Sea City sprite bug observations

kaan · April 9, 2001, 16:26

It seems that this bug has nothing to do with age.txt citystyle.txt or agecitystyle.txt because it appears only when nano assembly is discovered (and that is also the tech that enables sea engineer). if you change the tech required for sea engineer the bug still only appears with nano assembly. does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

how to try it out:

start a new game with no mods.
goto scenario editor and give yourself virtual democracy (diamond tech).
give yourself two sea engineers and use one to build a sea city right away.
goto scenario editor and give yourself nano assembly.
build the second sea city and see the difference.

-klaus

Martin Gühmann · April 10, 2001, 03:08

I knew it that it has to do with some of the techs. I in CityMod the bug appears also in the diamond age but it is age six not five.

-Martin
[This message has been edited by Martin Gühmann (edited April 10, 2001).]

Martin Gühmann · April 12, 2001, 13:30

Now I tried it. I moved the undersea tunnels to an extra advance. Therefore the problem doesn't lie in the advance.txt, in the unit.txt either. It has to do with the undersea tunnels. If you replace enabling advance of undersea tunnels by another advance, nano assembly won't cause the problem anymore, but the undersea tunnel enabling advance.

-Martin

kaan · April 13, 2001, 13:16

well i did some experimenting with tileimp.txt and i found out that if you remove the terraintypes kelp and reef from underwater tunnels the bug is gone !!!!

as a side note: it doesnt matter what tilesetindex you use for undewater tunnels, i set them to 400 instead of 500 and it still display correctly.

well thats a day gone with finding that out ;-)
ill continue tomorrow.

-klaus

Martin Gühmann · April 13, 2001, 16:58

Klaus: I wasn't able to remove the bug. How did you it exactly? I removed TERRAIN_WATER_KELP and TERRAIN_WATER_REEF from undersea tunnels the effect is that every city that is build on theese terrains isn't effected by the bug. On other terrains the bug still appears. I also saw that a undersea tunnel put next to a ocean city on a kelp is directed to the city, but the city itself is not on an undersea tunnel.

There is another idea the problem can also be located in the terrain.txt, but I have no proof only the hint that gives me the behaviour of the seacities.

A reply to a side note: Actual every road type use something like 17 or 18 single tilesetindices, not only the one that can be found in the tileimp.txt.

-Martin

kaan · April 13, 2001, 18:04

hmmm you are right about that, that is strange, ill look at it tomorrow

Martin Gühmann · May 9, 2001, 10:25

Now I tried the same thing with FixMod. The bug appears also there FixMod doesn't fix the problem. We thougt it is a bug related to the diamond age. But the real bug could be called undersea tunnel bug, because every seacity built on a tile on that a undersea tunnel can't be build is not affected by this bug. It seems that a abilty of building a undersea tunnel on a sea tile turns this sea tile into a land tile.

We were all cheated by the cheat editor.

-Martin

Jonny · May 23, 2001, 22:26

Quote:

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
It seems that a abilty of building a undersea tunnel on a sea tile turns this sea tile into a land tile.

I think you are probably right about this becuase I remember once when I was building undersea tunnels in a game, I looked at the mini map and wherever I had built a tunnel there was a little line of land on the map. The reason for sea cities appearing as land cities and being able to build improvements that are only for land cities in sea cities is because when you build an undersea city, it automatically comes with an undersea tunnel on that tile, just like cities come with roads/railroads/maglevs on that tile that are automatically upgraded. If you cheat and give yourself sea engineers before you get nano-assembly, the cities appear normal because they don't come with undersea tunnels because you don't have that tech yet. I have no idea how someone could get around this problem with a mod.

Jonny

MATT:-) C · May 31, 2001, 10:47

I had an idea. It hurt my head to think so much and it was ultimately fruitless, but I'll share it nevertheless.

I created a 'dummy' terrain improvement to represent tunnels and made the tunnels require a much later tech. Doing a bit of SLIC I made a trigger that would place some real tunnels on the square that the dummy improvement was built (using CreateImprovement event). This worked fine when the tech allowing normal tunnels had been discovered, but when I only had the tech for the 'dummy' tunnels and not the real ones, no undersea tunnels were created.

On the off chance you guys can think of anything else that might work . . .

MATT:-)

MATT:-) C · June 1, 2001, 10:34

I found a solution to the problem for those of you who still care!

Simply (!) create copies of all the sea terrain tiles that do not allow tunnels to be built on them. Then with a bit of SLIC just before a sea city is created, terraform the underlying sea tile to its copy and the city will show up with the correct sprite.

If anyone wants to do this and doesn't know how, I'm happy to help.

MATT:-)

Immortal Wombat · June 1, 2001, 11:56

yay! problem solved

And another person who can SLIC

I think there would be many people who would be evry grateful if you posted the code here. Thanks Matt

lev · June 1, 2001, 13:18

Yes, please do post the code for that, with instructions on how to implement!

MATT:-) C · June 6, 2001, 05:36

I will write the stuff out when I've got a few minutes to spare; loads of birthdays, exams and other time consuming things at the moment. Should be done by the weekend.

MATT:-)

Stryfer · June 9, 2001, 05:35

Hey
Does anybody know what activision does for the bug. Will they bring another patch? Do they know about the bug? Are they going to do something? Because for me its a very bad stupid bug. I like the sea cities and know they are all gone

Martin Gühmann · June 9, 2001, 06:52

I don't know if Activision know something about the bug.
Activion does something for the bug. My impression is that they wanted to release the game for Chrismas for every prize. They didn't gave the developer team enough time to finish the. There are no official PBEM and Hotseat features in the game of course they are they but hidden and unfinished. Another point is that I can't remember that I played a civ like game without any diplomacy pictures even The Rise and Rhule of acient Empires (a poor civ clone) has some.

Now to the patch: There will be no new patch. Activision had rejected it, because the lost enough money and resources to with game and it was a failure for them and why: They didn't finished it. They decided it was a failure and gave up.

Ok, you could write them a letter (but being nice) maybe they will hear but I don't belive it. The people who developed the game moved to other game companies alrrady. And Activision let them go...

Now the people of Apolyton try to make the best out of the game you should try the mods here.

They make the game really good OK some bugs are left.

-Martin

MATT:-) C · June 9, 2001, 07:05

Unfortunately I have found another problem while trying to sort out this bug. Most of the time my solution is fine and presents no problems (after a little refining). However, the problem arises when a sea city is built next to a continental shelf. After terraforming the underlying terrain, the shelf tile's graphics change: the shelf runs from NE to SW with the deep water to the SE and the shallow water to the NW (like the icon in the GL or 'cheat' editor). This makes the screen look much worse. I haven't found any way of preventing this problem (yet).

I'll post what I have got tomorrow (when I remember to bring the disk with me!).

As for what activison does about this, I'd would be (pleasantly) surprised if they helped, but I'll agree with Martin on that one.

MATT:-)

kaan · June 15, 2001, 07:56

Matt that was a genius solution, i had nailed it down to removing MoveCost from underwatertunnels. it worked but then all units could only move 1 tile at a time on them. maybe a combo of those would work, i also wondered why ships were able to benifit from underwater tunnels but that may be another thing.

klaus

MATT:-) C · June 19, 2001, 12:35

Sorry I haven't posted, I'm in the middle of exams. My solution isn't quite as good as I'd hoped because the terraform doesn't always happen. Specifically on beach and continental shelf tiles. I haven't found a way around the graphics problem either (not that I've spent ages working on it at all).

Kaan, I'll see if I can use what you've found out to help; after my exams finish on Saturday. Yes, I have an exam on a Saturday morning, how rude?!

MATT:-)