Mazeppa
Pleb
posted 07-03-18 14:08 ET (US)
Is there a way in allowing and disallowing buildings by hex editing? I have done a bit on it on certain games before like Empire Earth and other stuff, so I know it could be done. Allowing/disallowing buildings on a .sav file was made possible in Caesar3 by someone long ago, and was made into a tool, so it's a shame Zeus couldn't have the same thing.
I haven't done much on Zeus/Poseidon however, and finding the specific area to allow/disallow buildings in an adventure file is pretty daunting. So I'm wondering if anyone has already found anything like this in Zeus.
One could say "you can just allow/disallow" in the editor, but my adventure specifically starts the adventure on a .sav file, in a pre-built colony where I don't want players to build or re-build certain buildings I've placed. It's a very important feature I want to add so desperately.
AchillesHound33
Pleb
posted 07-03-18 23:15
ET (US)
1 / 4
The best example that I know of is in the Rich Man's Blues custom adventure. In that adventure, you can build wheat farms in episode 1, but after that, you are not able to. In order to prevent it from still functioning after episode 1, there is a flood event in episode 2 that permanently destroys a large fertile land where you would plant the wheat farms. The other area of meadow is designed (through mountain cliffs & rocks) to not have a large enough area to support a 3x3 wheat farm, so that the player can't plant a wheat farm there in episode 1 and be able to continue the operations of that wheat farm after the flood event. You can probably do something similar for coastline buildings such as navy wharves, piers, urchins quays, or fisheries. You might even be able to do something like that for large sanctuaries as well. Other then those scenarios I have discussed above, I don't think hex editing can work to disallow buildings in the Zeus/Poseidon editor.
AchillesHound33
Pleb
posted 07-04-18 20:04
ET (US)
3 / 4
I had scoured through the Adventure Editor recently to see if there is a way to edit those types of settings that you could use a hex editor for (for me, I was looking for a way to edit the bitmap settings, which I put a post on a couple months back), and I never saw anything in the Editor like that. My guess is that you would have to directly edit the files in Windows Explorer in order to make those changes like that.
You can't start an adventure in a colony in Zeus/Poseidon, it has to start in the parent city. You also are unable to populate a parent city or a colony with buildings either (except for roads) for the player to be able to use when starting an episode in a city.
Remember that the colony has its own settings of buildings allowed/disallowed not related to the parent city settings, as well as sanctuaries & pyramids (if an Atlantean adventure) available, so you can have buildings, sanctuaries, & pyramids available in a colony that are not made available in the parent city, and vise versa you can have those items that are available in the parent city not available in the colony.
If you are unable to make the adjustments you desire, my suggestion is to make 2 adventures, where you start in the first adventure in the city you indicated you wanted as the colony to start the adventure out in & be the parent city in your first adventure. You can easily make that adventure one episode long, or longer without going to a colony in that adventure. Unfortunately, though, you still wouldn't be able to preset any buildings for the player to start out with. The second adventure would be an extension to the first, where you would start in the parent city you indicated that the player will be in throughout the rest of the adventure. On the World Map, add the city you played in previously as an active colony, with the trade & tribute settings corresponding to the city. You can also ensure that both world maps on the two adventures have the same foreign cities, enchanted places, & ruins as well. The result is adventure 1 where you build a city, and in adventure 2, that city you built in adventure 1 is now an active colony that will pay tribute in the parent city & other colonies you build in adventure 2.