Armor changes

[phenyl]

paul,

that is the whole idea of scenarios for sure, but the implementation so far has been sketchy at best. esp if you are looking to combine elements of differents mods together!

somewhere else in the forums skorpion wrote :

, right about here is where I would normally be saying, it is time for somebody to create a WW2 scenario. However, I don't think that is possible anymore. The people that know me, know I am an avid CtP supporter. With that said, I now have to say, Activision screwed this one up big time. Not being able to create scenarios is much worse than the MP problems. I mean, CtP1 did scenarios better than CtP2 and that was one of the biggest gripes surrounding CtP1, lack of scenario support.
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so call to cash might be neccessary. i think that an outside utility, like the easy mod utility for ctp, might be neccessary. of course this might very well demand that the mod makers agree on some sort of pre set formatting when they release their mods if they want them to work together.

the way the mod community supported ctp was really good, but it also made users do things like installing the REAL way to play civ like it way for cdawn's apolyton pack with activion's patch and ctpfan's 1.21 hack neccessary. (this was just to illustrate a point) and then making some very precise (admittedly simple) modifications to the games text source files themselves!!!!

throught the development everyone seemed to be content to base their mod's areound cdawn's first one, BUT what if he wanted to release a 6.0 version or something. it would invalidate all the work that went after it.

see my point? of one person is going to be the "leader" of the mod scene, that is great. but so many people have so many good ideas and are all pretty much starting from scratch because of the way ctp1 was itself upgraded to ctp2 it is going to make some wierd issues when the work comes to fruit.

either people REALLY have to work together and everyone compromise / find the single best answer, or there is going to be cross development like CRAXY. i have brought this up and no one seems to be biting on it.

anyway, i dont really have an answer, except that scenario's arent the real answer to using and installng mods,

[Harlan]

Lots of interesting comments in this thread. First off, I'm glad to hear CD that you're still with us. I hope you'll use this game to be properly balanced, hopefully in conjunction with Wes so we can have one standard mod that others can be based off of.

Phenyl,
Yes, behind the scenes lies a tangled tale. In brief, about a dozen people who had made mods for CTP1 were invited to be a special alpha team for CTP2. They weren't the only alpha or beta testers by any means- Activision had lots of others including an in house team. But it was thought by including this group, people could get started on their mods early and push for changes to help their mods, so the game could hit the ground running when it was released. In addition Scorpion and I were asked to make scenarios to be shipped with the game, and to be paid for doing so. Scorpion had to drop out of that aspect for health reasons, I ended up making the Alexander scenario.

So far, so good. But in actual practice there were big problems. It was decided early on that this team couldn't get copies of the game builds by FTP because of security concerns- only Scorpion and I could get them that way. So everyone else was going to have them shipped. That was a HUGE problem. Between the time the game was supposedly shipped overnight and people got the game, many weeks went by. People got really pissed off. To make it worse, one person did get sent the build fairly fast, but noone else. So every day for weeks, people were expecting to get the build in their mail any day. By the time people did actually get that build, it was already way out of date and so comments about bugs and so forth were possibly irrelevant. It was also such an early build that it was hardly working and not much help for making mods since the official game files were all likely to change later. There was no other build sent to the team until the game came out, and then everyone got a free copy of the game.

That's it in a nutshell, though I could go into more sordid details (but I'd rather not!). Basically it was a good idea, but Activision didn't have the time or resources to follow it through. One thing we all learned is that Activision's CTP2 team was well meaning, but seriously understaffed and at tne mercy of poor decisions by higher ups. For instance, not long before the game came out, I'm told they were encouraged to get rid of scenarios altogether, because it was felt they complicated things too much. Luckily they resisted that. The higher ups were also the ones who vetoed the plan to have builds FTPed, which would have made this alpha team a success story I think.

I have a slightly happier tale to tell, personally. Making an official scenario I got lots of help and feedback. Virtually all the SLIC coding for the scenario was done by someone within Activision, as that person implemented my ideas. I also was able to make a number of suggestions for the game that got listened to, since I had updated builds at all times.

Generally speaking, I think that despite the problems the process had, at least you could say they tried, which is much better than most game companies, such as Microprose which virtually had no feedback with Civ2 products, ever.

One last comment on another posting here. It was said that making scenarios is impossible. As I posted somewhere else, there is a bug with placing cities, thus making scenarios impossible now, but I've been promised by someone within Activision that will be fixed in the first patch. The thing about the human player only allowed to be the first player. I agree that is a big problem. And based on my experience with Activision programmers, that will be dealt with if there is a big enough demand for it. If just one or two people gripe about it in Creation forum postings that Activision folks may not even be reading, don't expect much on that in a patch. Its certainly something they may not realize is a big problem. If you get an e-petition of scenario makers taking a stand on that and send that off, I think it would be a shoo in to be fixed. I would say that's true for other issues that need to be fixed as well. Since Activision is so understaffed, they can't fix everything that should be fixed, and they do listen to people here. So its just a question of speaking with a loud voice and making priorities.

[skorpion59]

Phenyl,

My fault, that statement was too general. I assumed the people that were interested in scenarios had been following the various threads and knew what I was referring to. The idea and implementation of scenarios (directory setup, etc) works fine. It is the type of scenario which doesn't work right. If you want a basic 8 player scenario with no pre-existing items (units, cities), it works quite well. However, if you want a REAL scenario which starts out in the middle of a massive war for instance, it doesn't work at all.

In therory, I like your idea of being able to put mods together. In reality, it is just not possible. How would you incorporate 2 mods which alter the same file with 2 different settings? Or what if one mod altered the setting and the other mod removed the setting altogether. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, it goes much deeper. How would you then know what other files were changed, based on the aformentioned settings, and will have to also be changed. A basic program wouldn't be able to address this and combine them correctly. It simply requires a human to interprete this information and figure out what needs to be done.