Adding Technologies

[Sheik]

Could someone walk me through the process of adding a tech (and keeping the icons right) to 1.29 that would be researchable after all the modern techs have been discovered?

[Optimizer]

You should be able to do it by having all the "end" techs (Int. Defense, Genetics, Robotics and Stealth).

[Sheik]

Will I have to give the tech a position on the Science Advisor screen? Or will it be researchable from the drop down menu after you discover the last tech required.

[The Templar]

Adding techs is easy, making it look pretty is a bit more challenging.

(1) Add the tech in the editor. Including an x/y position.

(2) Create both a large and small tech icon. Both are in .pcx format (Lview is an excellent editor). The small icon is size 32x32 and the large is 128x128. Be sure to name them in the following format to avoid confusion: x-tech name-icon size.pcx where x is the number of the tech. Just start numbering whereever you left off. So if your adding your first tech, Firaxis ended the tech tree with 82-Writing-small.pcx, and the tech you are adding should be 83. (again, this is not necessary but it is a good way to track your changes, especially if you are making several). Save icons in Civilization III/art/tech chooser/icons/

(3) Open pediaicons.txt in a text editor. This file controls which icons go with which techs. Once you look at the tech section of pediaicons.txt, the procedure to add techs should be self-explanatory. Remember to add entries for both small and large icons.

(4) To display properly, the file size of small icons should not exceed 2Kb and large icons should not exceed 16Kb.

(5) The tech tree display in the science advisor screen is another matter. For whatever reason, Firaxis opted to make the arrows on that screen a static feature of the background. So if you add new techs, no arrows will be drawn to them. Each age has its own advisor screen with arrows. You will have to draw new arrows on each science advisor era screen to which you add new techs. This can be a bit challenging (again Lview is a good, cheap editor with which to do this).

If you want to see new techs added, check out my space race mod (click link in my signature) and check out what I did with the modern age. I've included icons for the new techs, a new modern era science advisor background with arrows, as well as civiliopedia and pediaicons text files which account for these new techs.

[Saurus]

Originally posted by The Templar

(4) To display properly, the file size of small icons should not exceed 2Kb and large icons should not exceed 16Kb.

Thank you VERY much for this one.
I was wondering why my large icons was showing up
correctly while the small icons was messed up.

-S