Natural Disasters

[Immortal Wombat]

This was first proposed here by Alpha Wolf, and Radical_Manuvr managed to get some code almost working. I mentioned starting it again in the Apolyton pack thread, and started looking at the code, but it was pointed out that a separate debate was needed.

So:
What natural disasters should be included?
What effects should these have?
How often should they occur?
Should it affect the AI?

...and most importantly, (SLICers) why is the random function crashing the game wihtout an error message?

I have re-written Radical's code, with some small refinements, but it still crashes the game every time an earthquake hits.

Here is my file if anyone wants to take a look, it has included some of Harlan's comments about disasters.

[Bluevoss]

What would be great is if you could build something like "Fire Brigade" to prevent fires.

Sheeps bladders to prevent Earthquakes, perhaps? Seriously, I'd like to see things that could be adjustable, based on the buildings.

Natural disasters should destroy buildings. Plagues should reduce population by a good perentage.

[Immortal Wombat]

Plagues will certainly be affected by buildings. Aqueducts, Hospitals, Drug stores will all reduce the chances of a major plague or reduce its affects if it does hit. These can be set into arrays to be easily changed depending on which mod you want to run it on.

At the moment, nothing can predict earthquakes, and I don't want to add to the buildings just to have a solid-foundation or something to stop them doing so much damage. Maybe arcologies could act as a damage reducer for earthquakes.

[Locutus]

IW,
You forgot to attach your file. I wouldn't mind taking a look at it but I couldn't help last time so I don't know if I can help now. I do know that Random() isn't causing any problems, I tested it thoroughly back then and I used it lots of times since. It's probably Event:CutImprovement but I can't guarantee it.

[Immortal Wombat]

Sorry, too busy zipping it to attach it

I'm glad its not the random function, its very useful . If it is the Event:cutimprovement, could it be that there must be an tile improvement there else it crashes with an out-of-bounds error?

I didn't run a checker line in the code, but there is a function in the above thread that would check very nicely.

[Immortal Wombat]

WTF

[hexagonian]

Ben,

Has your code been tested yet????? (Sounds like it is still in process, judging from the above posts.)

If so, you know it will have a place in Cradle - just have to clear out some space for it....

I agree with Bluevoss - Plagues for pop. reduction and earthquakes for building destruction. I have mixed feelings whether it should affect the AI though.

Can you set up the messages to specifically tell where the disaster happened? And if the AI is also affected, can you give a message to the human saying that an AI civ has had a disaster?

After all, I may want to send some 'humanitarian aid' with my armies

[Immortal Wombat]

Ben,
Has your code been tested yet????? (Sounds like it is still in process, judging from the above posts.)

Nooooo, nonono. Well, yes, but it has failed the test quite spectacularly...

If so, you know it will have a place in Cradle - just have to clear out some space for it....

Cool.

Plagues for pop. reduction and earthquakes for building destruction

Yeah, both will also affect happiness, if the CutImprovement event works, I'll be using that too. And earthquakes also damage units in the area.

Can you set up the messages to specifically tell where the disaster happened? And if the AI is also affected, can you give a message to the human saying that an AI civ has had a disaster?

YES. That is one bit of the code I wrote that I think works very well. The human gets a message if the plague hits its city, or if the earthquake hits on or near their city. If it doesn't, but does hit near the AI, it messages the human which was the nearest AI city. I also made it check that the human only receives one message per disaster, so that if it has two cities within the affect quake zone, or a human city and an AI city in the quake zone, it just gets told of the nearest human city.

After all, I may want to send some 'humanitarian aid' with my armies

I don't blame you. Defending armies with only 50% hitpoints, and all infrastructure ruined and population halved, could make a city vulnerable. (and that is just Richter 6 )

[Peter Triggs]

Ben,

I've pretty well got the Quake_Event function working (no more crashes to desktop), it's just a matter of tidying up the details. But:

1) As things stand, only a quake with tmpRichter value of 7 or 8 will affect tiles outside it's epicenter (QuakeLoc). This doesn't seem all that good to me.

2) What about restricting earthquakes to locations that are near mountains? I've never been near an earthquake but it seems to me that's where they happen.

[Pedrunn]

Originally posted by Peter Triggs

2) What about restricting earthquakes to locations that are near mountains? I've never been near an earthquake but it seems to me that's where they happen.

