[SPOILERS - NO PLAYERS] The Final Clusterfuck: The PB38 Map and Lurker Thread

[RefSteel]

Is there a 3rd-party map editing program?

GermanJoey made one, with some balance checking and extraction-to-image features too. No GUI, but it can be quite powerful. I believe there are others out there too, maybe with GUI, hopefully still hosted on Civfanatics or someplace.

[Mardoc]

Cornflakes,

That would be a great help!  Much more likely for someone to find the time to polish a map than to make one from scratch.

I opened Civ 4 for the first time in [2 years?], and didn't see a WorldBuilder option on the main menus The extent of my experience with map-making in Civ 4 is creating sandbox games through the in-game CTRL+W. Is this how the "pro" map makers make the maps? By generating a map with a script, loading it into a game, and then making all the edits through CTRL+W? Is there a 3rd-party map editing program?

That's essentially what I do.  Sometimes working with Joey's tool, sometimes not.  As you might imagine, this method makes a 25-player map a huge amount of work.

I took a brief look at the Civ 4 map scripts that shipped with the game, and at least at the most basic level it looks like the theory is the same as Civ 6 (i.e. land vs water designation first, then hills/peaks, then terrain, then features). Upon brief testing I couldn't get Civ 4 to recognize any changes that I made to any of the map scripts that shipped in the box. I went so far as to delete random chunks of the map scripts hoping to at least get an error or crash, but to no avail  I tried copy-and-pasting scripts (without making any changes) but the pasted script would not work. I did paste Torusland.py into the PublicMaps folder and was able to start a game, so at least that much was working ...  but if I changed the name of Torusland.py to something else (ToruslandASDF.py) it wouldn't work. Is something inside the map script referencing the file name? I'm stumped.

Is there a "Civ 4 map-making for dummies" or "scripting for dummies" somewhere on the web? Has anyone else had this same experience with the map scripts?

Here's a post that seems to be at least related to what you're looking for: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/t...ss.353005/

One probably relevant bit from that post:

--> also see Bob Thomas in "CvMapScriptInterface.py"
   (in ..\Assets\Python\EntryPoints)

Some other things that look useful, but I haven't read in detail:

CivFanatics mapscripts section of the forum:  https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/ci...ripts.182/

Or else the utility section:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/ci...grams.176/

Here's one program that seems to do what you're looking for, on a glance:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/b...er.135740/

I know SevenSpirits made a handful of mapscripts; maybe there will be something in his threads you'll find useful:
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=5254
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=6887
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...p?tid=3760

If you're lucky, you might be able to ask Sirian some questions.  He wrote the original civ4 map scripts, working for Firaxis.  I don't know if he still sticks his head in around here or if he remembers anything useful from back then, though.

[Cornflakes]

GermanJoey's program looks like it will do the trick, after reading through the tutorials. It looks like I can do my script work in Python, output to text file, and then import the text file into GJ's tool. I'll dig into this as I have time, but with the holiday weekend coming up no guarantees that I'll have anything at all for a while.

Bacchus, if you have time to sketch out your big-picture layout in paint (or by hand on paper) it can be compared against Krill's concept. In the mean-time I'll proceed with Krill's concept as the basis of my investigation.

[darrelljs]

Wise move Krill .

Darrell

[Cornflakes]

I managed to get GJ's program to work! I got a test-map to load, but I'm having trouble loading up a full-scale map. Is there a maximum map size that Civ 4 can load? I get a crash when I try loading the 136x82 dimension map. If I crop the same map down to 30x30 it loads fine, so it looks like it's a size issue. I tried loading RtR Mod 2.0.8.3 first and that did not help.

The 136x82 dimensions are approximately the same overall number of tiles as Krill's 124x92, but I was able to fit the snaky continent in better on the slightly wider canvas.

screenshot of the first roughest draft continent (EDIT, in the HTML debug view since I couldn't get it to load in-game):

   

I know, I know, there are a ton of lakes in this (especially along the coast) ... This was mostly a rough-and-dirty proof-of-concept. All the terrain was randomly generated by GJ's program.

[Mardoc]

I don't think there's a maximum size limit except in practice, bigger maps are more resource-intensive.

My first thought would be that you're missing something to do with what constitutes a valid map. For a first guess - I don't see any smiley faces on the map, which is how GJ marks start locations. Maybe you don't have any starts marked, which would confuse Civ and prevent it from loading?

[Cornflakes]

What I don’t get is why it loads fine when I crop it down. I load it as a scenario and it places the starts at loading.

[Mardoc]

Can you post the worldbuilder files for the one that works and the one that fails? They're plain-text, maybe reading them will show some other difference.

[RefSteel]

It's imaginable that whatever subroutine is adding starts to the cropped map is crashing out due to map size, even though the game itself can handle a larger map with starts pre-set.

That's kind of all we have to go on unless you post the WBSave file though.

[EDIT: Crosspost with Mardoc]

[Krill]

I think maximum map dimensions are 124*124.