Wonderful article on Civ4 modding in Game Developer Magazine

[Urederra]

Thank you Aussie Lurker and Warpstorm for your feedback.

BTW, As English is not my mother tongue, I was trying to made a free translation of vox populi. The direct translation, as you said, is voice of the people. I don't know whether the latin quote is common in english or not, that's why I tried to tranlate it.

And the word you use between inverted commas, the correct spelling is aficionado. That I can assure you.

Thank you both for your feedback.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

No probs, Urederra. Vox Populi has sort of entered the popular Lexicon of the English language-and is often used in TV shows for any segment where they go out into the street to interview 'ordinary people'.
@Slax, as I said in my post before, they have said that cities will still remain within a single square. So, unless you built your city on top of a cow or pig to begin with, then you won't see said cow/pig in the midst of a modern city.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Slax]

@Slax, as I said in my post before, they have said that cities will still remain within a single square. So, unless you built your city on top of a cow or pig to begin with, then you won't see said cow/pig in the midst of a modern city.

Thats exactly what I meant. If the player has built a city right on top of a resource (not usually a good idea in civ3, by the way), it will be there amongst the building, etc. Just something I find little funny, thats all.

 

[Sirian]

Yeah I was talking with a former co-worker that works at Blizzard now, and we both agreed that we would probably never accept a job at Firaxis. The reason? Because Civ is our favorite game ever, so working on it would more than likely destroy the magic and totally ruin the game for us. That old adage about seeing how sausages are made totally applies.

I'd make my own sausages if nobody else could get the recipe right.

 

[rickb]

Woohoo! Finally got this month's issue. I was most interested in the GameCore DLL SDK. It looks like the entire Civ specific game code is put in a dll which is great news, meaning it can be completely replaced. They put a lot of effort into designing the code interface to remove dependencies and provide a clear delineation between the dll and the app code. I get the impression there are at least two dll's, one for the AI and another for the core game, not sure if there will be any additional granularity, meaning you'll probably have to provide an entire game replacement if you swap out the core game dll, and I assume they aren't going to make the source code for the dll that ships with the game available.

Most of the Python and XML stuff has already been mentioned here, like they made sure all data inputs were hot-swappable, any changes are automatically detected and reloaded into the game on the fly.

They also mention the tricks they had to do to make it look like your playing on a globe in the zoomed out view. Since they're only bending the world about 150 degrees (morphing onto a sphere would obviously distort things too much), the opposing edges don't line up, so they apply some sort of additional transform to make them line up.

God, it's gonna be a long 4 months. I'll have to make sure I actually play the game for a while before being tempted to mod it.

Really the only thing I don't like is Python as the scripting language, but I understand the decision. I just refuse to use any language where whitespace is significant. Can't we all just agree that from this point onward, all new programming languages must have C-like syntax (i.e. braces) and be done with it?

Oh, also they mention the lead programmer is a Mustafa Thamer.