PBEM Human-Human Diplomacy through SLIC?

[Locutus]

In this weeks column (it hasn't been posted yet but thanks to my subscription ot Apolyton's newsletter I've already read it) Solver discusses the problems with PBEM in CtP2. I wasn't aware that the only mayor problem with it (I wouldn't call non-functioning cracks a real problem) was diplomacy, or I would have posted about this a long time ago.

Most (if not all) of the things that can be achieved through diplomacy can be achieved through SLIC as well. Granted, it won't be as fancy as but it's probably possible to do the human-human diplomacy in PBEM games through regular messageboxes and some SLIC code instead of through the diplomacy screen. How about it? Do people feel something for this? I'd be happy to help out the multi-player community in setting this up. The possibilities even go way beyond what's currently possible in the regular diplomacy model, much more complex deals can be made since there's no need to learn the AI how to deal with it. One possibility that comes to mind is the option to request/give away units, another to force someone to pay tribute on a yearly (or should I say turnly?) basis.

Unfortunately I'm very busy at the moment and my schoolwork will keep me from doing anything with CtP2 for at least a week to come. And even when that's done I still have a lot of work to do on the MedMod and the improved Alexander scenario, so I won't be able to do any coding anytime soon. However, that does give us some time to discuss the all possibilities and potential problems of this.

What options should be included and what should the messagebox-interface look like? I haven't looked into this for CtP2 but in CtP1 it wasn't possible to have more than 4 or so buttons per message, so we'd have to take that into account when designing an interface. Also, how should the messages be triggered? I'm fairly certain that it can't be done by pressing a key (which *was* possible in CtP1), so some other way to trigger this will have to be thought up.

Let me know what everyone thinks of this...
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Locutus (edited March 04, 2001).]</font>

[phoenixcager]

This is great news!

When you say it won't be as fancy, what exactly are we talking about?

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phoenixcager of the Civgaming Network.
Visit the CGN forums.

[Dale]

Just on the MP problems, I think I might have thought up a way to get hotseat working through SLIC. I've got to look into it a lot deeper.

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Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[phoenixcager]

quote: Originally posted by Steve5304 on 03-04-2001 12:53 PM Its a Hidden Feature ! how can anyone test this......unless they work for CCraptivision and are preparing the patch.. 52.00 bucks...., I will never fforget Activisions Treachery for not making the AI worthy ! I have given up on ctp2 , I eagerly await Civ3.

Testing the hidden PBEM feature is easy. It's only minor modifications.

Read Mr Ogre's thread: http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum46/HTML/000011.html

It's the mods to make human-human diplo. that'll be tougher.

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phoenixcager of the Civgaming Network.
Visit the CGN forums.

[Steve5304]

Its a Hidden Feature ! how can anyone test this......unless they work for CCraptivision and are preparing the patch.. 52.00 bucks...., I will never fforget Activisions Treachery for not making the AI worthy ! I have given up on ctp2 , I eagerly await Civ3.

[kaan]

it would be grat if someone wanted to make the human-human diplomacy part for pbem.

[preacherman]

I would like tobe able to comunacate human to human in hotseat. so what ever you can do would be great.

[Locutus]

Thanks for all the feedback, glad to see people appreciate this. I have a few hours today, I'll see if I can come up with some sort of prototype to show how it might work. A picture is worth a 1000 words but a prototype is worth a 1000 pictures

Phoenixcager,
With fancy I mean that you can't use the regular diplomacy screen with the nice flags in the background and the checkboxes and masks and stuff, but you'll have to do with regular textboxes with buttons representing choices, much like the Alexander scenario.

Here's how one of the messageboxes might look like:

Messagebox 1:
Blah, blah, blah. Do you want to give the Americans:
[button 1] Gold [button 2:] A City [button 3] A Unit [button 4] Next ->

When you click next the messagebox dissappears and a new one appears:

Messagebox 2:
More options. Do you want to give:
[button 1] Annual Tribute [button 2] An advance [button 3] PW [button 4] Next ->

You get the point...

Steve,
Oh come on. Don't give up just yet. At least try the MedMod first... Activision may have given up on us, but that doesn't mean we can't make this a good game. CtP1 is all the evidence I need to prove that we can turn CtP2 into the best Civ game so far.

Dale,
I'd love to hear what you can do in that area. What do you have in mind exactly?

Preacherman,
Human-human communication works the same in hotseat and PBEM (those features are virtually identical, the only difference is that hotseat is on only 1 computer and PBEM on several), so if this works with PBEM, it will work with Hotseat as well.

