Help with modifications

[colorme]

I want to modify some of the AI files. But I'm a newbie to this aspect, and what puts me off is that I'll have to play the game for 50-100 turns before I see the effect of the modification (e.g. changing various AI strategies).

Question: Is there an easy way to cycle thru 100 turns quickly? For example, if I was only an observer to the AI's game (and not an active player), seems like a hundred turns would last less than a minute. I'm sure activision has a game version that supports this, for their own inhouse tweaking.

Perhaps WesW or some of our other mod-makers can comment?

[Locutus]

I don't think such a thing exists, but what I always do is put myself on a very isolated island and just keep hitting that End Turn button, without settling or moving or doing anything. Another option might be to put your settler(s) to sleep. In CtPI it would automaticly cycle through turns in that case, until something woke your unit up (well, sometimes at least, didn't seem to always work for me). You could at least try this in CtPII as well and write a bit of SLIC code that automaticly wakes your unit after 100 turns or so. It should look something like this:

int_t testcounter;

HandleEvent(BeginTurn) {
unit_t	tmpUnit;
	if (player[0] == 1) {
		testcounter = testcounter + 1;
		if (testcounter == 100) {
			GetUnitByIndex(1, 0, tmpUnit);
			Event:WakeUnit(tmpUnit);
			testcounter == 0;
		}
	}
}

I didn't actually test this, so I can't guarantee that it'll work, but I'd say give it a try. If after a 100 turns you want to wait until the next 100 turns have passed by, simply put your unit back to sleep, this trigger will try to wake the a unit every 100 turns (of course, you can change the number 100 to anything else if you want).

[colorme]

Thanks Locustus. That's a good idea. One problem though is that certain messages (e.g. the announcements regarding various wonders being made) pull up a window and stop the game, until you click OK. Its a pain to keep clicking multiple okays every few turns.

But perhaps this could be modified in the original SLIC too?

[Locutus]

Well, something can be done about that as well. Either play around with the options and advanced options menu to figure out how to disable those messages or open up script.slc and do a find & replace. Find all instances of 'Show()' (without the quotes) and replace them with '// Show()'. Now all the messages will still be there, but they'll only appear in the messagetab and will no longer pop up and force you to click them away. This should solve that problem for the mayor part. If needed you can replace 'alertbox' with 'messagebox' as well but I don't think that will be necessary, outcommenting the show functions should do the trick.

If you want to you can also make this whole thing a little bit more sophisticated by giving options in how long you wish to wait, enable or disable it by pressing keys, etc. All that requires a little more time and effort to set up though, but I'll definately put it on my to-do list.