[C4:AC] SDK Released - Whos still in?

[Senethro]

Welcome back.

Its been four months longer than we hoped, but the SDK has finally been released. Its hard to sustain enthusiasm when theres not much you can do, so this thread is for people still wanting to contribute to the project. If you find you can't commit or are busy currently (many of us have finals or exams, myself included) then say here as well. It'll let us keep the memberlist clean and you won't receive emails from me!
If you've made other Civ4 mods in the meantime you can plug them here as well.


Where the Project Stands

Still very much in the early design and prototyping stages. We'd decided to base the mod on an Alien Crossfire techtree but without the Progenitor factions. Pjay and Rubin had experimented with implementing crawlers and the techtree.

Some pretty pictures.


Concept models by Gclarkson (Unity Foil) and The Revolution (Hive base)


Experiments with the height mapping by wGabrie :>


If you have any questions, PM me or email my gmail account (senethro@gmail)

I'll also try to be idling in the IRC channel. To join you can use the java chatroom here

http://apolyton.net/misc/chat/

Type /join #c4ac after connection to join our specific room.
Or your own IRC client.
Server: irc.apolyton.net
Channel: #c4ac


Some useful links for the files and if you want to dive into modding:

Our sign-up thread.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=139004

The patch, the SDK, modellers tools, other files

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=151059

Compiling the SDK

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=151079

Apolyton Civ4 modding forum

http://apolyton.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=257

CivFanatics Civ4 modding forum

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=158

Toolkit of software put together by MMC

http://www.evogame.co.uk/Dynasty/C4AC/c4ac.html

[Senethro]

Reserved for more text.


I'm idling in the chatroom mentioned above as often as possible. Last night I had productive discussions with Rubin and MMC about approaches to the mod and a toolkit MMC is putting together of useful software for programmers/artists.

I hope to schedule a formal chat for everyone and one for the programmers in the near future (after Easter) but please come by anyway.

You can also get hold of me on Googletalk and Aim (username: Senethro)

[PJayTycy]

About the crawler:

=> I added the concept of "home city" to all units. They are automatically assigned on birth. Two new functions are exported to python : getHomeCity() and setHomeCity().

=> I added a new property to the UnitInfos. Now every unit can have the crawler property, just set it in the xml files. If the property is not found (like on all units from firaxis), it defaults to FALSE.

=> I added 3 new mission types (crawl_food, crawl_production, crawl_commerce). They are available and show up in the user interface when a unit with the crawl-property==TRUE is selected and the unit is located on a tile currently not being worked. If the tile has 3+ yield for one of the missions, that mission "blinks" as a proposed action. When a mission is selected, the right amount is added to the home city of the unit.


Current bugs:
=> The added amount is never removed from base production. If you start a crawl mission, the crawler is put in "sleep" mode, but if you wake him up the crawl-bonus is not removed. This will require some thinking on how to capture this right, because I don't want to add code scattered al over the SDK (when the tile yields are changed by a worker, when the yields are changed by a civic-change, when the yields are changed by a tech-breakthrough, when a unit dies, when the crawl mission is canceled, ...). The problem is I couldn't find a "recalculate" kind of thing for the yields (if there was such a function, I'd only need to change -that-). Everything is done by adding/removing yields though. I wouldn't be surprised if a cheat ever turns up where users can "defeat" this add/remove system.

=> You can only start a crawl-mission on an unworked tile, but you can assign workers to a crawled tile in the city screen.


Other comments:
=> I have to find out how the mission-icons are ordered on screen, because currently it's very illogical.
=> The current dll is built with civ4 v1.59. I have to copy/paste all my code to v1.61
=> I re-used existing civ4 art: the indian fast worker = crawler, the mission-buttons are also taken from the workers : crawl_food = build_farm, crawl_production = build_mine, crawl_commerce = build_cottage.


Now, on Senethro's request, a few pictures:
Blinking "crawl_production" mission on an unworked mine.


City screen before and after the crawl mission started. The base yield is increased by 4, before any mulitplacation or other modifiers kick in. (ie: this is better than hacking away a work-around through modifing the multiplicators directly).

[Chaos Theory]

I'm eager to start programming, though I won't be able to contribute much for another month or so. I suppose I can spend time until then familiarizing myself with Firaxis code.

[BigFree]

I am no programmer but I will be watching your progress.

[Impaler[WrG]]

My pet project will be Social Enginering, it needs to be split into Civics and Meters to replicate the way more interesting system of SMAC. The meters themselves would become XML defined objects so it will be easy to adjust what they do.

I was also thinking of all these situations ware we add new XML tags and they arn't present for an existing unit. It would shure be handy if we implemented some kind of universal system that just defaults all values not found to zero/null.

[PJayTycy]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
I was also thinking of all these situations ware we add new XML tags and they arn't present for an existing unit. It would shure be handy if we implemented some kind of universal system that just defaults all values not found to zero/null.

It's not that difficult, in the C code you just add a default value and in the XML schema you indicate the tag as optional.

[#endgame]

My Software Engineering year long project is turning out to be a lot more work than I first thought, so I'm not sure how useful I'll be to the team at the present time. Sorry guys.

[ForesterSOF]

I am looking at the map side since my programming is nil

[Blake]

On Crawlers:
It is my opinion that the best way to implement crawlers is to have a crawler create a pseudo-specialist in the home city with the crawled resources attached to that specialist. Call it the Remote Worker specialist.

It's also my opinion that the only way crawlers will ever be balanced is if they actually consume a population point (think of them as transporting the workers to the work site), making them for utilizing remote tiles rather than a source of "free" production (for this the crawler would extract 100% of the resources rather than just one type).
However once the remote-specialist and linkage to the crawler is created setting this behaivour to one way or the other should be simple enough I think, for those who like inherint unbalance.

[Zoid]

I´m still in. But like ForesterSOF I have no programming skills. I can come with ideas and do some playtesting though.

[MMC]

Good idea Blake...
I'm still in, as you know, Sen.

I'll also be trolling the chat room if need be.

[PJayTycy]

Blake, that aproach still has the same problems I'm facing currently : detecting when to remove the "remote worker" from the city (cancelling action, unit killed, unit drowned, ...) and when to change the yield for the remote worker (tile improvement changed by terraforming action, tech breakthrough, rainyness change, ...)

So, besides these difficulties, it also adds the difficulty of finding a way to have 1 type of specialist be producing different amounts of resources, based on the actual location of the crawlers.

A possible solution would be to keep track of all crawler-added yields during a turn in a seperate value. Then, just before the actual production in a city happens, substract that amount, recalculate it with active locations of the crawlers and add it again. While this would almost certainly make cheats impossible, the progress bars would be meaningless again whenever you gave a crawler an order to crawl twice (the city bars would still update, but the actual resources would only be awarded once).

[Gavin Berchler]

AM

I am still in.... I think we will need to get cvs hostings, perhaps at sourceforge. Plus we should get a design document fully realised.

I think we should use the wiki on the site to prepare the design document. I will help with modding the factions.

Ps guys the map of PLanet is already in the Civ4 files. Look for Planet Map!

[Zoid]

Re: AM

Originally posted by Gavin Berchler
I am still in.... I think we will need to get cvs hostings, perhaps at sourceforge. Plus we should get a design document fully realised.

I think we should use the wiki on the site to prepare the design document. I will help with modding the factions.

Sounds good

Ps guys the map of PLanet is already in the Civ4 files. Look for Planet Map!

Umm, where? I looked in the directory and didn´t find it...