Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[Kull]

OceanFarms L1 - "Nets": As the name implies, this tile improvement is a Net (a graphical TIMP from Civ3 - see attached), nothing more, and is a visual representation of the technology used to generate food from this coastal zone. Its use and deployment is now VERY narrowly focused, because - in addition to the improved visuals - the new TIMP can only be built on Beach Tiles. That's also why it is now coded to be "un-pillageable". Historically, pirates and raiders couldn't stop people from fishing from a beach, nor would they find it economically worthwhile to do anything about the nets or weirs deployed in this narrow zone.

Because we are limiting the deployment options (Nets used to be buildable in every ocean tile), we'll now make it available earlier, with Ship Building (used to be Sails). Since Nets can't be pillaged, the player no longer has to worry about defending them, and accordingly it's a much safer use of valuable "early-game" PW points. The game play change is extraordinary in that regard, as it eliminates an entire category of needless early-game AI conflict.

[Kull]

Revising "OceanFarms": This sub-project began as a graphics task, narrowly focused on improving the TIMPs for "Nets" (L1) and "Fishery" (L2). But the more I dug into this, additional questions and issues arose, and as the focus widened, it seemed like a lot more was needed in order to improve game-play in this area. Specifically:

1) As shown in the post above - at best, the graphics are of questionable application for the Ancient Era. Something different was clearly necessary.
2) Which raised the question - what do these improvements actually represent? Obviously it's the Ocean equivalent of the Land "Farm" - a way to get more food from ocean tiles. But until we resolve the question of what exactly is collecting that "food", we can't create new graphics, nor figure out how best to stat them and deploy them.
3) Answering that question also leads to another - what sort of replacement art is needed and can it represent this "ocean food" capability across multiple time periods?
4) And the Advances which lead to each TIMP? Are they appropriate or will those need to change as well? And what about the timing and nature of each Advance? Do they reflect the technology being represented by the TIMP?
5) What about pillaging? It makes sense, for example, that a "Farm" could be destroyed (less so a "Pasture", but that's another discussion), but what about these ocean TIMPs? Some? All? None?

The posts to follow will answer all those questions, and give you a detailed look at the new "Ocean Farm" system, beginning with "Nets"

[Kull]

Nets & Fisheries (Existing): One of my long term pet peeves with CtP2 are the as-delivered Tile Improvement graphics which represent "Nets" and "Fisheries" (see attached). What are those things anyway? Red hulled boats dragging net-like things in their wake? Bright Red Buoys with nets strung out between them? Something else? Whatever they may be, "ancient era" they certainly are not. Yet the first set is available with "Sails", in the earliest of early times, while the triple red group isn't far behind. And then? There they stay, in your oceans until "Robotics". Ugh. Can we do better? I think you know the answer....

[Kull]

Unit Voices are Back: To begin - for those who don't care for unit voices - there are two ways to silence them. At the main menu, click the "options" button (lower left), click "sounds", and then set the voice volume to zero. This also works DURING a game - hit the "esc" key and you'll get access to the same "options" menu. In other words, it is VERY EASY to shut them off!

I had noticed voices in some of my games - but not for all units or actions - while other games had nothing (different installs, actually). The culprit for the second problem is the absence of a 15.8MB file called "sounds.zfs" which holds nothing but voices, and is now resident in the Cradle3+ "sound" folder. Confusingly, this file works in tandem with yet another "sounds.zfs" file (22.8MB) which sits in the base game ctp2_data\default\sound folder and holds all the non-voice sounds like guns, arrows, explosions, walking, etc.

Fixing the first issue was a lot more complicated, since it meant tracking down the individual missing voices and finding appropriate substitutes. Along the way, I made a LARGE number of changes, so that now all the female units (especially the new ones) have gender appropriate voices, the Fascist has a nice German accent, the Galleon captain is Spanish, Alexander has his own voice (from the Alexander scenario, unsurprisingly), the Janissary is at least Indian (better than British), and the Warrior no longer speaks with forked - or rather "Brooklyn" - tongue. And many others.

After playing around with this for a while, it appears that neither of the "SoundSelect" voices (see "sounds.txt") are ever used, which is probably just as well. Conversely the "SoundAcknowledge" plays about half the time you move a unit, and it can get annoying, especially if there are lots of units of a particular type to move, or you have units with long movement allowances (like ships) yet have to constantly start-and-stop them (especially during the early "Explore the map" phase). I can't find a file which controls the frequency with which any voice category is used (or that indicates why the "select" files don't play at all), so maybe that is still hard coded (which was a missed opportunity, IMO). Anyway, I am looking for voices which appear too frequently and in some cases have switched them over to "NULL". Better silence than annoyance.

