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The first scenario I tried
to design with Fantastic Worlds was a total flop.
My goal was to create a scenario around the idea of a war between
red and black ants. The red ants had more firepower, but the
black ants had cheaper units. Barbarian units were going to include
spiders, termites, and other hazards of the insect world. Plus,
I planned to use the events.txt file to occasionally generate
the deadly Big Giant Sneaker unit. Cities, of course, were anthills,
and the roads were "tunnels" that allowed faster travel
by going underneath the grass and soil terrains. The idea was
a good one, but I scrapped it and nearly pitched my copy of Fantastic
Worlds (henceforth, FW) out the window. So, what happened?
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The essential problem is that
FW has a serious memory management problem that corrupts scenarios
periodically and can ruin your rules.txt file. The problem occurs
only on some computers and you may be immune. It is also an unpredictable
problem in the sense that it can merely cause FW to crash a lot,
or it can actually wreck your files. For myself and several others,
the latter is the case - but there are ways to avoid it, most
of the time. I suggest the following precautions:
FW directly edits the rules.txt
and other files, so you DO NOT need to save as a scenario after
each edit. Instead, simply save your scenario as a normal game
of Civ2. When you load it again, your rules.txt and other changes
should all still be intact. If you must test your game as a scenario,
make sure you first save it as a normal game and then save it
as a scenario. Take the warning about "your changes not
taking effect" very seriously. I strongly advise you to
only use a single editor at a time.
Don't change your advances and your units in the same session!
After making your edits to any one type of thing, save the game,
quit, and then choose Load Game from the main Civ2 menu (the
one where you can see the hall of fame). This has worked well
for me as far as avoiding the memory leak, which seems to occur
most often when you switch editors. It is even more frequent
if you play for a while between doing the two edits. Paper code!
Prepare your scenario from the ground up using note paper, the
Notepad program, or your favorite word processor. When you're
pretty sure you have something complete, code in the elements
all at once.
Learn to edit the rules.txt and other files directly using notepad
for small changes, like adding a single technology you found
to be useful or fixing spelling mistakes. It's not that hard,
and tutorials are available under the heading of "modpack
design".
Back up all of your files to a separate directory from time to
time. I like to create a Backup subdirectory that holds a copy
of all of the files -- especially rules.txt and the art files,
which seem to be the most frequently damaged. If your rules.txt
file becomes corrupted, restore from backup.
Finally, be sure you refer to the Advanced
Scenario Design Guide by Leon Marrick. It has invaluable
information about problems with particular technologies, improvements,
and so on that can cause your scenario not to work.
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