Vikings scenario redo

[Harlan]

Mercator,
Your work here, and the link you posted, are very great. Keep up the good work. Let us know if you make any more progress on the visibility hex- it would be great to simply change this hex if one makes mistakes in what squares are shown to who.

Here's what I think must be the case about special resources, if I haven't made myself clear so far. Lets say you have a big ocean. In the map editor it will be filled with resources, but when you start an actual game, all the resources not near a coast disappear. If you then build an island near a resource spot, it still won't appear, but if you change that exact spot to land, it will reappear and stay that way even if you turn it to water again. So, there must be in the file a place where the underlying pattern is saved, and also a function showing if that resource is activated or not.

Hopefully, if that location is found, this means one could turn on or off resources through hex editing, though maybe only for squares that fit the predetermined pattern. Perhaps, Mercator, this is the meaning of the 3rd or 6th byte you speak of, or its in some other still unknown location. Could you try editing a spot in an ocean where there would be a resource if it was near to land, so the resource is uncovered, and then see if there are any changes to the hex code for that square? That information must be recorded somewhere in the .sav file!

Another thought: would it be possible to increase the size of a map simply by adding extra lines of terrain code for extra lines of terrain? I doubt its that easy, there is probably a spot somewhere else in the file where the overall map size is indicated, if not other such spots that need changing. For instance, after checking out the info on hex editing cities, I tried to move a city simply by changing the hexes indicating the city's location. It unfortunately didn't work, creating some kind of middle ground where the name of the city was in one place and the actual city kind of still in the original spot. So city location info must be in more than one place.

But, if a map could be increased in size, might it even be possible to increase a map over the 100 by 100 limit? That would be mind-blowingly great. I've always rankled against that limit.

Also, does anybody know of the hex that needs changing to turn a destroyed wonder into a non-destroyed one? Someone who has now left Civ2 once did that for one of my scenarios, so I know it can be done.

[Mercator]

I'll have another look at the resources, and I will try to find out the full meaning of the codes.

I will also try to see what changes can be made to change a map in a running game.

The map surface can be larger than 10000, it really isn't that difficult to accomplish. But don't get too excited, there is an absolute maximum, namely 10923. So you can get some gain, but not all that overwhelming.

Here's how to create a large map:
1. create a (blank) map of whatever size you want in the MapEditor.
2. open this map with a Hex-editor. The first to bytes of the map indicates the width, the 3rd and 4th the height of the map.
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: these sizes are according to the coordinate system used in Civ2, NOT the MapEditor.
Change those to whatever you want, as long as the surface (according to the MapEditor) stays under 10923.
3. Open the map again. You will now get a pop-up saying that the MapEditor failed to load the map. Just click OK, and it's done.
FINAL NOTES:
a. Because of this error, this "oversized" map will not be created as a new one, but remain as the map you had open before it. So if you have been working on another map, DON'T use Save, use Save As instead to avoid overwriting previous work.
b. In the header of the map file there is actually a little bit more information stored about map size etc. Not changing that, and not adding enough bytes at the end of the file to match the map size, causes the "failure". Since it works like this anyway, you don't have to worry about those other things.

[Harlan]

Mercator,
What you say is very interesting- increasing the map size by about 10% is still very interesting for me. But I am a bit confused about the "failure" and all that. Will this work, or not? Have you made maps using this extra size that one can download? Is there a way to do it that won't cause that failure by better file editing? Does this extra size cause any problems when playing a game, such as the AI having errors in the extra space?

I've already made a new map for my Vikings update, and would be very happy to increase it to 10923.

[Harlan]

Mercator,
You rock! I tested out your 10923 limit, and indeed it works! Your instructions were a bit unclear, but I see what you mean now. And, I'm happy to say, my worries about such a file not working as a game were unfounded, from the brief check I did. You gotta post this great finding on a new thread so more people will see it. Call it: "This one goes to 11" .

I was able to take a preexisting map and add an extra 10% to the south. Apparently one can't add to preexisting maps in any other direction (except perhaps with extremely careful hex editing that would take hours)- trying to extend the map to the east creates an interesting smear. Luckily though, in this case south was exactly the direction I wanted to go (allowing some Sahara on a Europe map).

Now I wait for mapping hero Mercator to find out about changes in a running game, so I hopefully don't have to start the .sav from scratch to take advantage of this.

[Harlan]

I have an interesting map discovery of my own. I was thinking how unfortunate that the extra map size only helps to the south. I think I have found a crude, partial way around this. It occurred to me that C. Flinchbaugh's Map Utility program can convert Civ2 map files into a text CTP file and then back again without any loss of data. I tried this out, and saw that I could roughly understand the layout of the CTP text file. Basically, there are as many columns are there are width square in your map, and as many rows as height squares in the map. So, if you want to say, move the entire map down five squares, just cut the bottom five rows off, and then paste them in at the beginning of the file.

The one wierd problem with this is that the rivers appear in both the old and new locations. I'm gonna ask C. Flinchbaugh to see if he can figure out why this is, and how to stop that bug.

[Mercator]

I updated the info about maps in savegames:
look here

I found out everything about the "visibility" byte and there is indeed a way to turn of resources.

Thanks for your maps and your compliments, Harlan. I'll try to make some nice guide or so to start a thread about the 10923 map size.

[Harlan]

Good discovery again, Mercator. Making maps is a whole new ballgame. Yesterday I was toying around with my Vikings map, and doing things I could never do before. I moved the whole thing to the right, then down, then expanded the bottom. Using the replace function and the map utility method I mentioned in my previous post, I was able to switch all desert and grassland tiles in under a minute (the problem was that I previously put grassland in the swamp slot, giving it no trade bonus when one built roads).

Using replace function with a hex file, I'll be able to fool the AI into thinking the grassland now occupying the desert slot is really grassland, when it comes to where they should build new cities.

One more thought on editing special resources: it would be very interesting if anyone could find the hex that governs what the special resource pattern is. The number of different pattern possibilities for any given map is rather limited (high resource seed numbers just repeat the same sequences). So I wonder what would happen if one put in a seed number outside the usual range- with Civ2 one never knows what kinds of strange things might result.