[Kull]

More Cradle 4 features:

1) Economic Building Upkeep: One of the nice things about Cradle 4 is there's no upkeep in Gold for many of the Economic Buildings. Which is good, since these structures are supposed to increase income, not force you to do math in order to figure out if they are worth building.
** Agora: Upkeep from 2 to 0
** Bank: from 4 to 0
** Bazaar: from 1 to 0or
** Brokerage: from 5 to 0
** City Clock: from 5 to 0

2) Religious Conversion Inhibitors: Another interesting feature is that Walls no longer inhibit religious conversion, but Religious buildings do. That definitely makes sense, and is another change that has been added to Cradle 3+, specifically:
** Walls: PreventConversion from 0.3 to 0
** City Walls: from 0.4 to 0
** Basilica: from 0 to 0.2
** Monastery: from 0 to 0.2
** Mosque: from 0 to 0.2
** Shrine: from 0 to 0.1

[Kull]

Tile Improvements (In-process and Multiple graphics): The "Port", "Trading Post", and "Fortification" are three "early-game" examples of tile improvement which feature "in-process" building graphics. You don't just get the standard "building" graphic (barrels, pile of rubble & stacked lumber) which sits on the map for "x" number of turns until the improvement is completed, but rather can "see" all three of them undergo different phases of construction. Among other things, it's a good reminder of what's being built on that tile (the "mouse hover" tells you nothing), but it's also a pretty cool effect.

Many of the late game improvements are equally generous in that regard, but most of the early game improvements are not. As a result, this latest project created new "in-process" graphics for farms, pastures, advance farms, mines, watchtowers, colonies, townships, shipyards, and even Wonders. Plus some for the modern era as well: Airbase, radar, sonar buoys, listening posts and underwater tunnels.

In addition, I used several of Hex's new farm-type improvements and made them terrain-specific. For example, you can build Advanced Farms (a classical era farming upgrade) on Grassland, Plains, and Desert tiles, and now each one of those has a DIFFERENT on-map graphic (see attachment). This really helps reduce the "everything looks the same" effect.

Lastly, I revised a few of the build buttons. They are only 40x30 pixels, and when you try to represent a complex improvement like a colony or township, well....not good. The result is two buttons that look nearly identical. The solution was to select the most prominent building from each improvement (a tower from the colony and a temple from the township), and it's now a much cleaner look.

[Kull]

"Updater.slc" Bug Fix: As I reported way back in Post #10, the new unit upgrade system does not work for "unbuildable" units like the Cradle Militia or Cradle Elites, a pair of categories created using SLIC code. The workaround for that involved another SLIC file, "updater.slc", but that had one MAJOR bug. If you tried to do a partial upgrade of your units, the code took you through them one-by-one and offered a yes/no choice for each of them. Or rather, that's what it was supposed to do, except the code threw out errors, collapsed in the middle of the upgrade process, and never functioned correctly from that point forward.

Well, I'm happy to report that as part of the Apolyton Edition project, Peter Triggs, Tamerlin, and Pedrunn created a revised version (APOL_updater2.slc) and after extensive editing to insert the Cradle 3+ Advances and Elite/Militia upgrade paths, the bug IS GONE! That's a MAJOR step forward for Cradle 3+, as it eliminates an old bug that affected all previous versions of Cradle, and solves one of the biggest remaining issues on my checklist. Because the Apolyton file has been edited so heavily (it won't work with other mods), the Cradle file has been renamed "updater3.slc", but the reality is that all the hard work (ie. the coding) was performed by the aforementioned CtP2 modding gurus. MANY thanks, and a big tip of the hat!

[Kull]

Unit Facing: The only downside to the "Idle Animation" is that once a unit completes its move, the sprite shifts to "Idle and then faces in one of two directions; SE or SW. Units without the Idle animation display no motion (legs walking, spears moving, heads bobbing, etc) but they do "face" in the direction of their final move, which could be any of the 8 Sprite directions (see post #51 for a small diagram). Personally I consider that a small price to pay in order to regain full on-map motion, but it occurred to me - why not solve the problem by creating Idle Animations for ALL directions?

And that's what I tried, using the Assyrian Archer as my testbed, but sadly it was a total failure. I could not figure out how to code the sprite building process so it would make use of all the new Idle direction images. I even opened up some of the CtP2 sprites which came with an Idle animation, and every one of them uses only the #4 direction (i.e. "SE": As described in the linked post, "SW" is not separate art, but rather the mirror of the SE image). A review of the "MakeSprite" documentation also came up empty, as their examples only included a single facing direction, and there's no hint that more are even possible. So at this point I'm going to assume it is NOT possible, and won't pursue it further.

That said, a really interesting thing happens every time you load a save game. All units - even those with Idle Animations - are facing in the direction they last traveled! And they retain that "directionality" until such time as they move, after which they revert to one of the two Idle facings. However, that is not universally true, and thus perhaps it's a clue that source coders could follow up on.

When you build the Idle animation, there are THREE animation "types" to choose from:
0 = sequential (play through from the first frame to the last defined frame)
1 = looped (starts over at the first frame when it's gone through all of the frames
2 = back-n-forth (reverses direction of playback when it reaches the last frame, and plays back to the first before reversing direction again.

