PROJECT: Playest II

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Flinx
2) If the AI offers a counter proposal, the leader head chances from the correct one to.... Oh! that is supposed to be my head

Yup, because it is now their parchment on that the treaty is written and the protrait shows their conterpart. However the diplomanager is everything else then excellent, so a total redesign is the way to go.

-Martin

[Lui2]

Trade

I'm under the impression that something is wrong with the calculated number of needed caravans in the current version.

Or are there any valid reasons, that are so many caravans needed to establish a trade route?

[Lui2]

Re: Re: GreatLibrary.TXT

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann Is it just a cut in the middle of a word and an additional line wrap is inserted or is the rest cut off.

It's a cut in the middle of the text, and the rest is missing.

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
The solution cannot be to shorten the text there must be another solution. This is a limit for modmakers and this is not good. So until some finds a good solution for that problem, I can live this assertaion.

A simple raise of the two used constants from 4096 to 5120 does not change anything for the problem. I don't digged deeper, but probably is the 4096 a limit that is set somewhere in the underlying data management. And I'm not sure if it's really worth to change this for one poor historical text about the knights and there history. It's quite simple to shorten this text for 200 characters without leaving any atmosphere.

And that limits will exist for modmakers is clear, but I think, the limit of 4090 chars per text section in the GL, is bearable.

Maybe we can agree to shorten the text?

[Tamerlin]

Re: Trade

Originally posted by Lui2
I'm under the impression that something is wrong with the calculated number of needed caravans in the current version.

This is a point that has already been raised, including by me, and it seems to come from the new way the number of caravans needed to open a trade route is computed. As far as I am concerned the new numbers are so high I consider that it is no more worth the pain to build caravans.

[Peter Triggs]

In the thread on Coding conventions and standards, Lui2 tracked down the assert failure re
NO_CONTACT_DECLARE_WAR in the Diplomat:: DeclareWar function and wrote:

By the way: If anyone has some suggestions what to do, to change this assert or the dependant code so that
only in real wrong situations a assert message pops up, i'm really interested to hear.

In Diplomat::SetDiplomaticState a number of tests are performed before DeclareWar(foreignerId) is
called. How about adding:

declare_war = declare_war && g_player[m_playerId]->HasContactWith(foreignerId);

The DeclareWar function is also called in Diplomat::LogViolationEvent but this is as a result of a
ceasefire being broken and so presupposes contact. There is another function ArmyData::ThisMeansWAR
(calls Player::ThisMeansWAR) which calls DeclareWar but it is, AFAIK, unused.

[Martin Gühmann]

Re: Re: Re: GreatLibrary.TXT

Originally posted by Lui2
Maybe we can agree to shorten the text?

That's too easy, and a modder wouldn't be notifies about it, we always whiched to remove limits, here is a chance to do so. Unfortunatly I don't have the source open right now. But the solution would be to replace the datastructure that contains the text by such a data structure with more size. So implement some growing.

-Martin

[Lui2]

Re: Re: Re: Re: GreatLibrary.TXT

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
That's too easy, and a modder wouldn't be notifies about it, we always whiched to remove limits, here is a chance to do so.

I think there are many things to improve in the game, that's more suitable to change than to increase the max entry size of the great library.

But if you like to increase the entry size, it's ok for me.

My only intention was to point out, that one section of the GreatLibray.txt is greater than the program can handle and the text is cut off and brings up a assertion violation.

If it's a problem for you, that the knight historical text is shorten for some characters, ok, let it as ist is. No problem for me. I made only a proposal what's imho the
easiest way to clean up the great library.

I never wanted to set any restrictions for the future development of the program.

So let's look forward to more interesting things to improve the program.

[Lui2]

Slave driver handling

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
In the thread on Coding conventions and standards, Lui2 tracked down the assert failure re
NO_CONTACT_DECLARE_WAR in the Diplomat:: DeclareWar function and wrote:

declare_war = declare_war && g_player[m_playerId]->HasContactWith(foreignerId);

Thank you for suggesting a solution proposal.
That would lead to the situation (as it is also now), that a slave driver of a nation, that has no contact yet with the owner of the city or setteler he tries to enslave, will stay unknown to the attacked nation. So this nation can declare no war and does afaik not even remember this act.

But on the other side if the nation is known before the raid, the slave attacked nation declares immediately war.

This feels a bit unbalanced or unrealistic to me. But it's fore sure an interesting tactical aspect. And I also don't know, how to handle this in a better way.

So I would agree with your suggested change in the code.

