CivEngineer and goody huts

[Mercator]

Upon a question from techumseh I started working on a utility that can add or remove tile improvements on a savegame or scenario map. The idea was basically a program to add fortresses to all squares to prevent "stack deaths"... The working title of this marvellous new tool is "CivEngineer"... After a little work on it, it looks like it's going to be rather more complicated than I anticipated (as always), and it won't get any special priority, which means it probably won't become public anytime soon, if at all... But still, if you have any requests for any features, now is the time!

Aside from that, for the interested, I found out how goody huts are removed after being tripped. The pattern of goody huts is fixed, but like the possibility to hide resources, it's also possible to "hide" individual goody huts:

Anyway, while testing something out, I thought I'd try and find out where the information about goody huts is saved (after all, there must be somewhere in the savegame that says for each hut whether it has been tripped or not)... And I found out. The information is part of the ownership bits in the map section, being the first half of the 6th byte in the 6 byte tile sequence of the second map data block (see here for detailed information: http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/guides/mapstruct.htm ). An ownership of F (hexadecimal) means no-one "owns" it (ownership = the last civilization to visit that square), which is how most of the map starts out (except for the squares occupied by the initial settlers). An ownership of 0 means the barbarians "own" it... Since goody huts only exist until the first unit has entered the square, the result is actually quite plausible: The goody hut pattern is fixed, but goody huts can only appear in squares with an ownership F. If you click the "wipe all goody huts" option in the scenario parameters, all F's are changed to 0, which means the barbarians own all squares, and thus goody huts can no longer exist.

[Panda]

I wish you could start a new game without goody huts - for all those mods which aren't compatible with barbarians.

[ravagon]

Is there any way to manipulate the outcome when tripping a hut?
Something along the lines of disabling certain options (barbs/advanced tribes for example) to increase the likelihood of others (cash/units) perhaps?

[Mercator]

Andrew: Well, you could open the cheat menu, wipe the goody huts, save as a scenario and reload... I might add the possibility to this utility as well, though. That way you can start a game, save, remove them with "CivEngineer" reload and continue. The only advantage there is that you won't have to treate it as a scenario.

Another feature I've been thinking of, is to allow importing black & white BMP's (and perhaps simple land/ocean maps, since making a land/ocean map in the map editor is way easier than adding, say, roads to your gigantic scenario map) as "masks". So you can use this mask to define the tile improvement patterns on a map.

ravagon: I'm afraid not... Not just by editing the savegame anyway.

[Goingonit]

Please, please do that improvement mask thing! I'm right in the middle of designing a scenario in which all farming/irrigation is placed accurately (where farming takes place) and thus c.70% of the land area must be irrigated/farmed! It's taking me forever (very large map); this tool would be a godsend.

[WarVoid]

I got a request for you Merc that has nothing to do with "CivEngineer".

Is there a way you could possibly add a "Flip Horizontal" feature to MapEdit? I've got some nice maps that are drawn perfectly, but they're vertical and I need to flip them horizontally. Would an update one of these years be possible?

[Mercator]

Originally posted by WarVoid
I got a request for you Merc that has nothing to do with "CivEngineer".

Is there a way you could possibly add a "Flip Horizontal" feature to MapEdit? I've got some nice maps that are drawn perfectly, but they're vertical and I need to flip them horizontally. Would an update one of these years be possible?

Erm... So you don't mean the "Flip vertically" or "Mirror horizontally" features? But rather rotating them 90 degrees? You can do that with an image editor... (OK, OK, I'll think about adding it, eventually)

Please, please do that improvement mask thing! I'm right in the middle of designing a scenario in which all farming/irrigation is placed accurately (where farming takes place) and thus c.70% of the land area must be irrigated/farmed! It's taking me forever (very large map); this tool would be a godsend.

Well, it's certainly going to take me quite a while (think months) to do this... Not because it's so difficult, but simply because I'll be busy with other things the rest of the year... I might even disappear from Apolyton (for a while)! (it's THAT serious )

[Heresson]

No, I'm, not so dangerous.