Version 2.1 fixes a few problems, including:

- Issues with the AddTopic bug;
- Issues with the manor alchemy chests;
- A bad container in the upper manor.

Get it here.

[EDIT - Previous method was a lie. This way really does work though]

Because I'm probably going to want to know how to do this again, here is the procedure for making BFSP64, BF2AF64, BF2EF64, and the Unlocks678 mods work with each other.

1. Copy the levels from your BF2EF64 levels dir to your BF2SP64 levels dir. They'll work, just like that.
2. Copy the levels from your BF2AF64 levels dir to your BF2SP64 levels dir. These won't work at all yet.
3. Copy booster_server.zip from your BF2AF64 dir to your BF2SP64 dir.
4. Extract all files from booster_server.zip into your BF2SP64 dir. Delete the zip.
5. Move the newly created Vehicles folder from your BF2SP64 dir into Objects_server.zip. Delete the Vehicles folder.
6. Copy Unlocks678.zip from your Unlocks dir to your BF2SP64 dir. I have no idea what the hell all is in here, but it needs it to work, so.

5. Open up your BF2SP64 ClientArchives.con in a text editor. Make it read like this:

fileManager.mountArchive Objects_client.zip Objects
fileManager.mountArchive Common_client.zip Common
fileManager.mountArchive Menu_client.zip Menu
fileManager.mountArchive Fonts_client.zip Fonts
fileManager.mountArchive booster_client.zip Objects

fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Objects_client.zip Objects
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/booster_client.zip Objects
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Common_client.zip Common
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Menu_client.zip Menu
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Fonts_client.zip Fonts
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Shaders_client.zip Shaders

6. Open up your BF2SP64 ServerArchives.con in a text editor. Make it read like this:

FileManager.mountArchive mods/Bf2SP64/Unlocks678.zip Objects

fileManager.mountArchive Objects_server.zip Objects
fileManager.mountArchive Menu_server.zip Menu
fileManager.mountArchive Common_server.zip Common

fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Objects_server.zip Objects
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Menu_server.zip Menu
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/Common_server.zip Common
fileManager.mountArchive mods/bf2/booster_server.zip Objects

fileManager.mountArchive mods/Bf2SP64/Objects_server.zip Objects
fileManager.mountArchive mods/Bf2SP64/Menu_server.zip Menu
fileManager.mountArchive mods/Bf2SP64/Common_server.zip Common

7. Go kill some bots.

There's a certain curiosity on my part as to if I can get the Special Forces maps to work, too. I don't think I can, but it could be worth a try, as those maps are about 10x better than most of what stock BF2 has to offer.

[EDIT - Do not try this. It is bad for you. Seriously. Just don't even go there at all.]

Come back to me, Hue 1968. Why have you forsaken me? Why?

Despite my general aversion to this sort of thing, but because it's so utterly me, and because I was encouraged to, let us play a little game. Suppose, for a moment, that you have a phone booth. With this phone booth, you will travel through time, collecting 8 historical figures to help you deliver your oral report on their time periods, and to help review the world of San Dimas, 2008. (And yes, I'm talking about what is now a 20 year old movie. Oi.)

In the original film, these 8 were:

1. Napoleon
2. Billy the Kid
3. Socrates
4. Sigmund Freud
5. Beethoven
6. Joan of Arc
7. Genghis Khan
8. Abraham Lincoln

Now as for my list, well...I'll play things interesting and stick to rough time periods and/or roles, just for kicks.

1. Tokugawa Ieyasu

I should probably have this be Magua for the sheer in-joke potential, but I'll go with Tokugawa, because he's pretty Nappy-like in his way - fantastic general, one of the most amazing politicians of all time, and...oh, hey, he WON.

2. William Tecumseh Sherman

Who isn't an outlaw, but IS of the appropriate era, and happens to be a thoroughly tough but well-spoken sort of a guy. Having read his book, I imagine he'd be excellent to talk to.

3. Lucius Cornelius Sulla

Not A Philosopher, but he'd be a hoot, if he and Tokugawa didn't kill each other.

4. Mark Twain

Philosophers, meh. But Twain, now. He's the kind of writer a guy can really get behind. Also I have the ulterior motive of wanting to read his book on how my raft of historical figures plays together.

5. Elvis Presley

Because musically I am not my father. And because the reaction by everyone else in the audience would be priceless.

6. Akhenaten

Because let's go for some interesting religious fervor here. Sun worship! Egyptians! Deformed heads! You can't go wrong!

7. Tiglath-Pilesar I

Because if you want some seriously hard, chariot-riding dudes in the vein of Khan, you gotta get yourself an Assyrian.

8. George Washington

Because seriously, honestly, I REALLY want to hear his review of the world of San Dimas 2008. Because I think it would be incredibly interesting to see one of our forefathers pass judgement on us. That's probably not the word most people would use, but I am me, so.

