The Altera Centauri collection has been brought up to date by Darsnan. It comprises every decent scenario he's been able to find anywhere on the web, going back over 20 years.
25 themes/skins/styles are now available to members. Check the select drop-down at the bottom-left of each page.
Call To Power 2 Cradle 3+ mod in progress: https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/call-to-power-2/ctp2-creation/9437883-making-cradle-3-fully-compatible-with-the-apolyton-edition
Is there any easy way to do this? I tried a version of AddStrNode which simply modifies the contents of the node when it finds it existing, but I always get an access violation.
Actually I don't get what you are trying to do, if you want to modify the string database, you can use any text editor to modify it. And if you want to modify certain parts of a sentence for instance you use placeholder variables of slic.
However still I don't get the point why modifying a string in the database, once it is loaded into the game from the textfiles. However AddStrNode can only add a string and can't modify it. The string database is not intended for string manipulation as it looks like.
While mostly agreeing with the above remarks, I fail to see why modifying AddStrNode does not work, assuming you add some valid code to the "// Key exists: do not add" branch.
That is, if you are modifying a unique string. Do you know if InsertStr is called after you have modified your string? Before modifying AddStrNode, it would have detected that the string already existed (AddStrNode fails), and would have created a new entry with a different (key) name. After modifying AddStrNode, calling InsertStr may cause AddStrNode to succeed and overwrite the string once more!
However, you may consider explaining what game effect you want to achieve. Maybe there are more ways to do it than modifiying the text database.
Given that the AIs aren't really artificial intelligences, does anyone know what structure the 'databases' take? Are they true DBs (if so what type) or simple flat files?
The data of the databases are stored in simple text files, e.g. unit.txt, tileimp.txt, goods.txt, strategies.txt, etc.
The data is loaded into the program on startup or on game reload. (Necessary for scenarios with different rule sets.)
For a standart game this means that you can change the rules during the game, but not to extensive, as the game for instance saves which technology you have and that is an index into the database.
And so far I don't see the sense behind adding or modifing a string during the game, to that database that can be done off-line, since it should be clear before the game which strings will be used.
It's what I expected from what I've found so far. It's just that I always worked in environments where databases were databases (DB2 & suchlike) and all other data was held in files. So I was just a little worried when people started talking about databases!
I've started trying to get a feel for the coding logic so, hopefully, I'll be better able to contribute to these discussions in future.
Tweet
Comment