Preliminary release of Mars scenario (Take 2)

[J Bytheway]

I thought that might be it... In that case there's only one thing left to try: Go as before, putting the game into a saved game directory, but this time before you load in start a new SP game on the Mars Mod, then load it from inside of that SP game. This is even more tiresome...

[FlameFlash]

*nods* I'll give that a try when I get home... at work now...

[drAgON1]

Wow sounds cool.....but thats alot of stuff to change.

[J Bytheway]

What's a lot of stuff to change? The installation is much easier on a PC - special instructions were required for FlameFlash because he's on a Mac.

Plus he's seriously overworked. If I'm to believe his last post he's been at work for 24 hours solid at least .

[drAgON1]

Ok i will download it tonight( For Sure!) The site is down right now. I just have never edited anything and I am not sure what your talking about in most of this forum. So i have to goto CTP every time I want a normal game and change files?

[J Bytheway]

Yeah, that's correct. However, since this only works in multiplayer you can leave it on default rules for the purposes of PBEM. Will need to be changed for LAN / Internet, though. It's only a case of opening one file and typing or deleting the two charachters 'ma' so it shouldn't be a big deal... If only Activision had correctly done the scenario support then this wouldn't be needed (grumble grumble ).

[drAgON1]

oh ok..well that dont sound too bad. I will ask Paulno1 if he will test it out with me tonight. Can u not ask activision to change that? BTW I only play internet games.

[J Bytheway]

Ask Activision to change it? Are you kidding?? The only reason it's possible to play scenarios on CTP at all is because of the v1.21 hack and that was done by some anonymous person outside of Activision ages ago. Activision moved on to CTP2 and then abandoned that. After CTP2 flopped they wanted to forget the whole CTP experience.

Good luck trying to play an internet game - just make sure you both have the 1.21 hack installed and that you both install the mod in directories with exactly the same name ('Mars' being the obvious choice...).

Quinns is the only person I know of to successfully play an internet scenario game - but presumably someone played it with him...

If you can persuade anyone to play with you then please please tell me how it goes (whether it works or not).

[J Bytheway]

I should clarify that - when I say exactly the same directory name I only mean the directory structure inside the CTP directory, not the location of the CTP directory itself.

[drAgON1]

Yes I was kidding. I have been reading these forums for years. I have been playing internet ctp for over 3 years now(WOW). Yes I have the hack installed. U ever read the read.me file with that?Why cant u add ai and barbs and such?

[J Bytheway]

I'm glad you were kidding. For someone who's been reading the forums for years you certainly don't post much (only 64 posts!).

I'm glad you're such an experienced player. You'll certainly have a better chance of making it work for that.

I was sure you had the hack installed, but I just had to check . I think I read the readme with the hack once - but I can't remember much of what it said.

I can't really remember the details any more but I tried for a while to get the AI to work - probably I didn't try hard enough but really the CTP AI is astronomically complex. The barbarian profile alone (which is much the simplest) consists of perhaps a dozen files which are mostly fuzzy logic (which I don't understand). All I know is that AI players are bad. Maybe I'll try again sometime, but from what I heard of the MedMod it took a handful of people months to get the AI working well (it still wasn't perfect - it crashed in the late game sometimes) and the MedMod is a lot more like regular CTP than my Mod.

One last piece of advice: Save your game very often.

[drAgON1]

Yes your right about my posting. I really did not care to interact with the rest of the Apolyton folks(I have seen the errors in my ways and it good to share ideas). Although I have join many other various sites made by CTP players thourghout time. they mainly lasted a month or so.

[drAgON1]

Ok all downloaded. Now all I have to do is run that install option? I get a bit confussed with all the ways you said you could put the files together. So, umm...what should I do next? Do I keep all those files in the scenario part?

[FlameFlash]

Originally posted by J Bytheway
What's a lot of stuff to change? The installation is much easier on a PC - special instructions were required for FlameFlash because he's on a Mac.

Plus he's seriously overworked. If I'm to believe his last post he's been at work for 24 hours solid at least .

Nope... not overworked per se... though it would be nice if I could work less...

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by drAgON1
Ok all downloaded. Now all I have to do is run that install option? I get a bit confussed with all the ways you said you could put the files together. So, umm...what should I do next? Do I keep all those files in the scenario part?

You run install.bat - Choose the recommended option for the first choice, say yes do copy the GL files, and then ScreenMod is uo to you (that's a mod by someone else which I included just because I thought it was so useful - all it does is make the city list screen and some trade screens bigger so you can see more options).

When you want to switch back and forth to the default game you can do it by hand by editing ctp_data\default\gamedata\gamefile.txt and exchanging the line Constma.txt for Const.txt or vice versa. If you prefer you can keep running uninst.bat and install.bat - but when you later run install.bat it is unnecessary to copy the GL files again because they weren't removed.

And, FlameFlash: Did you try my last ditch method yet?