Tool: DEFCON CityPlacer

[LordSturm]

Isn't the population "Proportional Population" as in a divider to evenly spread the population amongst even cities?

Also what is travel nodes?

I know AI Markers is where they place silo's/ships/radars/airbases...

( If you like stupid AI get the ai sheet, and paint it black. )

[zach]

Isn't the population "Proportional Population" as in a divider to evenly spread the population amongst even cities?

Makes sense, yeah. That's what I think, too.

[Lazureus]

When placing cities on my map using this tool, some of them didn't show up at all in-game, and many others showed up quite far from where they were supposed to according to the tool. Then again, i'm using a blur.bmp for borders atm cuz i don't have coastlines.dat defined, but i'm guessing the ones that didn't show up at all ended up off the territory completely.

Also, even with "Country Names" set to ENABLED, they aren't showing up on my custom map. Why is that?

[Spacemonkey]

The amount of cities that shows up depends on the amount of cities selected in the game option, the default is set to 25, thefore only half of the cities you place will show up on the map.

However, even if you set it to max, sometimes cities will still not show up.

[zach]

The chance of any particular city showing up in-game is proportional to it's "population" value compared to that of other cities.

The default city database includes over 2000 cities, but you don't see all those in-game when you're having a 6-man-fight.

As for country names, only a select few cities (Like Washington D.C. for US, and Moskov for USSR) show their country name as well. As of now, there isn't much to do about this.

~ What bugs me though is that you say they showed up 'quite far' from where you placed them. How far was this, approximately? Admittedly there is some loss of precision in the CityPlacer due to the fact that it is only able to export coordinates as integers (I am working on a more polished version, though, as some of you would know )

~

If you've got more questions, I'll be happy to answer them both here, in a PM or by email.
Hope you all enjoy these tools nevertheless

[Lazureus]

Well, let's just say that i had to manually move a few 3 whole integers either left, right, or even up or down. Most of them were 1-2 units off, though. In other words, if i clicked directly between a lake and the coastline and put a city there.. it'd appear on the edge of either in the game, or not show up at all cuz it ended up in the water >.> Manually adding or subtracting 1 or 2 from the X or Y (depending on which way it was shifted) usually did the trick. Only twice did I have to actually put in a .5 to get it where i wanted.

The ones that didn't appear at all, were ones that were coordinated off the territory, i had to blindly adjust their coords till they DID appear in the game, then adjusted them from there.

I know your tool is still in primitive stages, as you've only released one version of it (as with the coastline tool), but it would be nice eventually if you ever get any free time and a chance to, to add some features like:

- ability to load existing city coordinates, and move them/edit their properties. (making it a full-fledged editor;)
- ability to zoom in on the map to get a closer pick
- ability to export floating points, which you said you're doing already
- ability to maximize the window to fill the screen to help further zoom
- i am starting to think that those 0's on the very end of each city might have to do with its country being displayed, so perhaps an option to pick 0 or 1 for the city when placed or edited(if you put in the edit feature i asked about above)

Of course, these suggestions apply to your coastline drawer tool, too, especially since it's even harder to edit those manually if a mistake is made. No rush or anything, though, these are just suggestions that I feel could improve the daunting frustrations that come with placing defcon vectors... so if you ever have the time and desire- here's some things to consider ^.^

But good job in any case, these tools are really nice even the way they are now!

EDIT: YEP! Those 0's at the very end in the cities.dat file, that are always 0, changing those to 1 allows the city to display it's country name in game. Just tested^^

[zach]

EDIT: YEP! Those 0's at the very end in the cities.dat file, that are always 0, changing those to 1 allows the city to display it's country name in game. Just tested^^

Thanks for the feedback; all of the features you suggested were already planned, though

And that city/country information came in handy, especially since I hadn't figured myself yet. Thanks a lot

[zach]

I am having some trouble importing extra city data (ie. anything but coordinates), so don't expect moving/editing of cities to be available at 'release' of the ModSuite.

Other than that, the features suggested (except undo, sorry, that'll have to wait a bit too) should be in the tool I'm bugchecking at the moment

~

Keep in mind that it'll be my first ever "proper" OpenGL application, though. I don't want to set your hopes too high (at least not to begin with )

[Gein]

Do you have an ETA on that modsuite of yours . Looks pretty useful!

[denzil]

I can't say for him, but it's got the base functionality and he's been working on it for a few hours since I tested it, so hopefully not too long

[extremejon]

Totally Awesome.

Although it does get a bit Confuseing if you're lieing a large amount of city's down, It doesn't notate where you already placed them.

[GeneticFreak]

I know how to make a new city, but how do I change the proportion of existing cities so that my city appears instead?

Cant seem to get them to show by only making my city big and them small.

I'm making a "Present Day" map, with Jerusalem, Beirut, Pyongyang,

[supernote`ppp]

im using the steam version of defcon and loving it but i got a problem with cityplacer

i cant find the default cities.dat, the one with all the cities in the game in it, so when i add a city in city placer and put the new cities.dat in the correct place, only the one city i added shows up; as the only city in the world

is there any place in the steam files where i can find the default cities.dat? is there any place online where i can download the default standard cities.dat for the game? does anyone have the original default cities.dat that they could send me or upload? please reply or aim message me please

[AtomicPlayboy]

You might as well add the ability to create travel node maps and ai markers.

Why not just use windows paint? That's all I needed.

[denzil]

iis there any place in the steam files where i can find the default cities.dat? is there any place online where i can download the default standard cities.dat for the game? does anyone have the original default cities.dat that they could send me or upload? please reply or aim message me please

open up main.dat in WinRAR, extract the contents to the Defcon folder, it will make a /data/ folder. Under here and in one of the sub-folders, graphics I think, it makes the cities.rar. Or is that where coastlines go...? Anyway, it'll be in there somewhere!