Need help with a new mod

[Thalomarre]

Okay, so this started out as a little personal project to create my own Civilization to play within the game, but as it turns out I'm running into more difficulties than I expected.

I've created a new civ and leader, following Kael's Modders Guide, and have had mixed success getting everything to work properly. The most noticeable problem is that when starting a new game with the mod, there's no scroll bar when selecting your civilization leader. As an experiment, I tried changing my civ's leader to Askia to make it selectable without having to scroll, and then nothing below Askia appeared at all. So it looks like when it gets to my Civ, it sees something it doesn't like and then just stops loading anything.

I've scoured the web for information on this particular issue, and it seems in most cases where this has happened there was some syntax error or other in an XML file, but I've gone over my files several times and can't seem to find anything out of place.

I can select my civ from the Advanced Startup menu, and everything seems to load fine, except that I don't see my selected Dawn of Man quote, art or map. I was using Theodora as my image and Egypt as my map for the time being, along with a brief blurb I'd written up as a placeholder for my text.

Also, I had copied Kael's Civilopedia text for Boudica as a placeholder just to make sure it was working correctly, but the main text doesn't appear (the leader's name, title, and dates of birth and death do, however).

The odd thing is that the Dawn of Man and Civilopedia were showing up last night; the only problem then was the aforementioned issue with selecting the leader/civ at startup. That problem started last night, apparently after I started experimenting with custom leader traits - which, as it happens, are also not working correctly. The trait descriptions don't show up, nor do their effects, which would be pretty easy to notice if they were working correctly (free Shrine in every city, 4 units of Copper in starting city).

So... I know that's a lot of info, but does anyone have any advice? I'm at my wits' end here. If anyone wants to take a quick look at what I have, I've uploaded the files at www.voiceofadam.net/Azaman.zip.

Thanks in advance!

[whoward69]

it sees something it doesn't like and then just stops loading anything.

This is usually beacuse your civ doesn't have (at least) two uniques (units, buildings or improvements)

For the rest, enable logging and look in the database.log and xml.log files

[Thalomarre]

This is usually beacuse your civ doesn't have (at least) two uniques (units, buildings or improvements)

For the rest, enable logging and look in the database.log and xml.log files

Ah, I hadn't gotten to that part yet! I just wanted to see if what I had so far was working. I'll add the uniques and check the logs again, after which I may or may not be back.

Thanks!

[Thalomarre]

Okay, since my last post I created a couple uniques for my civilization and found a typo in my XML that was causing some problems, and after that everything seemed to be working fine.

Until I tried playing a full game and got to the Renaissance era. The moment the turn starts in which I should have researched Astronomy, the game crashes with a standard Windows error. I know Astronomy is what triggers it, because when I reloaded my game and changed my research to something else, and the next turn started fine.

As an experiment, I started a new game with my civ and set the Renaissance as the starting era, and it crashed almost immediately after displaying the Dawn of Man screen. I then started a new game in the Renaissance using the same mod, but a standard Civ (the Persians, I believe), and it started up just fine. So it seems evident that something about my Civ specifically causes the game to crash in the Renaissance Era (and presumably any era past that; I tried with the Industrial Era and got the same results).

I looked at the logs, but they didn't reveal anything obvious. Anyone have any suggestions as to what could could be causing this or where I should look?

I'm using the Gods and Kings expansion, by the way. I know the Rennaisance Era is where spies first come into play. Might that have anything to do with it?


EDIT: In case anyone wants to take a look, I've re-uploaded my mod to www.voiceofadam.net/Azaman.zip

[Thalomarre]

Ah, my hunch about the spies was right! I found out what I needed to know here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=466769

And contrary to what's said in that thread, I didn't have to restart my game after adding the Civilization_SpyNames table. Which is excellent, because I was in the middle of a damn good game.

Hopefully there won't be any further problems down the road...

[whoward69]

And contrary to what's said in that thread, I didn't have to restart my game after adding the Civilization_SpyNames table.

If you add/remove/reorder entries in a table that has an ID column you will have to restart a game, the other tables you can generally get away with. (And reorder includes disable mod / re-enable mod, because the mod will now be in a different place in the load list so will get different IDs than it had before which will scramble whatever was assigned those IDs in the game)

And even then that's not strictly true, if the IDs are for units/whatever that haven't been used by any player so far (eg if you add/remove atomic weapons while still in the Classical Era) you can also get away with it.

You will however quickly know when you can't get away with it, as Civ5 will just crash while loading your game - no warning, no nice error handling, just BOOOOOOM!!!!