I may have the source of the "Killer Aquaducts" Indentified

[Ken Hinds]

I've been working off and on with my project to get MGE and FW scenarios to play nicely together. I think that I may have found the source of the problem, but I need a little advice/help from the scenario creators out here.

I need a fairly complicated or extensive scenario made with the MGE tools and not with FW or by hand editing. I'd like it to be about like Kull's End of the Bronze Age, Jesus's Alba De America, or his Al-Andalus, or Harlen's Mongols or LOR scenarios. I'm not concerned with greatness, or playablity. I need a full blown scenario that makes a lot of use of the events file amoung other things. The scenario needs to have the AI doing a lot of ativity and it needs units that fill a missle slot or ones that are destroyed after attacking even if they do not fill a missle slot per se.

If someone has created one using the MGE tools that was actually ready for playtesting, but might not have been up to your standards for graphics or whatever, I'd like to borrow it for a while. I promise not distribute it since you deemed it not ready for Prime Time and will return it with any changes I find that might be needed to make it work correctly with MGE. I will not try to turn it into something of my own.

I know it takes a while to put together a complete scenario, even a mediocure one. My artistic abilities are about a -4 on a scale of 1-10 so I rather borrow one than try to do a complete one from scratch. My abilities to "Seek out and Identify" incompatabilities in other people's code is about a 7 or 8, which is why I've been able to last for nearly 35 years in the Information Systems field.

As part of it's anti-virus protection my internet mail connection does not permit attachments so please do not try to e-mail me a scenario. Either respond here with a site where I can find the scenario for download or e-mail me directly and I will send you the required number of floppies along with return postage. I have no problem with making international mailings to get the scenarios.

English versions of the scenarios or files are not required. I can readily handle German, Spanish, or French. Prometheus - My Italian is minimal, but I can keep from getting surprised by a restaurant menu. Rome's didn't kill me and I don't think a scenario in Italian will either. For our Scandinavian friends I can usually tell one language from another, but my Swedish is probably the worse of the three because my collection of Swedish stamps is smaller than mine from Norway or Denmark.

My thanks to all,

Ken
[This message has been edited by Ken Hinds (edited July 07, 2000).]

[Allard HS]

I don't have any scenarios like that for you, but a much more interesting thing to find out than this.

quote: My abilities to "Seek out and Identify" incompatabilities in other people's code is about a 7 or 8, which is why I've been able to last for nearly 35 years in the Information Systems field

can you try and identify the bytes in the civ2.exe file that determines how many units in units.gif/rules.txt are used. In FW there are more than in older versions, so there must be a change somewhere which should be identifyable by comparing the civ2.exe of FW and an earlier one. I haven't had luck in this so far, but that's because I have no good knowledge or good software for it. Maybe you can?

If you could, it'd be great, and would allow a large amount of new units.

[Ken Hinds]

Allard, the best that I might be able to do is find those bytes in MGE. The only two versions that I own are 2.42 on CD and MGE. I do have a couple of programs to dump and change hex files. I haven't really tried working out the Object code in CIV II yet since so much of it is done via text files.

Ken

[William Keenan]

I have done some work in trying to get MGE scenarios to work under FW. I learned that the length of a city record was longer in MGE then in FW (88 bytes vs 84 bytes as I recall). Therefore, a converter program would be required to reformat the SCN or SAV files.

Do you plan to create a conversion utility Ken?

[Ken Hinds]

William,

I've been working with Identifying and correcting the various text files so far. I've discovered that there seem to be some significant differences in the contents of the text files that come with MGE and those produced with the FW editing tools. I'm not at all sure that just converting the hex files to pad out the various sections without modifying the corresponding text files for a scenario will fix the problems that I'm working on.

My current areas of concentration are:

1) Getting the "(Unit/Improvement) attack near City X" messages to list the correct unit doing the attacking or at least make it a "Missle attack near City X" message like a player receives in a non-scenario game.

