who wants to help, mod with land & sea mines

kaan · March 30, 2001, 17:50

this is just an idea but it could be great.
first i want to hear if anyone would be interested in playng with this.
i also want to hear from anyone who is interested in helping making this work.

todo list

-figure out how to make the graphics for a mine
should it be a tile improvement laid by a unit?
-figure out how to make mines hidden from other players until detected
-figure out what new units should be made
engineer troops for placing and clearing landmines
minelaying ship
minesweeper ship
diver unit for placing magneto mine on ships in harbour?
-figure out what existing units should be modified
-figure out what techs should be added, and what should be modified
-make "Geneva convention" wonder that reveals all landmines for all players.
-figure out how to make the AI use all this stuff

+ a lot more

klaus kaan

Martin Gühmann · March 30, 2001, 19:55

Figuring out how to make graphics for a mine should be no problem but figuring out how to add an tile improvement is the real problem. Only Activision had add tileimprovements barbed wire and the pill box. I only found for the pill box an unit sprite, not for barbed wire. That is be caused in the nature of the pill box half an unit and half an tileimprovement. It can be destroyed like a unit and it must be build like a tileimprovement.

If mines would be tileimprovements they would be build like a tileimprovement and there would be no need for mines laying units. Therefore it should be a unit laid by another unit. But than there will be another problem: If had such a mines creating unit I would build hundrets of these units, to cover fast the world with mines. Therefore it should cost a certain among of public works or/and gold to slow down the mining process and to prevent armies of mining units. The actual purpose of public works was to prevent armies of settlers to put everywhere tileimprovements on the map like in CIV2. There I had over two hundrets of settlers occupied with this silly work. And that was the reason why Activision didn't implementet the cattle unit into CTP1. Cities surrounded by hundreds of cows just there to collect food for the city. May be we can make this cattle unit as extra food colector without putting it on the map like caravans they also generates trade routes without using them as real units on the map.

But now back to the topic:
Mines should be units, but the placing must cost something.
We need a new order something like lay mine. This order should create a mine. The mine must be a special unit that can't move. Special units are for non special units unvisible, it will only revealed by a normal unit if it tries to move on it. But a mine should do something different. The non special unit should move on it without revealing it, but damaged or destroyed by the mine that should destroy itsself by this action. And there is another thing that must be considered for a mine there is no difference between friend and enemy. A mine should attack every unit irrespective of its nation. And no one should start a war, because one of his units was killed by a mine. The only advantage of laying mines should be to know where are these mines.

-Martin

XMon · March 30, 2001, 22:29

If mines could be made a unit that is built like a tile improvement (as Martin referred to the pillbox) then that would be the way to go. Graphics would be a breeze. Maybe a piece of SLIC so that every turn all mines are converted to Barbarian units since they are always at war with everyone and being hit by one doesn't start a war. Making it invisible is easy, there are several vision classes that CTP2 doesn't use. They are called UnusedBit(a # goes here). I forget how many but I think it goes UnusedBit(3-13) so give your mine VisionClass: UnusedBit10 and the only unit that can see it is one that has CanSee: UnusedBit10. Could you deal with the mine being one square away from the unit that gets damaged? Like being next to the road instead of on the road? If so, you could make the unit Defend: Land or Defend: Sea depending on it's use and any unit passing it would be damaged. You could give the unit a small attack value and very small defense value so that it did not survive it's own autodefense attack. Oops, just thought of a major problem. Air units would detect the mine if they tried to move onto a square occupied by one. Hmmmm....something to think on.

Mines as tile improvements may be coded into the game. We know it was planned but scrapped at some stage of development. Perhaps because the AI could not use it correctly? CTP1 even has a sprite that looks like a minesweeper. And that gets to the real problem. The AI. I have seen stacks of AI tanks move past a lone fortified barbarian artillery unit within their borders and not attack it. Within one square of it! If someone could get the AI to the level of an un-modded CTP1 I'd be ecstatic. Anything beyond that I don't even dream of.

If any SLIC experts read this: do you think it's possible via SLIC to convert one of the special orders (a la Settle, Sue, Nano Attack...whatever) so that a unit could create another unit? For example, in this mod with a minelaying unit you could click on the order to "lay mine" and the cursor directed to an adjacent square where a mine unit would appear. I have been thinking of this for another non-mine related use but it would be applicable here as well.

