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I've been playing since the Civ 1 days. I bought Civ 3 when it first came out, but gave up on it after a while. Now, I'm regaining my interest as I read about the changes for Conquests.
One of the disappointing things about Conquests is that it lacks several features that would make scenario creation easier and more powerful (primarily scripted events). When I was mowing the grass last night, I thought: why not have a new program that would run along with Civ3 and implement scripted events. We've had a couple similar programs for Civ2: Xin Yu's CivManager, and Angelo Scotto's CSPL for ToT. Since so much is known about the file formats, it seems like we could find out how the data is organized in memory.
Potential problems: virtual memory. If the variable you want to access has been swapped out to the hard drive, it will be a lot tougher to modify it. It would also be hard to allocate memory for a new object (i.e. create a new city or unit). But it should be relatively easy to change the terrain on a map square, upgrade a unit, monitor for a city's capture or destruction, add or subtract gold or research from a civ, change production or add shields to the production in a city, etc.
If the hackers out there can create trainers that let players cheat in their MP games, why couldn't we use a similar program to do something useful?
One of the disappointing things about Conquests is that it lacks several features that would make scenario creation easier and more powerful (primarily scripted events). When I was mowing the grass last night, I thought: why not have a new program that would run along with Civ3 and implement scripted events. We've had a couple similar programs for Civ2: Xin Yu's CivManager, and Angelo Scotto's CSPL for ToT. Since so much is known about the file formats, it seems like we could find out how the data is organized in memory.
Potential problems: virtual memory. If the variable you want to access has been swapped out to the hard drive, it will be a lot tougher to modify it. It would also be hard to allocate memory for a new object (i.e. create a new city or unit). But it should be relatively easy to change the terrain on a map square, upgrade a unit, monitor for a city's capture or destruction, add or subtract gold or research from a civ, change production or add shields to the production in a city, etc.
If the hackers out there can create trainers that let players cheat in their MP games, why couldn't we use a similar program to do something useful?
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