Map and unit questions

[Alinestra Covelia]

1. How do I place invisible cities? I have tried clicking around and that only landed me with tired fingers. And I can't deal with having tired fingers. O no.

2. How do I eliminate the units' health bars? I have downloaded the spritegen exe file and I am using it on the relevant unit space in the relevant units.bmp file. Yet no matter how hard I try, the "Hidden Hill Base" units still have their highly unhidden health bars over them. These make them stick out like a sore thumb and thus players can see the buggers.

[Harry Tuttle]

TOT or MGE?

[fairline]

Deleting unit health bars with MGE is easy: place the blue (R:0, G:0, B:255, palette index 250) shield position marker dots at the extreme top-right and left-bottom positions on a unit's green border lines. You'll have to do this by manually editing the units file with a graphics program as the crappy in-game editor won't let you place shields / health bars outside a restricted region.

ToT: you need Meractor's Civsprite utility and you'll have to use the sprite file as opposed to a units.bmp. See Boco's El Aurens scenario.

[Alinestra Covelia]

ToT.

I've succeeded in eliminating the health bars - the process was quite simple and I was just being obtuse.

How do I place invisible cities? And can they produce units that walk around the normal map if I do?

[N35t0r]

Aha, here's the thread: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=74683

It looks like those cities will not be able to get units onto the main map, they'll stay on the parallel universe.

[Mercator]

(for the health bars)

I don't think you can place invisible cities without going through all sorts of troubles (i.e. hex-editing)...

I think Henrik did it by creating a settler via events on an (odd,even) or (even,odd) square, but that can really only be used purely as a label. It creates all sorts of problems if you want those cities to actually do anything like producing units. (This is what N35t0r just posted)

Or, um, actually, I made a utility that can do it. It isn't really "official" because I haven't properly tested it yet (and probably never will)... I think I've posted it here once before, or e-mailed it to some people.

I just made a few improvements to it, so I'll just attach it again. But you still use it at your own risk! It might be buggy, and it doesn't make any backups, so you'll have to do that yourself!

You'll need a few files too, such as the VB6 run-time files, to get it to work. If you don't have those already, you can find them on my utility site (see signature/homepage). If you then get a missing file error, you'd need to install MapEdit.


CivEngineer can add/remove certain tile improvements to/from specific squares.

Let me see, here's what you could do:

• First, you should mark the tiles you want to put your invisible cities on. Before you build those cities, change the terrain on those squares to a terrain type that isn't being used anywhere else on the map (or at least not by squares with other, visible, cities, airbases or transporters on it). Then build the cities... You can change the terrain back later, after you made the cities invisible.
  
  If the above isn't possible (e.g. all terrain types are all over the place), you could use units instead. Put units in the soon-to-be-invisible cities. But again, make sure there are no units whatsoever on transporter squares, airbases or in visible cities!
  
• Do whatever you have to do with the cities, while they are still visible. After using my utility, you will only be able to access them via the City Status screen.
  
• Start CivEngineer and open your savegame (using the Browse... button)... Don't forget to make a backup first!
  
• Select Remove in the drop-down box, choose City Present in the left list, and select the proper terrain type (or the Unit Present flag) in the list on the right.
  
• Click Save to save the changes (and possibly Exit if you want to quit, or Close if you want to edit another file)
  
• You can now reload your savegame. Hopefully, all marked cities have now become invisible. You can only see the city name on the map. Other than that, it's a perfectly normal square. And yes, these cities produce units as normal.
  
• Now the city has become invisible, you can change the terrain back to its former self, before you made the city invisible.

As you will see when you open a file in CivEngineer, you can do lots of other stuff with it as well...

The main thing to keep in mind is that the list on the right acts like an OR list, so to speak. For example. if you would select "Desert", "River" and "Road", all desert squares, all river squares and all road squares will be affected.

If, say, you would want to add roads to all squares, except rivers and ocean, you first add roads to all land terrain and then remove it again from all river squares.

Oh, and by the way, this works for ALL versions of Civ2 (well, except unpatched MGE), including ToT multi-map games. For multi-map games, you'll get to see four buttons at the top (named Map 1 through Map 4) with which you can make your changes for each of the maps separately.

