

Resolution:
if you start a scenario with 41 AI entities, regardless of other settings, Wild Animals will NOT be spawned.

You must have max 40 AI entities / teams for Wild Animals to be generated.

 

[rah]

I get them all the time. I usually play on more standard sized maps though.
The last few games I even got the event where you get a wolf as a pet.

 

[Schmiddie]

I played RaR gigantic historic map and have a lot of wild animals - all is fine. Map works perfect.

 

[CptBadger]

I have seen this a couple times. Can be annoying. I had a hunch it may be related to the "reduce distance between colonies" option? Since the two times it happened that I paid attention I had that selected, and I normally don't select that and get animals (and freaking tons of pirates).

 

[hdd]

well, at least I'm the only one having this issue consistently, which is a bummer.

So, in the game there are 4 Gigantic maps:
Amerayca - no animals
RAR Americas - no animals
The New World - no animals
Two Continents - no animals

If I play Religion and Revolution mod, then I get animals.
We The People mod - no animals.

I play 2 plots, with 41 players (that could be the cause ?!), Domination victory, No variables hidden.
All rest is unchecked.

Still no animals

Where should it be this script? maybe I've touched it somehow.

thanks

 

[hdd]

well, this is what happens when you have too much free time:

since I have this nasty little habit to mod the mods without documenting,
I've re-installed Col4 from scratch, all shiny new,
WeThePeople last version, new

I only play Gigantic.

The only scenario spawning Wild Animals is "RAR Americas Gigantic" (simple, not "Random" version).

All other Gigantic maps, including Custom Game > FaireWeatherTweakEX are not spawning Wild Animals.

Can you please share this with me, what Gigantic map exactly are you starting when you do get Wild Animals ?

Play A Scenario / Custom Game / Custom Scenario > The New World / Two Continents / Amerayca / FaireWeatherTweakEX > Game Options ?

It's that little stone in your shoe you can't get out...

Thanks guys!

 

[hdd]

... it's a boy!!
aaaaah, noooo... it's a bug...

So,
3 sleepless nights, 30 hours of debugging and ~100 starts later, I've figured it out:
if you start a scenario with 41 AI entities, regardless of other settings, Wild Animals will NOT be spawned.

You must have max 40 AI entities / teams for Wild Animals to be generated.

This wasn't happening on earlier versions of RaR.
Therefore, please note this and address it on future versions.

Thanks.

 

[Nightinggale]

if you start a scenario with 41 AI entities, regardless of other settings, Wild Animals will NOT be spawned.

You must have max 40 AI entities / teams for Wild Animals to be generated.

Looks like the issue is the exe. It has to have the number of players hardcoded and we have it set to 49. The Pope and the animals are two players, leaving 47 for the rest. For each European, a king player is added, meaning European players takes 2 slots. This means it should work with 33 natives and 7 Europeans, but adding a player of either type will break the game.

There are a few things we can do. One is to increase the limit. While it seems obvoius, the problem with this approach is that it will allocate the memory even if the players aren't active and as such it will increase the memory usage for no reason in most cases (we have a 2 GB limit due to being a 32 bit application). The other reason why it's not a good idea to just increase the number is that it will break existing savegames. It's not impossible that we increase the limit at some point, but if the number is too high, some bugs will occur. The limit in the exe is around 60, though I'm not aware of the actual number. It has nothing to do with 2⁶ = 64 as the exe limit is below that.

Even if we increase the limit, there will still be a limit. We should consider what to do if the limit is exceeded. One obvious approach would be to add some sort of error message if animals failed to be added.

EDIT: bug report https://github.com/We-the-People-civ4col-mod/Mod/issues/256

 

[Marla_Singer]

Looks like the issue is the exe. It has to have the number of players hardcoded and we have it set to 49. The Pope and the animals are two players, leaving 47 for the rest. For each European, a king player is added, meaning European players takes 2 slots. This means it should work with 33 natives and 7 Europeans, but adding a player of either type will break the game.

In RAR gigantic maps, the game was meant to work as follows :
- 8 Europeans
- 8 European Kings
- 31 Natives
- 2 free slots (for church and wild animals)

Back when I created the RAR Americas map (for RAR), I've found out that we needed to keep two "empty" slots in the code of the map for Players #47 and #48 in order to generate wild animals and church properly :

BeginPlayer
    Team=47
    LeaderType=NONE
    CivType=NONE
EndPlayer
BeginPlayer
    Team=48
    LeaderType=NONE
    CivType=NONE
EndPlayer

However, if the "Random" version of the map doesn't work on WTP, then it's worrying since no player are set up on it. It should be all generated automatically.

EDIT: I just play-tested WTP v2.7.1 with the map "RAR Americas - Random" for 12 turns and wild animals appeared normally, like it used to be the case with RAR.

 

[raystuttgart]

Careful guys,

there were reasons, why I had always tried to limit some aspects in RaR.

e.g.
* numer of total players - including Kings and Pope and Wild Animals --> Never go beyond 48 in TOTAL. (At least in my tests.)
* map sizes --> "RaR Gigantic" was about the reasonal limit I had found.
...

There are indeed issues considering hardcoding in the exe.
(And some others considering performace due to the graphical engine.)

I had tested out limits of such things very carefully early on when starting to work on RaR.
And of course I have also had some technical discussions with experienced Civ 4 / Civ4 Col modders.

I can't remember too much in detail anymore though.
I have simply stopped modding Civ4 Col too long ago.

So all I can give you as advice:
Whenever going above well experienced limits, you should do very careful long auto play testing and monitoring before publishing a new release.
(In many different variations of settings.)

That is probably what you probably already do of course.
So sorry, that I can't tell you anything more useful anymore.

Best regards
Ray

 

[Nightinggale]

There are indeed issues considering hardcoding in the exe.

I'm well aware of this, but I can't remember precisely what the problem is. There are some BTS people who discovered a way to push the limit further, but I can't remember what it was or if it had sideeffects. Unless we figure out what to look out for, it will be best not to touch the limit. It's not like I would recommend such a high number of players anyway, either do to gameplay or even performance issues on high end computers. Such a huge number of players will make late game annoyingly slow.

Besides it's important to point out that increasing the max number will not really fix the problem. There will still be a max number, which can be reached, even if we make it 100 (if we could). This means regardless of what number we pick, we have to consider what happens if we don't have enough player slots. The last player added is animals. If we fail to add animals, it shouldn't silently fail. Instead it should display an error message telling that the game is malfunctioning and the only remedy is to use less players. Nothing about just animals because other players might be failing to be added as well. While this will not aid in making giant games with lots of players, it will prevent playing and then wondering why the animals are missing.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Careful guys,

there were reasons, why I had always tried to limit some aspects in RaR.

e.g.
* numer of total players - including Kings and Pope and Wild Animals --> Never go beyond 48 in TOTAL. (At least in my tests.)

Just for accuracy, RAR has 49 players (I imagine you got confused because the first player is actually "player 0").
As already mentionned in my earlier post: 8 Europeans, 8 kings, 31 Natives, church and wild animals.