[phoenixcager]

quote: Originally posted by Locutus on 03-09-2001 06:03 AM Thanks for all the feedback, glad to see people appreciate this. I have a few hours today, I'll see if I can come up with some sort of prototype to show how it might work. A picture is worth a 1000 words but a prototype is worth a 1000 pictures

Thanks for the update!

quote: Phoenixcager, With fancy I mean that you can't use the regular diplomacy screen with the nice flags in the background and the checkboxes and masks and stuff, but you'll have to do with regular textboxes with buttons representing choices, much like the Alexander scenario. Here's how one of the messageboxes might look like: Messagebox 1: Blah, blah, blah. Do you want to give the Americans: [button 1] Gold [button 2:] A City [button 3] A Unit [button 4] Next -> When you click next the messagebox dissappears and a new one appears: Messagebox 2: More options. Do you want to give: [button 1] Annual Tribute [button 2] An advance [button 3] PW [button 4] Next -> You get the point...

Sounds fine to me. IIRC, the diplomacy screen in CtP2 didn't have much graphics anyway.


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phoenixcager of the Civgaming Network.
Visit the CGN forums.

[Solver]

Locutus, I really appreciate this, but what we have to do is not posting "Good news" and "Excellent!", but work on this. I believe I have to study SLIC to see more on that, but probably it is possible to release such a patch.
The reason why many people playing CtP I didn't move to CtP II is simple - they were amazed by the lack of PBEM. The reason why people playing CtP II don't play PBEM is simple - they don't like having no diplomacy. There are some new things in CtP II over CtP I to enjoy in the single player mode, and I think that given the ability to interact, we could attract people to play CtP II PBEM. Also, "Craptivision" would probably know that, and look at the work done by the Apolyton community. Actually, CtP II isn't a complete, ready game, me thinks. It's more of a half-ready game, and the Apolyton crowd is what can improve it to be better.
Now, so that we could be able to do something in practice, I would like some info on how does this actually happen. In which files do we have to enter the SLIC code, and how do we unite it later in a mod, and to make it available from the game? I've seen some files, but it's about 2 months ago, so I've pretty much forgotten what does it look like in CtP II, but I'll want the info to see.
Now, just a question: how many of us have at least minimal programming experience, to be ready for SLIC, as I think that people who have never written a string of code will hardly be able to do much about this. This isn't, of course, meant to offend those of you who aren't programmers, as I don't state I am the best Bill out there at all !
And, I don't, however, think that CtP II is the best civ title today, as it was mentioned in one of the reviews, that I've seen through the Apolyton news. BTW, just can't wait when will they prepare the real-audio file for the last newsletter. I think that lack of PBEM and the less challenging AI hardly make CtP II so much better than CtP I was. So many people have been speaking of CtP I's extreme failure, but I don't quite believe in it. The CtP II is so much similar to the previous game, that I just couldn't enjoy it for so long. CtP I was something entirely new, but this isn't, it's just the same game with some new features, and some stpes backwards, like the weird Msgs tabs, the reason why I miss important messages in the game, what has never happened to me in CtP I.

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Solver - http://www.aok.20m.com

[Dale]

Locutus:
Unfortunately, my idea didn't come off. It centered around the fact you can turn the AI off for a civ, and back on. On the weekend I gave it a go. What I did was prompt on the first turn "Is this player a hotseat player?" with a yes/no selection. If yes I would turn the AI off for that civ. Then for each turn I checked that flag to see if it was 1 (hum) or 0 (ai). If '1' then I would run a routine which popped up a msg "Player X's turn" and yeah. I tried it to limited success. It did actually stop on player 2's turn, pop up the notification of that turn, and then open up the screen for me. The only problem I found was that I couldn't do anything. It was like normally trying to look at the AI's units/cities. Only the info from spies or terrain info. There must be another flag to set, my thoughts run along the IsHumanPlayer settings. You know how ya check IsHumanPlayer(g.player)? Maybe it's related to that but can't find anything on what the actual FLAG is.

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Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[Locutus]

Solver,
You're right, there's a lot of work to be done and if I have to do it all myself it's gonna be a while before this code is done, since I'm a busy man and this code doesn't exactly have my highest priority.

I've looked into this more closely in the last few days and the only possible problem I see in the long run is the actual forming of peace-treaties and alliances and stuff like that. Giving gold or maps or whatever should certainly be possible but I currently don't know for sure how to force a treaty between players using SLIC (but that doesn't have to mean it's not possible, I do see some things that might do the trick, just need to do more testing for that). However, even if this turns out to be impossible I suppose it's not all that important since treaties like this can be made over email or ICQ or whatever just as well, it just won't show up in the diplomacy screen (which can't be used for human-human interaction anyway). And if necessary I could even write some code that would more or less simulate these treaties (e.g. keep track in SLIC which players are supposed to have a peace treaty with eachother and only allow the trading of advances between human if they have that peace treaty), but that's all for the future, no need to worry about that quite yet.

