City Styles, "technical" question

[Tellius]

Hi,

This one is for those of you who have already attempted some modding or tweaking yourself.

I'm mixing up my own set of city styles (combining the best cities of AE, AOM and E's Civ3 mod). It seems to work, but then I recalled that - if I remember correctly - the look of a city not only changes based on population points, but also if a wall or city wall is built. Is this indeed so, and if so, is the city sprite replaced by another sprite altogether, or is a wall 'added' (this could be so since the game uses that strange pinky color as an alpha mask, so adding something as small as a wall would be possible) to the sprite already there based on population points? If the sprite is replaced altogether, does anyone know what txt file is used to accomplish this?

Secondly, does anyone know what exactly cityid.txt does? It doesn't seem to interfere with my city styles project, but I'm curious what happens here.

Finally - I'm hoping E will read this - I thought that (in agecitystyle.txt) "type 1" always referred to sea sprites, but it turns out this is not always the case. E's civ3 mod has a renaissance_style_roman with a normal type 0 tyle for the biggest size, and also a type 1 for the same size, and this second sprite is definitely not a sea sprite. I must be wrong. But what does the type 1 stand for?

Thanks in advance for any tips and info

Tellius

[Martin Gühmann]

Re: City Styles, "technical" question

Originally posted by Tellius
I'm mixing up my own set of city styles (combining the best cities of AE, AOM and E's Civ3 mod). It seems to work, but then I recalled that - if I remember correctly - the look of a city not only changes based on population points, but also if a wall or city wall is built. Is this indeed so, and if so, is the city sprite replaced by another sprite altogether, or is a wall 'added' (this could be so since the game uses that strange pinky color as an alpha mask, so adding something as small as a wall would be possible) to the sprite already there based on population points? If the sprite is replaced altogether, does anyone know what txt file is used to accomplish this?

Actually the city sprite changes based on population and age. But the city wall is a sepearate graphics and is located in the tile file. If I remember correctly you can now change the graphics in citystyle.txt, maybe there is also something located in agecitystyle.txt.

Originally posted by Tellius
Secondly, does anyone know what exactly cityid.txt does? It doesn't seem to interfere with my city styles project, but I'm curious what happens here.

This file does nothing and is a leftover from CTP1. And please don't modify it, because no one has it modified in his mod and therefore it occupies an empty slot we may use later. And if we do this you mod will becaome incompatible.

Originally posted by Tellius
Finally - I'm hoping E will read this - I thought that (in agecitystyle.txt) "type 1" always referred to sea sprites, but it turns out this is not always the case. E's civ3 mod has a renaissance_style_roman with a normal type 0 tyle for the biggest size, and also a type 1 for the same size, and this second sprite is definitely not a sea sprite. I must be wrong. But what does the type 1 stand for?

Actually this is right type 0 referres to land cities and type 1 to sea cities. It doesn't matter which graphics we use, we can put land city graphgics on ocean tiles and vice versa.

Probably the additional entries are some rubbish from our modding attempts. This was supposed to fix the infamous sea city sprite bug, but it didn't work but the additional entries were left.

-Martin

[Tellius]

Hi,

thanks for the info Martin, it'll be very helpfull. I have big plans for a better city look, but at the moment, my ambitions are bigger than what I can realise;-)

By the way, what is this infamous sea sprite bug you are talking about. I've heard references to it before.

Thanks again

Tellius

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Tellius
By the way, what is this infamous sea sprite bug you are talking about. I've heard references to it before.

It is simple: Load up the original CTP2, well Activision's CTP2 1.1 does work as well, and use the cheat editor to cheat you into the right age and place a city on sea. It doesn't matter how you do this, whether you use the sea engineer or the cheat editor, the result is always that the city looks like a land city.

-Martin