Solver:	We begin the next installment of our interview with Sirian. Let's continue where we left off!
Sirian:	Things have been pretty quiet for me. I had my areas of responsibility wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. Game balance issues were finished by the middle of September, and my map work was done by the start of October. Now it's the middle of October and I've just been checking and double checking things, looking for any rough edges to polish. (I know some fans [were] concerned about the release date being pushed up a week or two, that maybe Civilization IV was being rushed out the door. Well, it isn't so. We had to accelerate the number of hours being worked each week, for a while there, but that's about the extent of it.) So we found an issue with one of the maps. The Pangaea script finally failed, once! Oops. One of the things I worked on since we last talked was adding some extra code to Pangaea, to check for and deal with any instances where it might fail to produce a single continent. I found out the risk of failure on tiny maps was not insignificant, after all. Maybe as much as 5%? Not a big deal, but that setting may be popular for multiplayer games, so I made the extra effort to add insurance. I'm really picky about the details! I try to get everything right, make it do exactly what it was intended to be doing!
Solver:	So should that be taken to mean that Pangaea won't fail, or can it still do so?
Sirian:	Failure may still be possible, but the error rate should be insignificant. This is one of those things where you don't want to tighten the screws too much. My solution won't actually change any of the instances where the map works normally. The extra fractal layer is only added if the first two layers leave a piece of land unconnected on one side or the other. Also... not all of the Pangaea types work that way. The "Solid" shoreline option... Those maps are constructed with a different process, which has no risk of failure. That process always creates solid shorelines, though! No inland seas, no snaky peninsulas, no tiny islands offshore. This is just talking about the Pangaea script, now! There is a wide variety of outcomes just from this one map type. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all supposed to produce a single super continent. So anyway... Just goes to show the kinds of things we are polishing at this point. The big stuff is already as good as we can make it. Not to say we got it all perfect. Surely not! But some things will only come to light when games are played by the hundreds of thousands, and not by the hundreds.
Solver:	Speaking of that "Solid" shoreline option, as we ended the first half of the interview, you mentioned Custom Map Options. Essentially, what they do is create several extra flavours for some map scripts, but I'd like you to tell us more.
Sirian:	The Custom Map Options are my baby! Over the course of development, I built up a decent amount of "political capital" by not sweating the small stuff. If there were cases where I might have handled a detail differently if I were leading the project... If Soren's decision was solid, then I supported it. We were in agreement on most things, anyway. You can't run around like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling any time you disagree with a particular decision. I'm sure everybody who has been part of a major team effort, at work or at play, can relate to this concept. This meant that when there was something truly urgent, that I could push hard for my view. Soren was always willing to listen, and he would give things a second or third look if I chose to be adamant – which I rarely did. The Custom Map Options was one of those times. I felt it was vital to open up maps wider to the modders. We were originally going to allow only the "Sea Level" and "Climate" map options, along with things like Game Speed, Map Size, etc. This would have meant that users would have to write a separate map script for every option or combination they wanted to produce. CivIV is shipping with twenty map types. Ten are featured, and the other ten (mostly multiplayer-focused scripts) are available in the Advanced section. However, if the Custom Map options had not gone in as I requested, we would have needed hundreds of scripts to offer the same amount of variety. HUNDREDS! I am not exaggerating. The Custom Map Options allow you to set up multiple choice selections for the player(s). Technically, there are no limits on this feature. You can set a hundred options if you want! Each one can have as many choices as you please! The sky is the limit here, now, and a good map scripter can now interact directly with the user via these options. Realistically, though, map makers do need to be careful. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. (If you give users too many options, you may just confuse them and turn them off.) The key thing here is that nobody is going to dictate to you what is appropriate. A map maker can decide that, then live with the decisions that are made. Most of our maps now have custom map options, tailored to the needs and possibilities of a given flavor of gameplay. Pangaea, for instance. The "Shoreline" custom option allowed me to do three things. 1) I was able to add more variety to the types of land forms produced. 2) I was able to ensure that if a given player does not like one or more of the options, he can avoid them and choose the one(s) he likes. 3) Players in the mood for a certain flavor can pick the one they want. Without custom map options, this would have required four different map scripts: one for each of the three flavors, and a fourth to combine them all and choose one at random. Once Soren was persuaded to support this, I went to work. Nearly all of my maps were produced after we made the decision to include Custom Map Options.

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