That would be more realistic, Since eathquakes usually happens when Tectonic Plates collide with one another that is also the case of mountains. But not only mountains but trenchs and submarine volcanoes. what would add more in strategy, since everybody build sea citys close from this tiles, now we are going to think twice before building in it.

And Tsunamis Should happen only on beach and coastal tiles. And destroy boats in shallow water.

And IW is right. There shouldnt be a way to control earthquakes until the future ages (arcologies would be nice).

Anyway, I dont want to intervein in your work, these are just some of my thoughts.

[Immortal Wombat]

Ben,

I've pretty well got the Quake_Event function working (no more crashes to desktop), it's just a matter of tidying up the details.

Thanks very much!

1) As things stand, only a quake with tmpRichter value of 7 or 8 will affect tiles outside it's epicenter (QuakeLoc). This doesn't seem all that good to me.

As things stand, if a F7 or F8 earthquake hit where there is no city, they affect the surrounding tiles and the ones surrounding them. F1-F6 quakes affect the epicentre and the surroundings. If there is a city then it only affects the epicentre. I think removing the "else" on (my) line 172 will make the quake search the neighbours anyway. I think that was an error on my part. Thanks for pointing it out

2) What about restricting earthquakes to locations that are near mountains? I've never been near an earthquake but it seems to me that's where they happen.

Okay then, I have no pronlems with that. In my volcano function, I did pretty much the same thing. It only affects mountains, trenches, volcanoes and rifts. (and if there are two beach tiles nearby, it assumes it is a ocean nearby, an therefore the meeting of continental and oceanic plates at a detructive margin, causing stronger [volcanos] than otherwise). That code can be easily chucked into the earthquake function (at least when I last saw the code )
Again, thanks Peter . Can you email me the code please, or post it here? Thanks.

Pedrunn, I think that earthquakes, volcanoes and plagues need perfecting before we start on tsunamis, but they will go in

I dont know how much of Harlan's notes anyone read in the thread above, or that I left in NaturalDisasters.slc, but he mentions that an underwater earthquake should spark a number of tsunamis based on its strength, and affecting nearby shallow water.

And lastly, though this might be way premature, do we want hurricanes? I think this would be best implemented if it is possible to find the area of the map where they occur (ie. between 5^o and 20^o, North and South of the equator). This would add some more regional hazards

[Peter Triggs]

I thought the code you posted was some discarded stuff from Radical_Manuvr and I've really hacked it around a bit. I hope you don't mind.

1) I moved the Quake_Event function in with the rest of the functions. I don't know how the compiler works but I noticed that when I've tried having 'chains' of SLIC files it REALLY slows the game down in later stages. It also let me localize some of the variables; I just think it's easier to keep track of things that way.

2) I don't think the KillPop event is working, at least I couldn't see it doing anything. I've replaced them with some AddPops functions with a negative argument.

3) You were right about the CutImprovements event. I've got it cycling through the first 24 tile improvement indices. But this will wipe out any of them: it might be an idea to be more specific.

4) I recoded the way a quake affects it's neighbouring tiles. A force 3 quake will take out the adjoining N,S,E,W tiles; a force 4 quake will additionally take out the NE,SE,SW,NW tiles; and so on. The way I did this is not exactly elegent: if we had 2 dimensional arrays it would be easy. But we don't and I couldn't think of any other way of doing it than the way I did.

5) When I started, I cut out your messages and when I went to put them back in I ran into a few problems. I had trouble using Dale's GetNearestCity Function but as it happens I've got my own version of this sort of function, which I'm more familiar with, so I just plugged it in.

//find thePlayer's theNearestCity to theLocation, outside or equal to theDistance boundary
//     return the distance from theLocation to theNearestCity
//     return -1 if no such city exists

int_f FindTheNearestCity( int_t thePlayer, location_t theLocation, int_t theDistance)

'theNearestCity' is a global city variable and the function will assign a city to it. It also returns the distance from theLocation to theNearestCity, or -1 if theNearestCity doesn't exist.

I also had a problem with the 'human' variable. I'm in the habit of reporting values of variables to the screen to make debugging easier and I've left in the message that reports 'human'. It always seems to be 0; I wonder if this is some background peculiarity of the Mod I'm running. See what you get.

For further debugging, there's also a message that gives some details about the quake.

I also left in some outcommented code that lets you set the location of the quake. You can then go into cheat mode, place down tile improvements or whatever, and see what the quake does to them.