Kaan, I'd say having a diver put magnetic mines on ships is out of the realm of this game. Give a diver unit a weak bombard ability would be the closest thing, I think.

kaan · March 31, 2001, 05:24

its good to hear that you will make the graphics martin ;-)

the unit made by unit sounds good. and i have thought of the PW price as well, maybe it should be really expensive, we will se how good a mine turns out to be ;-)

quote:

A mine should attack every unit irrespective of its nation. And no one should start a war, because one of his units was killed by a mine. The only advantage of laying mines should be to know where are these mines.

exactly like i planned :-)

as for the unit behavior adressed by both of you:
i was thinking more along the lines of makin a mine something you step on,
or something you drive on or something you sail into with some pecent chance, each time a minetile/unit does damage it will decrease that percent
and maybe after 3 times used the mine would be removed from play, or maybe with a very very small percent until its sweeped.

say you lay a tank mine, it would have the knowldege of who made it / can see it (nation) it would belong to the player having turn so every unit can step on it without noticing, and when someone steps on it it will check for unit type(is there a tank on top of me?), then it will calculate
if it goes off (done for every tank), then it will do damage to the unlucky tanks. then it will have been used once.

this would make the mine something you would want to avoid once you discover it, and it would also hinder players from making cheap units and just walk them in front of the real army.

there is one problem with the above, a player can see all the units he own !!!
ill have to do something about that. any suggestions?

quote:

Mines as tile improvements may be coded into the game. We know it was planned but scrapped at some stage of development.

very interesting, i didnt know that. has anyone found any evidence in the gamefiles that they once existed?

as for the diver unit, i was thinking in the lines of making it a terror unit and use it to halve the ships HP if succesful. history shows that sinking ships in harbour has rarely destroyed a ship, but it has taken a lot of repair to make it sail again.

Martin Gühmann · March 31, 2001, 07:00

quote:

Mines as tile improvements may be coded into the game. We know it was planned but scrapped at some stage of development.

Very interesting, because I found something in the gtsetXXX.til that looks like a land mine. Check out this part of the forum and you will get to know how to take a look on tese graphics: http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum48/HTML/000159.html

Therefore it is much easier to make those graphics, but there are different types of mines. It is no problem to convert graphics to a sprite. Resizing it is also not a problem but first example graphics of different types of mines are needed. Than we will need death victory and laying sounds.

-Martin

kaan · March 31, 2001, 07:54

what tilesetindex did you find it at?

Martin Gühmann · April 1, 2001, 15:57

Hi KLaus!

The TilesetIndex for land mines 31 and
for sea mines is 120. I needed a little bit of time to figure out the TilesetIndeces, because I blow up the tileimp.txt to a size of nearly 1000 tileimprovements just to take a look on the graphics. And it also not bug free yet. Paul called the land mine a (blue button) and called the sea mine (star/space mine?).

I considereed my last remark: There should only two or three types of mines graphics for all different types of mines. In the meantime I made a list of all variables that are used in the *.txt files from the ctp2.exe. I also found some stuff related to the mine task, maybe it is easy to implement land and sea mines. Then we need only some slic files to make the feature work correctly, and of course for the AI to use mines properly.

By the what is a x-ray mine? I found something like that in the ctp2.exe.

-Martin

Chris B · April 1, 2001, 19:55

Why is everyone stuck on mines- I was thinking about a new set of tile improvements for forests- lumber camps, sawmills, and mega sawmills.

Martin Gühmann · April 2, 2001, 03:56

quote:

Originally posted by Chris B on 04-01-2001 07:55 PM
Why is everyone stuck on mines- I was thinking about a new set of tile improvements for forests- lumber camps, sawmills, and mega sawmills.

I never saw something lumber camps savmills and mega sawmills in the gtsetXXX.til. It is easy to implement mines as tileimprovements, because the graphics are already there and some more stuff in the exe, too.

Maybe we should make the mines as tileimprovements, because every unit can step on tileimprovements but not on a field with twelve own units or on a field with a hostile unit.

-Martin

Immortal Wombat · April 2, 2001, 09:39

quote:

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann on 04-01-2001 03:57 PM
By the what is a x-ray mine? I found something like that in the ctp2.exe.

Its a hang-over from CTP. When they made CTP, it included sprites for many more tileimprovements than the ones used, but they were taken out.
In particular, there was 3 types of landmines, 3 types of sea mines and 3 types of space mines, that included X-ray mines.
Presumably these are mines that explode X-ray bursts in all directions

kaan · April 2, 2001, 18:51

Immortal wombat: well as long they are there we might as well use them ;-)
thanks for clearing that up.

Chris B: good luck with the lumber then :-)

Martin:
this is highly interesting, please let me know when you have more info.
im sure the slic coding wont be too much trouble ;-)
im quite busy right now but thursday i should have more time again.

klaus kaan

Martin Gühmann · April 3, 2001, 04:33

For now I have the value/flag list in some hints that there are some mines sprites and mines unit images in CTP1. I think the next task would be make it as work as Activivision far was.

-Martin