BTW, don't worry about Activision, if you ask me, they've completely given up on the CtP series. Most of the programmers from the CtP(2)-team have left Activision and are working for other companies now. So for any future CtP2 patches or for CtP3 a whole new team would have to be assembled and start from scratch. Combine this with the disappointing sales results (due to the dissappointment many people found in CtP1) and at least I conclude that Activision has burnt it's fingers enough on the whole series and is just hoping for someone to buy the rights (Markos/Dan: *hint* *hint* ).

To implement this code in SLIC you can just put the code in scenario.slc, either in the default files or in a scenario folder. Putting the code in a scenario folder would be best but I vaguely recall that esp. multiplayer games have trouble in handling scenarios, so the default files could be used instead if needed. If default files are used, the Paul's modswapper could be used to allow people to swap between PBEM and 'regular' games or I could write some SLIC code that would automaticly detect if a game was multi-player or not. If scenario's are used, you could simply start the game like you would start any scenario (ala MedMod alpha).

I already made a start with implementing the code: I made a (very) rough framework on which the whole mod can be based. It's not good enough yet to even serve as a prototype but it probably won't be too much work anymore. I found that putting together a decent structure to store all the data on treaties and to parse this data-structure to a diplomatic message was a bit tougher than I had figured. I think that someone who doesn't have very much programming experience would have a hell of a time to set this up properly, so it's a good thing I'm doing it (not that I pretend to be an extremely good programmer but I do study Computer Science and I have done this sort of thing before). However, once the framework for the code is complete, filling in all the details shouldn't be too much of a problem and could probably be done by almost anyone with some basic SLIC or other programming experience.

For those who would very much like to see what's I've done so far and who would be willing to risk a crash or two, I uploaded what I've done so far to my website. A zip-file can be found here. I put the files in a scenario setup, so simply unzip in the main CtP2 folder and the files will be placed in the same folder that I'm using for the moment: Scenarios\LocutusTest\scen0008. Once you've done this, you can simply start a new scenario from the new game setup screen to test it. To open the interface dialog, click on the diplomacy button in the control panel wheel (this will open the regular diplomacy manager as well, if needed, a more elegant way of starting this up could be coded at some later point). Mind that for now you can only 'talk' to player 2 and esp. the part that displays the composed message is very buggy. All that works for now is the composing of a new message, sending it and actually 'executing' treaties doesn't do anything yet (as I said, it's really not even good enough yet to serve as a prototype).


Dale,
I figured that you might be looking into that, never gave that option much of a chance myself. In CtP1 those Attach- and DetachRobot funtions were used in the tutorial to disable the AI until the human player was ready for it. I can't imagine any way of using it to change control of the human player to another civ. As far as I can tell, the only option that even has the slightest chance of succeeding (though I still find it unlikely), is to not only detach the AI, but also attach an AI to the current civ of the human player, that might force the human into the only non-AI controlled civ. If that doesn't work, I don't think it's possible at all to make the human change civ (other than through the cheat menu). If you ask me, the only use for those functions is in scenarios: e.g. one might make a colonization scenario and disable all Native American civs until the Europeans actually land to prevent FE the Aztecs from taking over the entire American continent before Europeans can even get there.

[Steve5304]

forget pbem. Carp-Ti-Vision pulled the plug on its support. ****** took ther money and ran,and all the talk about Pbem was ust rumour. there wont e a 1.2 patch. And if there is, it wont matte, I alreay returned my game.
I wish apolyton changed its stance toward activision for "neutral" to hateful" this way they would get the message.

[Dale]

Steve:
Haven't you got anything better to do? Personally, I play/mod CTP2 because we're 2 months off getting Europa Universalis in Australia, and CivIII is a LONG way off. There's nothing else of high-strategy to play. So make like the wind and blow me!

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Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[wittlich]

Now kids play nice This is a forum and everyone is entitled to their own opinions...as long as you're not insulting about it and degrading to someone else

I understand Steve's disgruntlement in CTP2. I prefer to play civ games in a multiplayer mode...and of course, CTP2 sucks in this My roommate and I haven't played CTP2 in a few months because of the wide variety of errors inherent in the game...but we still miss playing the game just the same.

Dale, I purchased EU a few days ago and we've been playing that and the old stand by CIV2 since then. As for as EU goes, it's a good game with no major bugs that I've noticed so far (even though the users manual is poorly written). But I have to say that even though EU is a good game - it is not a civilization game. What I mean is, in the civ series, I felt rather connected to my civilizations, for some reason this "feeling" is missing with EU.

So, yes Dale I would recommend you getting EU when it's released in your country...but play it with an open mind and try not to compare it with the civilization-based games (though that may be hard to do!)

Happy gameing and "productive" postings everyone! Ciao!