ARGHH: It was the wrong file. This should be the right one.

[Immortal Wombat]

Thanks Peter, that sounds great. Don't worry about hacking it around, I need the help

I think you attached the wrong file though, or one of the chain. I can't see the changes.

[Immortal Wombat]

BUMP, just to let everyone know that Peter changes the file.

Thanks, it looks like it will work now...

[Pedrunn]

It is the whole thing working or just the eathquake fuction.
If you think that the whole thing is working could you organize it to me. It will be huge pleasure to test it for you guys.

[hexagonian]

BUMP!

Ben,

Any success on geting this in a final working form?????

[Immortal Wombat]

Oops, I've been away for a few days, and lazy for a few days before that. I will try to get it sorted into a 1st version before August 8th (another holiday) and then let y'all test it for a while.

[Immortal Wombat]

Okay... So I wrote the code for Plagues, pretty much the same as what I'd already done for Mars, with some adjusting for buildings. Problem is, that the function doesn't work. I figured out how far the code gets to with inserting test messages, but so far there has never been a plague. I think there may be some hidden out-of-bounds error, but I can't find it. If anyone wants to look over it, here it is...

Thanks Peter

[Peter Triggs]

It's the CityHasBuilding function. I think it's a leftover from SLIC1; it doesn't go to the BuildingDB like you'd expect. Instead it takes a quoted string argument as in

         if(CityHasBuilding(PlaguedCity, "IMPROVE_AQUEDUCT")){
	 PPChance = PPChance - 10;
         }

Other than that it seems to work fine. This is looking good.

BTW, you should have got an error message. You sure you've got DebugSlic turned on?

[Immortal Wombat]

Yeah, I never turned it off.

How did you figure out all these syntax things? When to use BuildingDB, when to use " marks , when to use ID_ :brainexplosion:


1:30 am need sleeeep.

Thanks.

[Jules]

I like the realism and unpredictability that natural disasters would add to the game, so I thought I'd check this out. Disasters got dropped after the original Civilization. Not sure why.

Ok, with a few minor tweaks I got plagues to work. Thanks to Peter for pointing out the quotes issue with the CityHasBuilding function. I work with that function all the time in my programs, yet I overlooked that error. Doh! *smacks self*

Looks like the AddHappyTimer has a one-turn delay before taking effect. The death happens right away. I guess it takes some time for the initial shock to wear off when the disaster hits before the misery sets in, so for me that's no biggie.

It'd be nice if the happiness penalty from the plague showed up in the city's status window. Anybody know if that's possible? (btw, in the AddHappyTimer event line, what does the 14 signify?)

The only problem I encountered was with the messages not displaying correctly. It showed up in the log, but didn't pop-up on the screen as the code indicated it should. Plus I couldn't even open the message from the log. Maybe there was something I needed to change. Hmmm...

This looks to be really cool once you get it fully tested. Can't wait for the finished version. Great work, guys!

[Immortal Wombat]

Hmm, it seems DebugSlic was off. Maybe I was testing Cradle :hmm: I still didn't get an error about the buildings anyway though... Seems to have no major errors in I think, so that is good to know. Just a little problems with the earthquakes to sort out.

The 14 in that line is the "reason" behind the unhappiness. In this case, 14 is conquest, because unsurprisingly, there is no unused "Natural disaster" reason. I have a list of them somewhere if you want the other "reasons", but none of them show up in the city manager, so there isn't much point.

If the messages are being weird, try changing them to alertboxes, these should always show.

[Immortal Wombat]

Okey-dokey, I'm going on holiday, and everyone is clamouring for natural disasters. In the game.

So here is what I have done so far. The tsunami.slc file is included, but not #included, as it causes some problems. I now get no error messages on start-up, but have and had no time to test it thoroughly, and its all still buggy. As I thought the two weeks could be usefully used by someone else, here are the files. Sorry if they crash your pc or anything, what can I say, I'm on holiday

Included new:
Plagues + Earthquakes still.
Earthquakes now only on mountains.
Volcanoes. Affect mountains only.
Tsunamis - Doesn't work, but no time to fix.

Cya'll in 12 days.

Ben

[Pedrunn]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
Okey-dokey, I'm going on holiday, and everyone is clamouring for natural disasters. In the game.

