Firaxis released a bunch of Civ4 downloads today. First up is a new patch with a myriad of fixes, as all good patches should have. Since I haven’t really been playing the game (um. Ok, I haven’t been playing the game at all, no “really” needed, stupid WoW!), I’m not sure of the impact of these, but they’re probably cool.
The two other downloads are more curious. The first is the “SDK”. I put that in quotes because SDK stands for Software Development Kit. This isn’t really a toolkit that let’s you tweak stuff. This download is the source code to a chunk of the gameplay for Civ4. It seems absolutely insane to me! It’s a bunch of source files that require Visual Studio. With it, you can compile a DLL that you can then drop in to use your code instead of theirs. I can’t see what end users will know how to do this, except professional programmers! I write game AI for a living, I’m not gonna tweak theirs in my spare time. Whoa.
Who knows, maybe people who want to get into the industry can use this as a tool to experiment with and show off their skills. But it’s not all the game’s code, just a particular portion. From my cursory look, there doesn’t seem to be anything having to do with rendering or anything. So the burgeoning game developer can write a mod that does all sorts of crazy stuff and completely changes the way the gameplay works, but the game’s graphics engine remains the same. Which is fine, I guess.
The last download is the multiplayer pitboss. It’s a standalong application that you drop into your Civ4 directory. Note that you must patch the game up to the new patch, 1.6.1, or the pitboss won’t run (I learned that one the hard way). The idea is described on the official page here - basically it enables multiplayer games to continue in a turnbased mode even if not everyone is connected. So if Joe and Bob and Sue are playing a game, but Bob has to log off, Joe and Sue can finish their turns and log off. Then when Bob logs back and and finishes his turn, the pitboss will send out an email and tell everyone that they can take their next turn too. It sort of seems like an advanced way of doing a play-by-email game. I’m going to see if I can’t try this out with some friends and give my impressions. But given how long a game of Civilization takes, who knows if we’ll be able to get to it?
If anyone else manages to try it, let me know! I’m definitely interested in the idea of it.
3 Responses to “Civ4 Downloads Galore”
Game modding is pretty huge now. It’s what keeps me and many others PC rather than console gamers. Even though I don’t use the tools myself, I’m a total ADD gamer so I need to constantly try new mods.
And tons of amateurs love digging into the SDK, so lots of mods get built. Have you seen the massive amount for Oblivion — and the games been out for less than a month. And the PC users are extremely irked because they can’t import models that are physics enabled yet into their custom work.
Btw, there’s already a civ 4 mod that uses the SDK to make some pretty cool changes: http://kael.civfanatics.net/files/FallfromHeaven100b.exe It’s a cool mod, try it! — turns Civ in a fantasy themed game. It doesn’t seem that different at first glace, but by the time you start getting religion and noticing that religions affect your tech trees and units and resource types and everything, you start to see how radically different it is. When version 2.0 comes ou they are going to make the ‘look’ of the game catch up, so that the graphics are as different as the game is.
If the game is a platform, the users will do cool things with it the original creators never imagined.
Hmm, how can there be a mod using the code they released yesterday already? I’m guessing his mode is purely tweaking XML files and scripts. The thing that I’m incredulous of people actually using is the code that was released this week. This was actually C++ source code that requires a copy of Microsoft Visual C++ to compile properly. This is not something I would think most people have or know how to use.
I think the idea of a moddable game is fantastic, and I love that people are constructing their engines in such a way as to enable change (I remember discovering the Fascism mod for Civ2 and never going back to the old original version because it was so much better). I just am curious about the extent to which Firaxis is going by releasing engine code. That is very unusual.
Ok, I’ve changed my mind. After looking at his mod and his comments on the forums, it looks to me like the folks at Firaxis must have given him a prerelease copy of the SDK which was released this week. Basically, he had several versions of his mod up through February (probably all python and XML stuff, like I said) and then he just released a new version taht requires patch 1.6.1 THE DAY THAT PATCH CAME OUT. I’d say someone at Firaxis likes him. AND he’s all over the civfanatics forums posting how-tos on using the SDK. So I’d go with, ya, he used the actual C++ code (or someone on his team did). So I guess some people are just that into the game that they’re willing to do it!