Sea tile graphical corruption - and trade question

[Alinestra Covelia]

^ What it says:

1. My sea tiles are corrupted. I'm using them as space tiles, so I have them as largely black with a few pixels here and there of other colors for a starfield. Same deal with the river mouth terrain squares. The only problem is that it seems like some of the squares are transparent and "hold" whatever color pixel previously occupied that square.

So say I move the map around. Little artifacts of pixels remain lying on the sea squares. Or I move a Trireme (or a Star Destroyer) across the sea. Same happens.

Anybody know how to solve this? I can post a screenie if it would help.

2. It struck me that today's globalized world is extremely dependent on trade. But in Civ2, trade is just a purely optional icing on the cake. So I was wondering how to remedy this. For example, if China and Taiwan were represented only using Civ2 terms, there would be little incentive not to go to war. But in the real world there's so much essential trade between the two that war would be so destabilizing that neither government wants it.

I was thinking about bumping up the costs of all improvements by quite a bit. Maybe even reduce the trade arrow benefits of most squares. That would make caravans and freights the only real sources of trade arrows for cities. So in order to even have a hope in hell of building a high-maintenance improvement (say it costs 8 gold per turn just to maintain a Supermarket), nations would be much more worried about keeping the peace and sending trade units far and wide.

Maybe even bump all the cities up to crazy-high populations and force them to swap out food supply trade units every so often.

[Harry Tuttle]

Screenie and file please.

As for the trade effect I would run a sim to see how well the AI recognizes the need for trade.

[N35t0r]

that would mean you've got transparent terrain instead of a colour.

Also; note that the image for ocean on Terrain1 is only used for high zoom-out levels of ocean (anything from the level of zoom dithering dissappears and rivers are only shown by the X river connection outwards) The more normal zoom level's ocean is made up from the four no-coastline quarter tiles in the coastlines section of Terrain2 (which I assume you erased completely, hense your problem)

Just replace them all with the appropiate quarter of the space terrain you're using and it should be fine, if you kept the planets to inside their tiles (which you probably did if you erased the coastlines).

Cheers

[Alinestra Covelia]

Okay, a couple of screenies and we'll see how this goes.

Here is the default display when the scenario just loads up for the first time. You see an Imperator-class Star Destroyer and a Victory Star Destroyer hanging out in space.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Then I click around the map in a sloppy fashion, including the Bright Center of the Universe.

[Alinestra Covelia]

...And finally back to our romantic Star Destroyers, who are now swimming in a sea of dropped pixels.

The weirdest thing is that on-screen, lots of the pixels are colored - mainly the colors of the tribes (blue, indigo, orange, yellow, red, green, white, purple).

But when I save them as a jpg, they become mere black and white.

You'll have to take my word on this. For some reason the color corruption is not carrying over to the saved file.

[Alinestra Covelia]

The terrain bmps used for this scen are here:

(This is actually a gif, to make it small enough memory to post. But normally in my scen folder it is a bmp.)

[Alinestra Covelia]

And this is the terrain2.bmp (same deal - I had to make it a gif to upload it here).

[Catfish]

I'll answer the technical question. Nestor was on the right track. It's the coastline/ocean graphics. Your sets of 4 small diamonds aren't quite large enough to form a complete game tile. That leaves transparent gaps. I've used cyan to show the difference. Replace the cyan with black to fix.

[techumseh]

Looks good, AC! When will it be done? I mean, after you solve this glitch?

[N35t0r]

As for the trade issue, I guess both your propositions are good ways of balancing it (You'd still need to retain some trade value for terrains, since the trade route yield depends on that), of which i'd prefer the first over the second, but unluckily they are only feasible for humans, since the AI will rarely build a fraction of the caravans a human player will...

I'll refer you to Eivind's Blitzkrieg 1936 scen, in which the different nations must build as many caravans as possible and send them about to keep up in both the techs race (it's a gigamap, so payouts are huge) and the arms race (huge gold output from vans, expensive units).

[Alinestra Covelia]

Catfish - great catch! (haha pun) Thanks for pointing that out to me. Now I can get that sea glitch sorted! Awesome!

N35t0r, that's good to know that map size affects the trade payouts. In vanilla Civ2 the time and effort of trading was so great compared to the actual payout that I rarely did it myself. But I'm thinking of having this apply in a Multiplayer Civ2 scenario I'm working on. (And yes, it's the ancient "Modern World" scenario from way back when with house rules galore...)

Techumseh, I'm in the middle of first year in law school right now so I can't guarantee anything, but I do love the scenario and I'll work on it over Christmas if I can. The graphics still need some tweaking and polishing up (as you can probably imagine, looking at the above bmps) but the next major steps to make it playable are:

* Finalizing the tech tree, including Imperial-only and Rebel-only (as well as determining which techs allow multiple units buildable only by opposite civs).

* Balancing the attack and defense strengths etc. of the units. I need a delicate balance whereby a starship is decently powerful against a planet, as long as it doesn't have shields (coastal fortress). If it does, then attacking with ground units is the only way to go because ground units will have a higher attack value (and you don't want to risk losing a whole ship, which is much more expensive and carries a load of people). Starfighters should be almost useless against planetary defences and purely useful in space combat against starships and other starfighters.

* Placing the star systems. This is going to be very boring and lengthy but at least it's something I can do in several consecutive lunchbreaks one at a time.

* Hex editing the cities to make some "coastal" and others not coastal. (Which means that only some planets will be capable of producing the powerful starships or building shields.) This will be lengthy but arbitrary

* Graphics overhauls for throne rooms, interface, and other goodness if I feel brave enough.

* Puerile and smutty reference notes in the pedia.txt and describe.txt files.

[N35t0r]

There's a big pile of stuff which affects trade revenues, including but not limited to continent numbers of the cities involved, their owners, their trade outputs, and certain techs.

I'll try and dig something out...


[edit:] here is ther old GL thread, which I think is very comprehensive.


The whole GL index is availiable here, btw.