So here is what I have done so far. The tsunami.slc file is included, but not #included, as it causes some problems. I now get no error messages on start-up, but have and had no time to test it thoroughly, and its all still buggy. As I thought the two weeks could be usefully used by someone else, here are the files. Sorry if they crash your pc or anything, what can I say, I'm on holiday

Included new:
Plagues + Earthquakes still.
Earthquakes now only on mountains.
Volcanoes. Affect mountains only.
Tsunamis - Doesn't work, but no time to fix.

Cya'll in 12 days.

Ben

Attach the files. Like i alredy said i would love to test them.

[Immortal Wombat]

Thanks Pedrun, I woulda gone of on my vacation and left yuo disappointed.

*slaps forehead*

[Peter Triggs]

I'll try to have a look at them too. But I've been awful tied up for the past few days and I don't know when I'm going to get some spare time. Anyway, have a good holiday!

[Pedrunn]

I just start testing it. I know IW is not here to fix but will keep reporting to when he comes back. My messages may not be so accurate since i started a game with my mod. That way i had to delete some lines "already typed".

I wrote the messages in a new document. and imported it through strings.txt.

I started the game it did not had mountains close to me settle a city. I settled anyway. At the next turn appeared a message sayng that my medics averted a plague. What was nice because this meant the files were working. But next turn it appeared again. and again. and again. It became to look annoyng. Surprisely after three more turns a message appeared saying that a plague has struck in one of my cities. It still was size one so i cant tell you if the killpop is working(by the way shouldnt i loose the city if it was working?) but the happiness lowered.

Some turns after that another message appeared saying that a EarthQuake hit the city of Oporto wich belonged to the portuguses. first thing i did was open the cheat mode and see its status. It was a size one city too but i cant tell you if it was one before the EarthQuake or if it lost pop with quake. But it had three units in it so my guess is that it did not loose any unit(we were still in turn 8) .

Overall
It seems to be working, but i wanted to suggest that plagues should only occur in size three cities or more to simulate the high density number of people causing the spreading of the plague. And because it was kind of strange to see those message appearing at the box right in the second turn!

I want to ask help for someone to check the messages i wrote. They were all based in the recomendations of IW in ND_msg.slc But i changed most of it.

[Pedrunn]

I have made some testing with the cheat mode.

Plague

The killpop seems to be working fine. I also notest that because it is a file in test the events have 100% chance of happenning since every turn either my medics prevented the plagues or the plague strucked.

EarthQuake/Volcanoes

I have found two gameplay bugs regarding to the dead tiles appearing in the place of the earthQuake.
1)One of them is islands of dead tiles appearing over the sea.
2)The other bug is that we can only terraform dead tiles in the last half of the game. So what should we do with th dead tiles that appear at the begginnig of the game?

Messages

I'm having problem with the messages. The lines {theNearestCity.name} and {PlaguedCityCounter} doesnt seems to be working.


Anyway what is the difference betwee plague and epidemic?

[janilxx]

Originally posted by Pedrunn
EarthQuake/Volcanoes

I have found two gameplay bugs regarding to the dead tiles appearing in the place of the earthQuake.
1)One of them is islands of dead tiles appearing over the sea.

Actually this could happen when undersea volcano erupts. HAvaiji have formed in this way and actually Havaiji islands are expanding all the time because of volcano erupts.

But this should happend only with volcanoes and very, very rarely.

2)The other bug is that we can only terraform dead tiles in the last half of the game. So what should we do with th dead tiles that appear at the begginnig of the game?

When volcano erupts a lot of lava will arise. Lava is very good breeding ground for plants and actually after a year(or few years) lava is not shown anymore but there is plenty of plants growing. So could it be so that after volcano erupts the dead tile remains dead for a 1-5 turns and after that it returns as a tile that were there before the erupt. That might be hard to code?

But what about earthquakes... If I am right earthquakes happen usually in dry land. And earthquake's destruction marks are seen hundreds of years. So maybe those tiles should remain dead untile human discovers the technology to repair those(that should not happen early).




HAve you asked Wes if natural disasters ould be added to MedPack 2?

[Pedrunn]

Yet i still think that if a Earth Quake happen in the begginnig of the game lets say turn 30 we probably will only clean in the turn 500 or something. But maybe i'm just saying that because those events are happenning too frequently, almost every turn (what i think it is because it is a test file)

I dont know if Wes will use it since i dont play MM2 (i play my own mod)
But ask him.