A "Mod of All Mods"?

[biljir]

But I like the Nigerians .

And the Australians, and the Irish, and the Native Americans...

And I suspect, if you look really hard, you can even find someone who likes to play the Canadians

[Depp]

Then they can add the nigerians...

Personally i hate starting a game and find out im playing against the jamacians or whatever! It´s like playing against the smurfs or the three stooges!

[Pintello]

Hi All,

Harlan mentioned me in here so I will tell ya'll what I can contribute to all this. I have altered the relevent Sprite, Icon, Unit, etc. files and add the relevent graphics files to CD's Mod so that all the new units have aleast unique Sprites for all the new units. Also, the new Sprites also are true representations of the new Units. For example, the Mounted Archer now uses a different Sprite than the Horse Archer, the Spy Satellite is a satellite, the Helicopter is a Helicopter, the Cruise Missile and the Nuke have different graphics, etc. The only graphic that has not changed is the Alphatransporter which CD uses the Rift Gate Sprite for. One important note here is that not all the graphics are animated, and not all of them have the additional graphics that are used in the Library etc.

All the images I use are available either on the site here, or are some that Harlan was kind enough to provide to me. Harlan has also provided a new Catapult graphic that is an improvement on his previous one to me today. However, I will not have a chance to change it in the game till I get home from work tonight. If you are interested, when I have made the relevent changes to the graphics related files I can e-mail it to you.

Also MarkG, I am in the process of moving to Florida, so the e-mail in your files will not be valid after Monday. People can still e-mail me at Timothy_Pintello@boscomm.net though, so how would I go about getting that changed in this forum.

Timothy Pintello

[Diemar]

If there is any interest in a small program which enables The user himself to choose which mod he wants to add and which he doesn’t want to add, then I think it would be fairly simple to write, and even more simple if The ”modmakers” where able to cook some rules together regarding how a ”modpack” should look like in terms of filenames and so on.

I would be able to set aside some time for the coding of this program, if there is any response or interest regarding this post.

Ideas regarding all of The above would be appreciated


Enslave them all!

Thomas Diemar.

[This message has been edited by Diemar (edited July 21, 1999).]

[MarkG]

Diemar, before the FW times, the civ2 equivalent(more or less) was the ModPack Manager, and it was one of the hotest files around
The answer to your question is "hell yes!"

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Markos, Apolyton Civilization Site

[Diemar]

Well I’m talking about a program that can intelligent compare and merger the ctp files. But in many cases The right ting to do is to append The changes to The ctp files with The include command.

If this program is to be very good I would need to dictate some conditions for those modcreators who wishes to utilize this Mod Manager. For example, it would be nice with a info file that contain some words on The changes which The mod do. This info file should be written so that I could use the info in The manager, to prompt The user whether or not he/she want to include this or that change to The game.
Without this info file my job at programming this manager to be user-friendly would get allot harder.

I would like some response from those modcreators out there on this, while I get started on looking into the structure of all these ctp files, which can be altered with slic.

Enslave them all!

Thomas Diemar.

[Harlan]

As a mod creator, I say thumbs up to any program anyone makes that helps in any way. So yes.

[Depp]

Sounds like a great idea!

SLIC mods can easily be used by this program as they can be addad as separeate yourfile.slc files and then just use the line
#include "yourfile.slc" in script.slc!

[Diemar]

Wasn’t that what I just said?

Enslave them all!

Thomas Diemar

[DOGFISH]

Mark,
What's the consensus then, is this going to happen or is going to be put off? If you're not going to do this I think you should consider some guidelines for mods to txt files and graphics. I've talked about this before and the reason's seem obvious to me...
Dogfish

[MarkG]

"is this going to happen or is going to be put off?"
well, I think we were stalled at the finishing of the TP mod(which I believe that has come to a more or less finished(for now anyway) form) and the remaining(?) sprites for the units that CD adds.
Once this is achieved, we can move on...
and not to forget to mail CD about it, I think we have everyone else's "ok" on this(dont we?).

Other than that, is there a volunteer for doing the "merging"?
If not, I will give it a try after my vacation(which starts on Monday)

"you should consider some guidelines for mods to txt files and graphics"
If you(e.g. this forum) gives me a set of guidelines, I'll happily post them in the(now not existing) ctp file submission page

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Markos, Apolyton Civilization Site

[DOGFISH]

Markos,
I may be the only one who feels this way, so I'd like to see if you get other responses... By my own rush to get all I could get done, I'm modded out. I don't know what has been changed where or if it was my change or someone elses. Things work... but I can't install any mods that overwrite entire txt files. I would like to see that available to those who can use an easy install like that but also a file of specific changes and where they go.
As far as sprites... I know that people like to change colors or improve the sprite somehow... the tiff's and the makespr script should be included. I also think if there were more working examples of the scripts available as models or to hack around with, there would be more people creating sprites.
We already have a game full of unmodifiable units... we should try to keep all mods as open and flexible as possible.
Also, is there anyway to change the topic heading of a thread? The one I started with questions about Paint Shop has become filled with some good info on animated sprite creation... I just wonder if people who don't use paint shop skip over it.

Dogfish

[Diemar]

I’ve started on this CTP ModManager. The First thing I’m concentrating on is The comparison and merger of The ctp files.
I will be monitoring this thread for suggestions regarding this program. These ’small’ programs tend to grow in complexity as you discover new details that could be added, so don’t count on this program being finished within just one week.

MarkG, perhaps we could combine our efforts on this program, especially if you have any experience writing code that deals with sprite-graphics. Email me if you are interested in this.

Enslave them all!

Thomas Diemar

[PICKmyBRAIN]

Well while the "MOD compiler" program is in the works why don't we just go around every few months or as the need arises and create mods with the most popular features that we have stumbled across people could vote for their favorite fix and we could name it something like "The mother of all mods ver x.x" The Creators with mods featured could be the MOD squad!

You can pick your brain but it's impolite to pick someone elses.

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The mark of JM
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[Diemar]

Can’t figure out whether or not The last post from PickMyBrain was sarcasm or what!

Maybe it’s just me

Enslave them all!

Thomas Diemar