2) Create a Describe.Txt file for those scenarios with overflow problems or missing unit/improvement descriptions. IMNSHO a lot of my enjoyment from the various scenarios comes from two things.

a) Outwitting the designer by winning/trying to win with the "Total Loser" civs such as the Catalans in Jesus's Al-Andalus or the Greeks in Kull's End of the Bronze Age or in the case of Harlan's Mongols or LOR scenarios playing the intended civ on Deity rather than the designed level of Emperor or whatever.

b) Reading and admiring the work and research that was put into the descriptions of the various units and wonders. Without a separate Describe.Txt file much of this information is lost to the player(s) because it overflows the boxes. I'm not sure about with FW, but MGE does not have scroll bars on the initial boxes. The scroll bars are on the Description windows.

3) Adjusting boxes and windows so that various overlapping columns, etc. are readable without switching back and forth or guessing.

4) Getting Heralds, Leader Portraits, and Wonder movies to match appropriate civs/events in scenarios.


My intent at this point is:

Particularly with item one, find out if the program files need a code patch and finalize that patch. Then obtain MPS's blessing to distribute that patch like the patches already on this site or convince them to make an official patch from my work.

What is more likely is that each .SCN file and the cooresponding Text files will need to be hand massaged and updated individually. In that case my intent is to make what adjustments are required and then return the changed files to the designer for distribution, or not, as they see fit. In this process if I should find that conversions could be automated to work with all or the majority of CIC and FW scenarios then yes, I would most likely consider producing and distributing the conversion program.

While I probably should have known better by now, I originally thought that the scenarios included in the MGE package had been redesigned to work correctly with MGE. I recently found indications that this is probably not the case. I was playing one of the Microprose Scenarios that has "destroyed after attacking" ground units appear fairly early in the scenario, if you are not playing the producing civ, and had the same "barracks attack" type message occur as it does if you are playing a FW scenario with MGE.

When I brought up the subject several months ago several people reported that it only happens in these scenarios when played using MGE or possibly UCC. At the time we didn't have any UK players posting in the discussion so no one was sure that they also have the same problem. I'm still not sure that they do.

I'm really afraid that I will discover that there is no MGE version of the Scenario creation tools and that the ones included in the MGE package are the same ones that came with FW. If that proves to be true then I will have to design them myself or resign myself to accepting, what to me, is irritating garbage that is in no way the fault of the scenario designer and it detracts from my enjoyment of their work.

As I said in my initial post, I been working on and off on this. Lately mostly off since I'm putting in 60-70hr work weeks and need my 15hr/wk Civ fix. Excuse me that was a typo should have read 15hr/wk problem research time.

In any case if someone has a scenario available that fits the criteria I would really like to know about it.

Thank you reading this far.

Ken


[This message has been edited by Ken Hinds (edited July 08, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by Ken Hinds (edited July 08, 2000).]

[Captain Nemo]

I am aware of the problem with the "Abraham Lincoln attack near Rome"... I have just had loads of problems with my new scenario in that regard because I have multiple missile type units. In my previous scenario I limited the AI to one missile unit and hard-coded the game.txt statement for missile attack (That's the easy fix...)

Here are a few other areas that would be very interesting to look into/fix:

Size of the text/description boxes in MPGE. My very nice FW scenario with long Wonder description texts gets truncated when played with MPGE.

When a FW saved scenario (.sav file) is edited to make multiple civs human controlled, it works perfectly allowing you to play all the human civs in the game order without any differences from a normal single player game. During AI moves/attacks you get the map view of the last played Human Civ.

But if you load the same saved game using MPGE it ignores the multiple human civs.

You have the option to play in MPGE Hotseat mode but here you have the annoying problem of not being able to see the AI moves and having to save the game with an .hot extension instead of .sav .

I am currently working on a massive scenario that I am trying to make playable in FW and MPGE but it definitely requires human control of 2 Civs and really needs the player to see the AI moves. Right now it plays very well in FW but MPGE isn't that good.

What do you think?

[Panda]

If anyone ever does hack the civ2.exe file, I'd love to know what determines/where/how to change the sound association for a unit slot.

BTW, Ken, I'm a UK user of UCC, and I know that the 1.3 patch did something screwy which mucked up the names in the Rules.txt. You had things like "Women's Suffrage built in x" when it was really only the Pyramids. That might be the problem here.

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"The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on"