A fail and a couple wins

I feel I must be forthright with a recent occurrence. An occurrence of failure upon my part, borne as is so often the case out of good intentions in conception going awry in prosecution.

Basically I volunteered my time to a Colonization project of someone else's then flaked. It was more or less my responsibility to dump the Civilopedia into a spreadsheet and modify the appropriate entries for the mod. I figured this would work for me as I planned on performing this task for my own mod, Grow Tycoon.

Well, one thing leads to another as they say, and here we are more than a month later and I essentially forgot all about it. Well, not really forgot - more like I just kept putting it off. Of course the lines of communication going both ways could have been better utilized, but what is past is past.

Yes, I am an old rascal and have immense and profound powers of procrastination. But there is nothing like failing in public to better prepare oneself to succeed later on. I also feel the double burden of being a stoner who flaked as people tend to blame their predisposed prejudices and look no further rather than attempt to understand the nuances of life. I care very deeply about the issue of ending prohibition and I almost feel like I damaged it through my irresponsibility (albeit very slightly).

So in atonement I have been working extra hard on laying the foundations for the creation of Grow Tycoon. In a move that somewhat surprised me, I opted to delve into the mysterious world of the SDK first.

Following an excellent old post by Kael on Civ Fanatics, I was able to get the open source C++ IDE Code Blocks working with the Colonization SDK. I compiled a vanilla (unmodded) DLL successfully and used it within a basic test mod.

Afterward I went on to the fool-around-with stage and was able to fidget out the way to add a new Yield to the game. For those not familiar with Colonization, a Yield refers to any resource in the game whether it be Ore or Education points. The Yield I added was more in the vein of Liberty Bells or Crosses, but by following the the short guide I posted on Civ Fanatics you could come up with any sort of Yield you want.

I decided to start there first, as I want to add a viable Cultural Victory to vanilla Colonization. I am still tweaking the settings, though. My biggest problem at this point is deciding how the points should be generated in the game. At the moment I am thinking they will either need to be "built" by a unit in a building (like a Statesman in a Town Hall) - I am trying to avoid this - or they will be tacked onto Founding Fathers making collecting them more strategic (currently the player is rewarded for passing on a FF in favor of saving points for specific one - this will make grabbing all the FF you can more attractive).

The Founding Fathers option is by far the easiest option to add to the game, but I am also considering adding the ability to use colonists to work the Printing Press and Newspaper buildings for Fortuente Culture points. This would also create the need for an Expert culture unit, the Editor. I may end up adding both options, but I don't want to spend too much time on mods or modcomps other than those which directly benefit Grow Tycoon.

While I have seen some XML editors that looked pretty nice, I am currently using Adobe Dreamweaver (I know what you're thinking) and it works well enough that I have not really been looking for a replacement. I am looking for a Python IDE also, but have been procrastinating that rather much. Notepad totally sucks for editing Python, but it does work after all.

So as of right now I am working on that. I have added in my Fortuente Culture points into the Info screen (I'll probably post a guide on that too) and am playing through otherwise vanilla Colonization matches to tweak and refine my Cultural Victory option.