Any more opinions for this theme?

[Ekmek]

Re: Slave driver handling

Originally posted by Lui2


Thank you for suggesting a solution proposal.
That would lead to the situation (as it is also now), that a slave driver of a nation, that has no contact yet with the owner of the city or setteler he tries to enslave, will stay unknown to the attacked nation. So this nation can declare no war and does afaik not even remember this act.

But on the other side if the nation is known before the raid, the slave attacked nation declares immediately war.

This feels a bit unbalanced or unrealistic to me. But it's fore sure an interesting tactical aspect. And I also don't know, how to handle this in a better way.

So I would agree with your suggested change in the code.

Any more opinions for this theme?

is there anyway this function of No_contact and not declaring war can be applied to specific units? This could be a way to emulate Civ3's "hidden nationality" and allow for new units like guerrillas, terrorists, special forces, and pirates doing actions that don't spark full on wars and become difficult....not to go off topic.

[Fromafar]

Actually, I thought is was just a mild AI cheat. The AI will always know who has performed a slave raid, even if the slaver should have been invisible. Someone at Activision must have felt that the cheat became too obvious when the AI started declaring war against invisible opponents it had not even met.

Implementing something like a hidden nationality could be done by setting the foreigner to barbarian. Or even worse, we could set the foreigner to some other player, to have the SMAC "frame someone else" option .

[Lui2]

Translation string length

The length of the two last lines from the extended options of the german translation are too long to fit.

Best would be to extend the width of the window becaus it's hart to shorten the text without loosing the sense.

[mnbryan37]

I have a problem with the game crashing, only when I play under X/P (see "Game Crashes" thread). I noticed in GordonF's post towards the bottom of page 1, that he references an "X/P patch". Is there such a thing?

Also, since this problem does not occurr under the original game and Activision patch, I would assume that it has not surfaced in the play testing covered in this thread.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by mnbryan37
I have a problem with the game crashing, only when I play under X/P (see "Game Crashes" thread). I noticed in GordonF's post towards the bottom of page 1, that he references an "X/P patch". Is there such a thing?

There is no patch for Windows XP. You talk about a post by GordonF towards the bottom of of page 1 of that thread. Well I cannot find this post, I can just find [/QUOTE]this post in the game crashes thread. However the odd thing is that according to email notifications I got he should have posted in that for two times.

Originally posted by mnbryan37
Also, since this problem does not occurr under the original game and Activision patch, I would assume that it has not surfaced in the play testing covered in this thread.

Well there is a crash that might occur when you are playing mods that uses Diplomod 3.6 like Apolyton Pack or MedPack. The symptoms are: You have set the entry MaxPlayers in your userprofile.txt higher then NumPlayer, and just after a new player was inserted by a revolt so that number of players in the game is higher then number of players you started the game with, the game crashes. If you /reloadslic on the turn before the crash you can bypass the problem for one turn. I wonder why noone reported this before, because you have now an graphical user interface to set NumPlayer and MaxPlayer and the game is also tested with mods. Maybe it is gone because we had to reimplement some slic functions.

-Martin

[mnbryan37]

I'm sorry Martin, I was not very clear on where GordenF's quote was. It's towards the end of page one of this thread (Playtest II).

I have not experienced the crash you explain above, but then I have never changed the maxplayers value in my userprofile.

I have just converted an older computer back to Windows ME, from X/P, and will play my next game there to see if I get the same type of crash.

[J Bytheway]

Update - 2004.06.15

It's been nearly a month, so I guess it's time for a new version. Lots of little changes this time.

The change which removes the blank age buttons from the MP setup screen might cause problems with mods, but I included it anyway. Complain if you want it removed.

[file removed]

[This version is obsolete. The next version is available here.]

Changes:

Added: Implementation of chance of gaining an advance through conquest
Fixed: Various SLIC bugs
Fixed: Bug which would inappropriately disable the embargo and declare war buttons
Fixed: Miscellaneous sprite-related bugs
Fixed: Possible crash (may be related to Solaris project bug)
Fixed: Memory leak in the wonder movie window
Changed: Score from city sizes to reasonable values
Changed: Things to improve .NET compatibility
Changed: Naming convention for autosaves
Fixed: Blank age boxes in MP setup
Added: More automatic focus changes for cities to standardize behaviour
Fixed: Bug causing incorrect production when pressing F3 after end of turn
Fixed: Possible rounding errors on science calculations
Fixed: Incorrect display in keymapping dialog
Added: New commands in keymapping dialog
Added: New credits