Using CSPL to Create an Event File For ToT

[Harry Tuttle]

I was bored today at work (the halloween party ended at 2pm) so I went digging around and found Angelo Scotto's disertation on using CSPL (C Programming) to write a program that would hex edit the ToT source while the game is running.

Just a bit curious, but has anyone actually compiled anything using this? If I were to ever use this useful little thing I'd feel a lot better seeing it in action rather than making it from scratch.

[Alex Woehr]

DarthVeda used it in Kyokujitsu (WWII scenario from Japan's perspective). He used it to attach the four different maps end-to-end rather than on top of each other. As to how he did this, I couldn't tell you.

[Harry Tuttle]

Did he ever complete that? His website says negative. http://www.darthveda.com/kyokujitsu/index.html

[Alex Woehr]

No. he didn't, but what he did write is quite playable.

[Harry Tuttle]

Ok, I'll take a look at what he did. I'll probably keep this in mind for the future. Thanks for your help

[techumseh]

1. Years ago I got Angelo to write a little CSPL thing for an early attempt at a Russian Civil War scenario. It worked for the prototype scenario, but I couldn't get it to work for the final product. It changed event created caravans to a commodity other than 'hides'.

2. Kull did a lot of work writing the manuals for CSPL. He's a good person to ask about it.

3. Darth Veda didn't use CSPL to make the maps continuous. He used round world maps linked so one seemingly started at the same point where the next one seemingly ended. So you used a row of teleporters to move to the next map and keep going. I believe this technique was developed by Mercator.

[Harry Tuttle]

CSPL seems to open a few more doors for scenario designers. I can see some really neat additions if we choose to use this program. I'm sure Gold Gulch, with all its special events would benefit profusely.

As for #3, that's kind of neat. Each map will look kind of weird I surmise as each hemisphere would be a cylindrical map, but the benefits are decent. This approach would increase the playable map for a huge increase in tiles and could potentially bar certain units from "theatres of war"

[curtsibling]

CSPL is one of those untapped forces that may add so much to the CIV experience.

We should try some experiments...!

[Mercator]

Originally posted by techumseh
3. Darth Veda didn't use CSPL to make the maps continuous. He used round world maps linked so one seemingly started at the same point where the next one seemingly ended. So you used a row of teleporters to move to the next map and keep going. I believe this technique was developed by Mercator.

I think it was William Keenan who developed it. At least, if I recall correctly, he was the one who "hired" me for that "Multi-Linked World Map Project" that didn't quite get anywhere (partly due to me, I suppose). But it didn't actually need to get anywhere, because a little while later gigamaps were discovered. And with a gigamap we could suddenly make a huge world map without having to stitch 3 maps together. (Yes, that's 3 maps. If you want a round map, you'll need the 4th to have the left and right edge line up again.)

The biggest problem with this, though, is that the AI won't know how to deal with this. It's unlikely to be using the transporters (properly).

That's something to keep in mind when using CSPL to get ambitious. The AI still is just as stupid.


I should probably get in touch with Angelo Scotto, though. I recently had a look at the Civ2 memory for a bit and found the offsets for the map section in memory. He didn't find those, so CSPL is kind of guessing to find it.

[Harry Tuttle]

Interesting... Too bad size is such a factor in the game. Too much and the game is near unplayable...

[Boco]

At the very earliest stages of El Aurens, I experimented with CSPL (using Kull's manuals ). Initially, I had a list of several routines I wanted to invoke to simulate lack of supply and artillery fire. In the end I couldn't get even the simplest one, artillery fire, to work. Darthveda succeeded a bit with CSPL, because he can program in C++. I failed because I can't, and Angelo was simply too busy to go through a lengthy debugging process. In its current form CSPL cannot be used by anyone who doesn't speak C++.

[Kull]

Update CSPL

I did some follow up on CSPL with Angelo over a year ago. Here's the text of our two emails:

Hi Angelo,

Long time no talk, old bud! Brian Mason (Tecumseh) is building a new Tot Scenario, and asked me to develop some CSPL events for it. Despite assisting you with the manual, I'd never seriously tried to build CSPL events for a real scenario, but I've been disappointed that no one else has released a CSPL scenario, and figured, "why not?"

So I broke out the manual and followed all the steps to get things set up, but in the end I could never get CSPL to compile properly. At first the batch file wouldn't run at all, but I made a few edits and that got thing working somewhat, but the compile process always resulted in a host of errors. I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that I'm using WinXP (which didn't exist when you created CSPL), but my C++ knowledge is too limited to say for sure. (I am using the recommended version of Borland, so that shouldn't be an issue.)

Anyway.....I was hoping you might be able to run a test of your last version of CSPL on a WInXP machine to see if it works, and maybe provide some pointers to help me get started. I'm sure you're busy and won't be bugging you to create any events, but just need help to get the program running.

Many Thanks, Paul

And his reply....with attachment!

Phew, sorry if it took me so long but WinXP exposed a very strange behaviour with this script, definitely i need to upgrade CSPLCompanion to WSH (even if few people will use CSPL, having it working is a good thing ;o) )

Aside from having CHOICE.com I had to remove “ characters from BORLANDPATH and CSPLPATH, and I needed to explicitely add path to includes and libraries that comes from Borland C++ compiler.

To make it work you should open the bat file I’m sending to you and change BORLANDPATH and CSPLPATH (which now are pointing to C:\windows\temp\borland and C:\windows\temp\cspl) to your paths, I really think this fix couldn’t work if your BORLANDPATH or CSPLPATH has blank spaces in their name but I’ve not tested it.

As soon as I find some time I’ll move it to WSH (probably JScript) and this should solve our problems once for all.

Ciao, Angelo

Unfortunately I can't recall the results of testing the new CSPL, and I never did get back with Angelo to see if he'd done anything further with the code. I suggest you guys try out the updated CSPL and if there's a desire to pursue this seriously, I can provide Angelo's email address.

[Kull]

While running the failed WinXP experiments, I created a text file to capture my comments on problems with the code and the manual. See attached.

[Kull]

As far as I know, this is the most recent released version of CSPL (but you'll need to replace the v0.1 csplcompanion.bat with the v.02 poated above. One other known problem. "Images" is a child folder of "Doc", not "Manual" (just drag it to the correct location)

[DarthVeda]

Originally posted by Mercator

The biggest problem with this, though, is that the AI won't know how to deal with this. It's unlikely to be using the transporters (properly).

Yep. That's the drawback. You basically have to script four maps seperately.

Kyokujitsu was definately way too ambitious of a project for me to complete in a timely fashion. CSPL is very powerful, I can't remember exactly what I was using it to do, but it was quite nice.