26-09-2003 16:49									#1
	No scripted events? No problem! Why can't we make our own? Got spare money?

I've been playing since the Civ 1 days. I bought Civ 3 when it first came out, but gave up on it after a while. Now, I'm regaining my interest as I read about the changes for Conquests.

One of the disappointing things about Conquests is that it lacks several features that would make scenario creation easier and more powerful (primarily scripted events). When I was mowing the grass last night, I thought: why not have a new program that would run along with Civ3 and implement scripted events. We've had a couple similar programs for Civ2: Xin Yu's CivManager, and Angelo Scotto's CSPL for ToT. Since so much is known about the file formats, it seems like we could find out how the data is organized in memory.

Potential problems: virtual memory. If the variable you want to access has been swapped out to the hard drive, it will be a lot tougher to modify it. It would also be hard to allocate memory for a new object (i.e. create a new city or unit). But it should be relatively easy to change the terrain on a map square, upgrade a unit, monitor for a city's capture or destruction, add or subtract gold or research from a civ, change production or add shields to the production in a city, etc.

If the hackers out there can create trainers that let players cheat in their MP games, why couldn't we use a similar program to do something useful?

	26-09-2003 18:13									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

I've had sush a program in mind, but I've never (yey) created a memory trainer, and from what I've seen from the Civ3 memory it's not as straight forward as the savefiles, as most things are based on poiter arrays, and the important stuff is to find these arrays.

I'd be happy to help out for creation of sush a tool thou.
The best tool would probably be created with cooperation of different programmers.

	26-09-2003 20:25									#3
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

quote: Potential problems: virtual memory.

That's not a problem at all. Virtual memory is absolutely transparent for applications.

Concerning events, I answered here : http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...598#post1204598

	26-09-2003 22:23									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Muchembled - thanks for the link; I don't go to CivFanatics so didn't know about your utility. Is there a thread, FAQ, or writeup that specifies the memory offsets to access various parameters (like Gramphos's BIC file writeup)?

What I meant on virtual memory is that I'd be amazed if program B could access program A's virtual memory. I'm not a Windows API expert, so I could be wrong here, but I've certainly seen a lot of program crashes when an uninitialized pointer tries to access a random memory location...

	27-09-2003 00:00									#5
	Full PM-box? Change here!

Hmm, there are 2 things that mustn't be confused : swapped memory and memory spaces.
Anyway, you'll see in the source of my utility that all is built around 2 functions : ReadProcessMemory and WriteProcessMemory

	27-09-2003 01:01									#6
	Support Apolyton

So does this mean there's hope for scripted events in Civ3?

	27-09-2003 03:02									#7
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Well, it depends on if any other programmmers are interested. I'm not starting a new project on my own. Especially since my experience with memory reading is almost zero.

	27-09-2003 07:44									#8
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

quote: So does this mean there's hope for scripted events in Civ3?

There is hope for some scripting ability.

I would maybe be interested in helping, but more to learn. I have no experience with this kind of thing. Its an interesting idea and it would be great to see some experienced programmers tackling this once Conquests comes out.

Any thoughts from any Firaxis people who may be reading this?