Download CivEngineer

[Alinestra Covelia]

This look scary, but I'll give it a try over the weekend sometime. I am always amazed by the sheer depth of creativity that people will go to to alter a game... Good work!

[N35t0r]

Hey! It's not just 'a game' it's 'THE Game'

[Mercator]

Well, it's not that scary. If you make a backup of your savegame there's little that can go wrong. You can just play around with CivEngineer a little to get the hang of what exactly it's doing.

[St Leo]

Can a city name be three blank spaces?

[Mercator]

Yes it can, but you'll have to use Alt+0160 at least once. I just tried renaming a city to three spaces, and ToT turned it into 3 underscores. When I used Alt+0160 and two spaces, it was fine.

[Heresson]

Oh, now that there's a discussion about such stuff, I recalled I have a little problem. I'd like a city to be called Constantinopolis, but I CAN'T NAME IT THAT WAY. It's one letter too long. Can You change the letters limit?

[Mercator]

Nope, unfortunately.

[Heresson]

Damn.
OK. Now go to my own thread and answer my other questions

[AGRICOLA]

How do I alter the color in the "head" of TOT health bars to colors that are both easily distinguished and unique to each civ? I'm trying to play techumseh's Market Garden scen and am having unnecessary difficulty because of the lack of contrast between the German grey and the Allied brown

I've looked at the Midgard scenario, where the "heads" have different, reasonably distinct colors, so that it should be possible to do the same in Market Garden.

Can I hexedit the .scn file to reassign civ colors or do I have to move the German and Allied civs in RULES?

[fairline]

It's at the top right of the units.bmp file: the pink area (R:255, G:0, B:255) of the health bar equates to the unique civ colour - increase the area covered by this pink to increase the size of the civ colour coverage.

[AGRICOLA]

Yes, that much I know.

What I want to do is to change the colors that the "heads" of German (grey) and Allied (brown) health bars have on the game map. The two colors look much too similar.

If the color of the "heads" of the health bars were distinctly different, it would be much easier to distinguish the units of the two combatants. I'm wondering how to change them to two very distinct colors like, for example, white and blue.

Thanks for the tip on enlarging the colored portion of the head of the health bar.

[Mercator]

You can change the colors in the cities.bmp:
http://coc.apolyton.net/guides/tribe_colors.shtml

Unfortunately, the color in the health bar will always be a drab, dark variant of it. The RGB values are halved to get that color. For instance, even if you make a civ bright blue, RGB(0,0,255), the color in the shield will be dark blue, approximately RGB(0,0,128). I say approximately, because there will be slight differences due to the 15-bit nature of ToT graphics.

[AGRICOLA]

@Mercator

Thank you very much for your explanation and the link.

If I had checked this thread sooner, I could have saved myself a couple of hours work locating in which Midgard file the different colors are defined and then looking at the same file in techumseh's Market Garden scen.

Cam Hill's article is excellent. It was some consolation that other players have had problems with this, so mine is not the only voice crying in the wilderness. I found his advice to designers " Are the colours in both the bright and dark form clearly distinguishable from other tribes? " to be spot on.

Do you know if Draco Omega ever finished his "the Sprite Workshop"?

After a trivial edit job on CITIES, I now have no more excuses for not playing Market Garden.

[kobayashi]

Why can't a city be made invisible simply by using a blank in the cities.gif? You'd have to shift the size box to the bottom right or simply use the 'invisible' colours for its flag and colour bar?

[Mercator]

Originally posted by AGRICOLA
Do you know if Draco Omega ever finished his "the Sprite Workshop"?

No, he didn't. I made CivSprite and SpriteGen, though, (largely thanks to his and Angelo Scotto's findings) which can be used to edit the sprite files. Unfortunately, they are quite limited. And that won't likely change soon.

Originally posted by kobayashi
Why can't a city be made invisible simply by using a blank in the cities.gif? You'd have to shift the size box to the bottom right or simply use the 'invisible' colours for its flag and colour bar?

But the main point of making the cities invisible was to make them inaccessible. A city that can never be taken.

[Alinestra Covelia]

The city hiding tech that the Mercator Civilization gifted to the Allie Cove civilization has been found to be in perfect working condition and we have mastered it.

Now to go onwards to that Discover 8 tech, "linking maps" (as we're hoping to techsteal from techumseh)...

[Mercator]

Splendid!