MP: a lEArning experience (Newbie EA CBM1.92) [in progress]

[megawidget]

Originally Posted by ulius

Hi,
I bought Dominions 3 just recently and found it quite enjoyable so far. So if that's still possible, I'd be eager to join my first MP game with you :-).

Since all the races I'm familiar with are already taken I'd have to take a look into the ones that are left to pick.

We have hit capacity, but we should be able to swing 10 players. So pick a race and we'll start!

How do you feel about an underwater nation? I would prefer a smaller map, and it's very probable we'll have water on it enough for at least one nation.

[ulius]

Never played one, so I wouldn't really know what to do with it. But it's a game, so who cares? Yes, why not try something new? Sounds like a good idea to me.

But let me take a brief look at those underwater nations first.

[megawidget]

Now that we're filled we have to pick a map.

I propose we use the Land of Ethereal Squirrels:
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showpost.php?p=713239

Outside of the obvious perk of having ethereal squirrels, it has 103 land + 13 sea provinces, with 11.444 provinces for each land player, and 13 for the one water player. This should make for a reasonably paced game even with 10 players.

ulius, you'll have to pick a water nation for this one as we have all the land nations we need. Which should be fun! I'm personally a huge fan of water nations, though I have no justification for that whatsoever -- I guess I just like lurking.

If there are no counter proposals, I'll host the game on llamaserver tomorrow night (I am GMT -8) and players will be able to upload pretenders.

[megawidget]

Originally Posted by ulius

Never played one, so I wouldn't really know what to do with it. But it's a game, so who cares? Yes, why not try something new? Sounds like a good idea to me.

But let me take a brief look at those underwater nations first.

Take your time. Just make sure to state your choice in the forums by the time you choose your pretender!

[ulius]

Atlantis, Emergence of The Deep Ones, it is.
They ... will ... emerge.

[ulius]

Originally Posted by megawidget

Now that we're filled we have to pick a map.
I propose we use the Land of Ethereal Squirrels:

I like the look of the map but I just tested it and I was placed in the lake province in the middle as Atlantis. That wouldn't be very ... convenient for me if it happened in our game. Any suggestions?

[jotwebe]

Nice, I like wraparounds.

There's a slight issue with this map on linux: the .tga file is named LandofEtherealSquirrels.tga, but the .map file has the name in lowercase. Since linux is case-sensitive I had to rename the .tga file - hopefully this won't mess with compability or something.

[megawidget]

Originally Posted by jotwebe

Nice, I like wraparounds.

There's a slight issue with this map on linux: the .tga file is named LandofEtherealSquirrels.tga, but the .map file has the name in lowercase. Since linux is case-sensitive I had to rename the .tga file - hopefully this won't mess with compability or something.

Where'd you get the map? Mine has both in the same camel case, and I got it here:

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showpost.php?p=713239

[megawidget]

Originally Posted by ulius

I like the look of the map but I just tested it and I was placed in the lake province in the middle as Atlantis. That wouldn't be very ... convenient for me if it happened in our game. Any suggestions?

Haha!
Complain here if that happens and we'll restart.

[jotwebe]

Originally Posted by megawidget

Where'd you get the map? Mine has both in the same camel case, and I got it here:

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showpost.php?p=713239

That's where I got it from, too (the "even more final" zip). And both the .map and the .tga are in camel-case - that's the problem, I think.
The .map file is a text file with all the data about its provinces and so on.

At the start it tells dominions where to get the image - and here's a quote from it. As you can see in the #imagefile line, it specifies it in lowercase.

-- Title and image file
#dom2title The Land of Ethereal Squirrels
#imagefile landofetherealsquirrels.tga
#domversion 175
#wraparound
#defaultmapzoom 1.00
#description "An infinite world full of ethereal beings, but primarily known of 
ethereal squirrels. This is the fixed version of 22.2.2010."

That's no problem in windows, windows ignores case. On linux however there's a difference between landofetherealsquirrels.tga and LandofEtherealSquirrels.tga, and so dominions gets told "there's no such file here, sucka". Then dominions crashes

One fix would be to change the #imagefile line in the .map file to CamelCase, but I'm a bit worried that there'd be problems when the .map files aren't exactly the same, even if there's no difference for the actual map. Maybe someone with more MP experience knows?

The fix I went for is to rename the .tga file to lowercase, which leaves the .map file completely unchanged. I don't expect the server to care about the map images, so I hope it'll be ok.

I'm a bit surprised it hasn't come up in all the time the map has been in use.