Modding article on inc gamers about reddit AMA with devs

[Green1]

Summary article:
http://www.incgamers.com/2014/10/civilization-beyond-earth-ama-talks-mods-ai-and-demo

Reddit AMA:

https://www.reddit.com/user/FXS_WillAndDave?count=75&after=t1_clfpqr3

For those who are of the "too long did not read" variety:

- Possible to mod XML and game scripts right off the bat.
- No documentation on modding or tools at release, but "coming".
- Mods will NOT work in multiplayer, but it is in the work for future patches.
- Civ: BE works on a more stabilized Civ V code and has much of the same structure.
- WILL have a hotseat mode.

[Green1]

I must say, as an aside to this low info article and AMA which the reddit community should have blasted them for.

If it is Civ 5 modding, that crap looks kind of hard. Not undoable. But, a learning curve nonetheless.

BUT.. even with XML modding, if itr is similar to Civ 5 enough we hopefully can get to where we could do at least custom factions with enough study. These ancient games spoil us.

[Green1]

Problem is, this is also a modding heavy board. I have investigated the skills it takes to mod Civ BE based on Civ 5. It is a huge jump, even for artists. All those leaderheads are presented in 3d and animated unless Civ 5 detects your computer to be a low end lappy. That is not even the biggest deal. XML code is throughout. You change one thing one place, it must be in several others with knowledge as to what is changed and where. There is no one page "all graphics here" pcx or faction .txt.

BUT.. this IS learnable. Problem is, even for Civ 5, the documentation SUCKS from first glance. It tells me fundamentals, yes. But it does not tell Joe gamer how to put in his custom civ of doom in the game in layman's terms that does not cover 50 other aspects of the Civ 5 system!!!!

There will be a market for that....

BTW, BU, how is your 3d modeling coming along?

I may need to enlist in some .... services. Not now. You know the Green 1 always talks in years and months.

I saw an excellent 3d rendering of Domai many moons ago, but I am not sure if it was you or of the Aunt.

[sisko]

BTW, BU, how is your 3d modeling coming along?

I may need to enlist in some .... services. Not now. You know the Green 1 always talks in years and months.

I saw an excellent 3d rendering of Domai many moons ago, but I am not sure if it was you or of the Aunt.

I'm afraid, BUncle will have to attend soon the "3D modelling 101" course by Buster's Aunt. 

[Geo]

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Green, your lack of faith will be your undoing, my young and drunken padiwan.

[Yitzi]

Modding is good; I suspect that BE's biggest flaws* will be of the form that is fairly straightforward to mod away. (1UPT will probably be the biggest non-moddable-away flaw, though the lack of one-directional node-to-node links in the tech web, or of multiple-prerequisites, is also a concern if that can't be changed.)

*Not being a worthy successor to SMAC does not count as a flaw (due to not being BE-specific), though even that will likely be partially** moddable away.

**The narrative strengths of SMAC will probably be fairly easy to mod into BE; the mechanics of the unit workshop, crawlers, social engineering, and a quadratically growing penalty for too many bases (definitely the best way to deal with ICS, even if SMAC's approach is flawed in practice without mods and may be the wrong mechanic anyway) are more likely to pose issues, though.

[Green1]

That, and I am worried about the AI.

I am currently on my mandatory 2 week waiting period to wait and hear about issues before buying, so I will be looking very closely at this.

Although, most of the whining and griping comes from Civ 5/4 deity players on CFC who will not be satisfied it seems unless they hook up Deep Blue to the AI and it behaves like MP. So, my only option is to just watch the occasional LP and make up my own mind.

I heard one guy on one thread claim Alpha Centauri's AI was better than Civ 5 based AIs like BE!

[BlaneckW]

why would it be hard to mod away 1upt?

[Buster's Uncle]

One assumes that's embedded deep in the code - and even if you could change it, doing so would break many other things in the engine.  It's a pretty fundamental design assumption.

[Yitzi]

why would it be hard to mod away 1upt?

Because, if the units-by-tile system works anything like it does in SMAX, there are some very useful simplifications and efficiencies that can be done with 1UPT, that presumably were done, and that are incompatible with not having 1UPT.

Basically, there are a lot of times when the game will want to check "the unit in this tile".  That works very differently if there's at most one unit in the tile, as opposed to if there are multiple units and then one particular one is to be selected.  It actually is such that, in the unit information for SMAX, there are entries "previous unit in the same tile" and "next unit in the same tile", in order to make it easy to get all the units in the tile; BE probably doesn't have that, and therefore won't be able to handle MUPT efficiently (meaning that it probably wouldn't be enabled at all).

[BlaneckW]

You're sure it's not just a convention?  I imagine transports have more than one unit per tile, unless it's using a special placeholder or something and the unit is held in null space.  Or air.  I can't believe air units and ground units can't occupy the same tile.

[Buster's Uncle]

It would take entirely rewriting the game engine, I betcha.

[Geo]

There must be MUPT-finding code in CBE. There can be a multiple of air units in a city. Civilian units and military units can stack (one of each), trade units are completely differently depicted, so could potentially be 'stacked' as well with a military and civilian unit on top of them (however temporary due to the changing nature of trade routes).

[Green1]

It would take entirely rewriting the game engine, I betcha.

There are Civ 5 mods that do change one unit per tile to allowing stacking.

Whether the AI handles this, it introduces new bugs, or even the internal workings of the mod, I have no idea. But, it has been done without rewriting the code. Although I do imagine the skill set to do so was pretty advanced. More advanced than the way AC modders do things with the exception of Yitzi's assembly language patch work.