Civilization V announced

Fans of turn-based strategy games will be very pleased to hear that Civilization V has been announced.

Its most significant new feature will be using a hex grid. This is an interesting divergence from a square grid but reduces the error in land movement from 40% to only 15% or so. I recently discussed this on C-evo’s forum. There are three different ways Civilization clones have grids:

• A square grid, with diagonal movement costing as much as horizontal or vertical movement. Most Civilization games do things this way.
• A hexagonal grid, with movement in the six directions having the same cost. FreeCiv has had support for this for many years. East-west movement is 15% slower than north-south movement (or vice versa)
• A square grid where diagonal moves cost more than horizontal and vertical moves. C-evo does this: A diagonal move costs 1.5 as much as a horizontal or vertical move. No, any fractional move left over at the end of a turn does not roll over for one’s next turn.

Update: There is an official website at http://www.civilization5.com/

C-evo on netbook bug fixed

There's a bug in C-evo (the largest game I put on my 50 megabyte "desert island" disc) where it doesn't fully work on a netbook. In more detail, the diplomacy screen is nay-to-impossible to use on a screen only 600 pixels high because its top is cut off.

Since one rule I have for all software on my desert island disk is that it must work on a netbook [1], I have fixed this bug. Look at c-evo-netbook-fix.c and c-evo.netbook-fix.exe at samiam.org/cevo. This program, which is run in the same directory as cevo.exe, creates a cevo-netbook.exe with this bug fixed.

In more detail, the offending code is this line in Term.pas:

NatStatDlg.UserTop:=Screen.Height-PanelHeight-NatStatDlg.Height-8;

These are the variables used:

NatStatDlg: The window that pops up when you hit F9 (the nations window)

UserTop: Its default starting position, whose top is off the screen on a netbook unless we fix the above line.

Screen.Height: How high our screen is

PanelHeight: How high the "panel" on the bottom of the screen is

NetStatDlg.Height: How big the nations window is.

8: An eight pixel cushion so it looks a little nicer.

Since I don't have Delphi 4, I had to find the resulting compiled code the hard way. The offending -8 above is byte number 723333 in the code (as a positive 8, since the compiled code subtracts 8, instead of adding -8). Since C-evo is using the "subtract this 8-bit signed value with a value of 8" opcode here, we can make the number in question a negative number, resulting in the window being moved down instead of being moved up.

[1] The target netbook is a Intel N450-based netbook with a 1024x600 display.

New C-evo maps

I have made a couple of preset maps for C-evo today; both are very small maps. One is best for a 1-player game against the AI; there are a number of starting positions but the human has a better island. The other has three starting positions on a tiny map.

Also included is one of the “Total fairness” C-evo maps.

The main reason I have made these maps available is because I had a small file with just one map which was only about 800 bytes in size; since the Desert Island CD uses the ISO filesystem with a 2 kilobyte block size, making this file a little bigger (any size 2048 bytes or less) doesn’t increase the amount of space the file takes up on the disc.

It can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/cevo/

C-evo tutorial finished

While I finished all of the essential writing for the C-evo Tutorial yesterday, I spent some time this morning cleaning up the wording (removing typos, simplifying one paragraph that was a little hard to understand, etc.) and have uploaded the tutorial here:

http://samiam.org/cevo/

C-evo tutorial made

I have spent a good deal of the last 24 hours working on a C-evo tutorial. It can be downloaded at http://samiam.org/cevo.

I've been making some stuff for C-evo

I've been spending my geek time these last two weeks or so making some stuff for C-evo. Namely:

• I have taken a tech chart someone else made and compressed it to be only a little over 100k in size
• I have written some programs that slightly modify the gameplay: The final year, the technology advancement rate, the city growth rate, and the map sizes can now be adjusted.
• I have written an over-6000-word HOWTO that describes C-Evo's basics; it is geared for someone who has never play a Civilization game before

The files I have made can be looked at here:

http://samiam.org/cevo/

C-Evo 1.1.1 on one floppy

In my last blog entry, I noted a number of games that fit in under 7 megabytes. One of the games, C-Evo, I noted fitted in about 2.5 megabytes.

Actually, it fits on a single 1.44 meg floppy. Two if you want sound. What I have done is take the C-Evo installed files, remove the AI development kit (this is only useful if you're both a Delphi developer and have interest in developing an AI for C-Evo), and split off the sound. I then made two files; the core C-Evo game that is perfectly playable, albeit without sound, which compresses in to a 1,384,627 byte 7-zip file, and a file with all of the sounds for C-Evo, which compresses in to a 924,045 byte file.

If you need 7-zip to decompress C-Evo 1.1.1, that will also easily fit on a single floppy. Who needs CD-ROM drives anyway?

Speaking of floppies, the last version of Slackware that could be entirely installed from floppy was Slackware 3.4 from 1998; the last version of Slackware that could have the base system and networking utilities installed from floppy (installing the rest over the network) was Slackware 7.1 from 2002. A base Slackware 2.1 system (1994) fit on four floppies; the entire system only used 70 floppies. Yes, I remember, back in 1995, giving my roommate an entire floppy tray filled with 70 floppies so he could install Slackware on his computer. The base system for Slackware 7.1 needed 16 floppies; at that point it no longer made sense to use floppies any more.

Recently, an artist made artwork showing you would need hundreds of floppies to fit a modern Photoshop install. But, good software doesn't need that bloat. C-Evo shows that a compelling and addicting game can nicely fit on a single floppy; MaraDNS can also easily fit on a single floppy, complete with source code.

Zillions of Games can also easily fit on a single floppy; I have a version thats 400k in size that supports Chess and a couple of Chess variants (notably Capablanca chess). The majority of the space in the 20 meg install file for Zillions is for all of the graphics for all of the abstract games supported by Zillions.

Some other games that easily fit on a single floppy: Cultivation, Andy Noble's remakes of classic games

For people who want to look at the files showing C-Evo 1.1.1 on a floppy, go here:

http://www.samiam.org/cevo/