civ3mod.bic and civilopedia

[Alex]

Hi,

I have been thinking about making some changes to the game's rules using the editor, but I would like to know if the changes I make in the "civ3mod.bic" file are reflected in the civilopedia as well. Let us say that I change uranium so it appears when you discover Radio, for instance... Will the Uranium entry on the civilopedia reflect this change? Or do I have to tinker with the civilopedia.txt file?

Mind you that the changes I'm planning to do will not add anything new to the game, I'll just make some changes on what's already there.

Thanks for the input.

[Kilroy_Alpha]

You need to alter the civilopedia entries yourself. The editor does nothing to any files other than civ3mod.bic .

[godinex]

You can search other txt an write over.

[Alex]

You need to alter the civilopedia entries yourself. The editor does nothing to any files other than civ3mod.bic .

Thanks. This may be a good moment to start my Civ3 Portuguese Translation Project...

(Note to Infogrames: this is for my personal fruition and it is not intended, by any means, to be distributed to others... )

[Spatzimaus]

It's more annoying than you think.

Say, for example, you want Uranium to appear at "Atomic Theory" instead of "Fission" (one of my first changes). You change it in the editor. Simple, right?

Next time you make a game, the Uranium icon WILL be in the right spot (right-click on Atomic Theory and it'll be there) but the text, which is from the civilopedia.txt, will be unchanged.

The unfortunate part is this: you can save the .bic file to a new name, move it to the Scenario directory, and load it as a scenario to keep from overwriting your old .bic, but you'll still have the same Civilopedia whether you use your new rules or the old ones. So, if you change the .txt it'll apply to all your games, no matter what ruleset they use.

To really screw things up, the .bic is loaded when the world is created, and any changes made after that are ignored, but the Civilopedia is loaded up again each time the game is played, so if you're continually making tweaks the two won't match.

The only real solution seems to be to accept the game was not designed to be easily modifiable, back up civ3mod.bic and civilopedia.txt to another directory, and hack away on the main copies. Sure, you won't be able to play a normal game, but them's the breaks. Not that I'd want to; I really prefer the changes I've made to the original game, and so do my friends.

[Alex]

Spatz: thanks for the info.

This is Civ3 customizability, sheesh...

Anyway, I think I'll hack away on the main copies of the files, as you suggest, because I think I can do a good job

But the backup thing is in order so I can try to translate this baby into Portuguese... And from what I've seen so far, it won't be easy...

[Gramphos]

Yu can make new Pedia entries for you bic by changing the value the game look for in the bic from for example
GOOD_URANIUM to GOOD_URANIUM_YOURMOD or GOOD_YOURMOD_URANIUM (might be easier to see as a pattern)

Then you can just redistrubute a text to paste at the end of Civilopedia.txt, and it will only affect your mod. (As other still tells the game to look in GOOD_URANIUM)