And here's the clue: If you build the sprite using Idle animation types 0 or 2, the unit does NOT retain directional facing when you load a saved game, you just get one of the Idle facing directions.

Why is that? Who knows, but once I realized what was happening, all my rebuilt sprites utilize the "looped" animation (#1), so at least directional facing is available whenever a save game is loaded.

[Kull]

"Assyrian Archer" unit: One side benefit from recreating the "Great King" sprite - it led me to look more closely at Stan Karpinkski's Archer unit from AOM (see attached). It's actually a Civ3 conversion, but either way the images which comprise the sprite are of consistently good quality, and it was pretty easy to add the missing Idle animation and to clean up the very few graphics glitches. It clearly has a more ancient look than the "Nottingham Forester" currently filling the role of "first archer", so I created some new 2D pix and it's now in-game.

[Kull]

IWe'd love to get more CTP2 enthusiasts active in here --- a CPT theme/skin for this sub wouldn't be out of the question...

LOL, well there probably isn't a large number of CTP2 lovers still out there, although it would be nice if those few were aware of the project. Hopefully it'll be ready for playtesting in a month or so - Cradle 3+ is already very stable and quite fun. Of course, Cradle has always been a fabulous mod, and I'm just ramping up the eye candy, cleaning out some old bugs, and hopefully getting this bad boy to be fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition. Frankly, its almost there, although the real test will be how well I've been able to merge the Cradle AI attributes with the loads of new stuff added by the Source Code guys.

But yes, If you guys want to do some sort of main page "hey look at this cool thing!" announcement, that would be great. Likewise if Apolyton is willing to host the final product, major thanks for that!

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Thanks, man! Hope you are enjoying the write-ups.

It's always awesome to watch an artist at work.

Is there anything the Management could do for you? We'd love to get more CTP2 enthusiasts active in here --- a CPT theme/skin for this subwouldn't be out of the question...

[Kull]

The REAL "real chariot": As a testament to the blindness that often accompanies single-minded focus on achieving a desired outcome, "Exhibit A" would have to be the "Real Chariot" sprite. As I discussed in the post dedicated to that topic (Post #44), the sprite appeared to have only two defects - it was a "little small" and the charioteer had a Greek-style horsehair-crest helmet. No problem. I disassembled the sprite and proceeded to modify 165 images to remove that crest. In the process I couldn't help but notice that the charioteer seemed to be very slim, had what appeared to be a flesh-colored breast plate and - based on the buttocks visible in the rear view - was apparently nude from the waist down. Admittedly "Great Kings" weren't known for absence of clothing in battle, but, whatever - I NEEDED a Wonder Unit chariot and these were just minor details, right?

Certainly not worth worrying about anyway, so I finished the unit, put it in-game and thought no more on the matter. Until, while looking through the "Forever Future" mod folder (from which this unit came), I found the large Unit Icon for this chariot (see attached). Whooops! Now don't get me wrong, I like naked chariot girls as much as the next guy. Especially those with an impressive set of "breast plates". But, well, there are some things that - once seen - can't be ignored. And thus, adios to this version of the "Great King" chariot sprite!

[Kull]

Great King Chariot Sprite v2: For reasons that will be discussed shortly, Cradle needed a replacement for the "Great King" chariot sprite. As noted in earlier posts, there weren't a lot of options so this time I modified the "Pharoah Chariot" sprite and gave it the head of a bearded Assyrian and removed the fancy plumes from the horse heads (see attachment). As a result, it now fights with bow & arrow, is the same size as its Egyptian counterpart, and generally has a more "Near Eastern" appearance. That said, it took an ENORMOUS amount of editing to create, and while the benefits are apparent, it might seem a bit duplicative. After all, this is the SECOND major editing project aimed at developing a sprite for exactly the same role. So why would somebody do that?

[Kull]

You rock, Kull.

Thanks, man! Hope you are enjoying the write-ups.

[Kull]

Concepts for "Elites" & "Elite Units": The Great Library had no information on "Elite Units" as a group, and while there was a limited concept entry for Veterans, the new "Elites" promotion (introduced by the Source Code team) was not mentioned at all. Accordingly, I wrote up a detailed description on which Cradle units qualify for Elite Promotion and also explained the difference between the two kinds of Elites, since the shared terminology is inevitably confusing. This includes links to & from the MANY affected units, and involved changes to the GL, gl_str.txt, uniticon.txt, & concept.txt, along with 3 new pieces of art for the Elites, Veterans, and Elite Unit concepts.

One "not-so-side-benefit" from the research effort was the discovery that "Elite status" doesn't just work automatically. The SC guys didn't incorporate it in the base game, but rather set the COMBAT_ELITE_CHANCE setting in "Const.txt" at "0". For Cradle 3+, that value is now set to "0.05" (half the veteran chance).