CTP2 Editing GUI

[J Bytheway]

I'm writing a CTP2 Editing GUI for my own (nefarious ) purposes. Kind of like EasyMod for CTP, only not really - mine's very different and much better (obviously ). Well, in some respects, anyway, and if I get it doing everything I hope to.

I know many (most?) people prefer fiddling the text files themselves for most of the time, and I sometimes feel the same way, but I'm hoping the strengths of my program will be its ability to do mass changes, e.g. Double the cost of all age three advances, generate all the statistical bits of the GL, etc. (Although none of that is implemented at the mo - there's only a basic editing interface; you can't even add or remove entries yet ). I wrote lots of little applets to do these things for CTP, but I wanted to conglomerate them this time around.

So, is anyone else interested in using such a thing? And if so, would they like to help test it during development (which is of course the most dangerous stage in terms of the possibility of losing all your work, etc.)?

Or are you all hardcore text-files-or-nothing people?

[Immortal Wombat]

I generally just delve into the text files, I never used Easy Mod for CtP, I didn't trust it not to screw everything up, and not tell me where or what it had done. But what I do find annoying is large-scale changes, like advance costs, unit abilities etc. If there was a way to cut advance costs on a large scale, add/remove flags across the file, that would be very useful.

[Locutus]

I agree with IW basically. I never trusted Easymod (it had some known bugs and I feared the unknown ones) and similar tools (I think someone once designed a Excel sheet which accomplished the same thing as well). So normally I wouldn't be too eager to use your tool but the mass changes thing certainly sounds very, very useful and tempting to use...

[J Bytheway]

Very well, I shall make mass changing my priority. I'll keep you all posted.

[The Big Mc]

I know I normally go into the text files you notice things better that way

[Martin Gühmann]

Actal I needed a lot of time to add all the new goods to my mod, a lot of Great Library work, work with the uniticon.txt, goods.txt, goodID.txt. Such a tool would accelerate the mod developement a lot. A lot of work was copy and paste and modifying the copied entries, and sometimes I forgot something to change. And of course it would help people to start modding. So we could get new modmaker. Of course it would be good if such a tool would be open source, so everyone who knows the program language and has the time could help develope this program.

Some feature I like to see in are a Great Library prewiev, multi language support, saving all files in a certain mod directory. Ability to load all files of this mod (gamefile.txt). And a textfile viewer as subwindow.

-Martin

[Pedrunn]

The GL is the worse part for the modders in my point of view. A lot of work and really boring!
Something that connects would be nice.
Eg. it would read in prereqs if you write something like EnableAdvance for a unit it would find the unit in the Uniticon.txt read the Unit.txt find the line EnableAdvance recognize the advance finding it in the Advance.txt serch it in the uniticon again and link it to to the advance entry of the library.
I dream with it everytime i start the GL work for my unreleased mod.

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
Actal I needed a lot of time to add all the new goods to my mod, a lot of Great Library work, work with the uniticon.txt, goods.txt, goodID.txt. Such a tool would accelerate the mod developement a lot. A lot of work was copy and paste and modifying the copied entries, and sometimes I forgot something to change. And of course it would help people to start modding. So we could get new modmaker. Of course it would be good if such a tool would be open source, so everyone who knows the program language and has the time could help develope this program.

I'm not sure if I like the idea of my bad, inefficient, code being visible to everyone - but I suppose it wouldn't be too bad . I'm writing it in VB6 (I know - not a *real* programming language, but I don't care).

Some feature I like to see in are a Great Library prewiev, multi language support, saving all files in a certain mod directory. Ability to load all files of this mod (gamefile.txt). And a textfile viewer as subwindow.

GL preview. Hmmm... Should be doable.

Multilanguage support already built in to a certain extent, but you can't develop in two languages at once - you have to choose one way or another. And all the comments, help, etc. is in English.

Files are currently saved in their respective game directories - I was considering the option to save them all in a copy of the directory tree for the purposes of zipping and distribution.

You can already import a project from a gamefile.txt (I tried it with cradle and it seemed to work fine).

Textfile viewer would be easy if you didn't want to edit in it whilst the GUI was open - but having both at once would be asking for trouble. Regenerating the text of the file repeatedly would slow things down and use up more memory (and the memory consumption is quite considerable already...)

Originally posted by Pedrunn
The GL is the worse part for the modders in my point of view. A lot of work and really boring!
Something that connects would be nice.
Eg. it would read in prereqs if you write something like EnableAdvance for a unit it would find the unit in the Uniticon.txt read the Unit.txt find the line EnableAdvance recognize the advance finding it in the Advance.txt serch it in the uniticon again and link it to to the advance entry of the library.
I dream with it everytime i start the GL work for my unreleased mod.

That's what I plan for, only my vision goes further yet. But it won't be easy. It almost certainly won't be in the first release version.

Progress so far is that you can edit pretty much as I wished for, add, remove, copy, paste entries, and I've got good support working for the advance tree.

Now working on the mass changing code, but the big job is designing all the structure files to describe to the program the content of each data file (I've only done a couple for testing purposes so far). The one for units.txt in particular will likely be a big job...

[Pedrunn]

I can wait as long as you finish it
But I cant wait to see it ready.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by J Bytheway
Multilanguage support already built in to a certain extent, but you can't develop in two languages at once - you have to choose one way or another. And all the comments, help, etc. is in English.

Actual I meant the possibilty to develope your mod in more than one language. It is ok if the program is in English only. But if you don't have the view over files that aren't in the English version is a problem of EasyMod and this shouldn't be in your program.

-Martin

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
Actual I meant the possibilty to develope your mod in more than one language.

Yes, I understood, and you can, but at present you would need to have a seperate installation of my program for each language. It would be easy to change that to just needing seperate ini files though.

Either way, you won't be able to develop mod in multiple languages in a single interface all at once - you'd have to close & open again. But the two different versions of the mod could share some data files.

[Martin Gühmann]

Actual in CityMod2, ApolytonPack and GoodMod, all the files in the ..\ctp2_data\default\ folders are shared. There are only for the strings extra folder. All string files of the English version are in a folder called ..\ctp2_data\english\ for the German version in a folder called ..\ctp2_data\german\ so this shouldn't be too difficuilt to implement.

-Martin

[J Bytheway]

To keep you all updated:

I have encountered a rather large problem in that the memory consumption of the program is enormous - loading units.txt, advance.txt and buildings.txt gives me an 'out of memory' error. I had got all the code optimized for speed over memory consumption, but it looks like I'll have to change that. This will, unfortunately, delay things considerably...

On a lighter note, the mass-modification code works a treat.

[J Bytheway]

That's fixed (as far as possible). I'm proceeding to the GL (No idea how fast this will be).

Just to wet your appetites I attach a screenshot showing my increasing by 20% all advances in ages 7 to 10. (It's all a bit scrunched up as I wanted to make it as small as possible). Tell me what you think.

[child of Thor]

I for one will find this very helpfull, so keep at it please.
I don't really have enough time to learn Slic(at least for the time being), so this will be a very nice way for myself(and others i'm sure)to change things quite easily. Can you also use it to add/edit Great Libary entries?