Honorable Mention: Thomas Jefferson, Heraclius, Marcus Aurelius, Gaius Marius, Frederick Douglass, Vo Nguyen Giap, Hatshepsut, Queen Elizabeth I, V.I. Lenin, Julius Caesar.

Do feel free to share via comments.

Now is the time
To prove
What we know to be true:
That we shall conquer all.
---The Rememberance (Clan Ghost Bear), Passage 155, Verse 2, Lines 45-48

A little bit of worldbuilding work, here.

Firstly, the map:

Click for a larger version.

This is the third version of this particular map. The first, which got referenced a couple of times previously in this series, was in the default CC3 bitmap style, which is one that I quite like, actually, but one that just wasn't cutting it for this particular project for some reason.

Went through a lot of ideas after that, including trying to make up a style based on the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms map (which is probably the best the Realms have ever looked, but trying to match that style...holy crap), before settling on ideas out of the Cartographer's Annual 2007, one of which was the Sarah Wroot style, which looked utterly fantastic, but was also utterly unreadable, which turns out to be a problem.

The new map is in the Mercator style, and turns out to be readable AND looks completely awesome, although I will likely change it in a few particulars, including:

- Filling in the bloody Unknown Lands once I come up with something to go there.
- Decreasing the font size for both the Western Sea and the Unknown Lands. It's a tad large.
- Naming the various adjuncts to the Sea of Vargra.
- Possibly adding ice to the Sea of Moving Ice.
- Adding in the forests that exist in Tithorea and Titheheim.
- Moving some labels about a bit.
- Moving the whole landmass over a little. When printed at 1 inch = 100 miles on a 2x2 layout, the exact middle is somewhere in the Plains of Black Ash in a sort of annoying spot. Then again, it's not bad where it is.

Other than that, I'm pretty happy with it. None of the rivers are named, mind you, but I'll save that for the inevitable series of 1 inch = 25 or 50 miles maps I'll end up needing to do.

Now, what I'm going to do for city and dungeon mapping to complement this style, I have no idea. Dungeon Designer 3 has thus far proved itself to be heavily unuseful, and while there are ways I believe it could be useful (mostly involving Symbol Set 2, which has nice stuff), some of it's going to take some work to get right. For cities? I have more options here, and will likely have even more if City Designer 3 looks as awesome as the previews show it to be. In particular, the Cartographer's Annual has this style, which I quite like though it may be too 19th century for the matter at hand. There is also this style, which complements the Mercator map well, but all you get is peaked roofs and such, which is somewhat annoying. So we'll see. Likely be ages before I do a city in any case.

On another note, I've hit upon a tool that I'm using to organize my notes, and that is a personal wiki, of which I am using this flavor, which lends itself heavily to being useful, and I find I quite like it. I've already transcribed all of my written scribblings on classes, races, and religion, and it probably won't be too much more work (at least by comparison - clerics were a bitch) to finish off the rules portion of things, at which time I'll move on to actual geography fluff. It's pretty likely I'll wind up doing a Tharavel style setting book at some point (though hopefully with better art, and I have some ideas on that). Hopefully in August I can do some work on that.

Also need to work on historical stuff, but I'll do a seperate post on that later.

Because I've had this song stuck in my head for like 5 years now, but always as music. And then last night I remembered part of the lyrics, and thanks to the Power of Google, I am victorious.

On that note, would somebody care to explain to me why my default memory for about 2002-2005 is driving in cars in Corvallis? Because I didn't think I did all THAT much of it, and I definitely didn't do a whole lot of driving on Highway 99 out by Bi-Mart (always cut over on Harrison/Van Buren), but sure enough there I am. Wonder why.

Because I'm having about 2 minutes in every 10 of internet connection right now. Which is something I remember pretty well from my days in the 90s of dialup, and also how it took about 9 years to download a megabyte. And, I dunno. Has broadband shortened my patience, here? Were we all just ignorant in 1995, and willing to put up with the repeated attempts to refresh to make things work, the slow speeds, the dropping out, because that's just how it was, man? Or is that, you know, that sort of thing was ok in 1995, but this isn't 1995, it's 2008, and seriously, what the Jesus here people?

I'm tempted to go with the latter. Hey, working infrastructure. Get it right, guys.

I don't think I've ever shown this one, and I'm not sure anybody but Whir has seen it. So behold, the worst start ever:

Remember kids. Highlands does not like you.

Because I haven't really talked Civ for a while, and I just played a pretty epic game.

Every so often, you have this desire, when playing world maps, to conquer the world. This is the unquestionable natural order of things. The world is there, we desire to conquer it and bend it to our wills, preferably while killing several million of its other digital inhabitants. I had not previously done this, preferring to win instead by space or culture or what have you, becase do you know how much land you need to conquer to go from this:

To the winning 51% land?

Quite a lot, as it turns out:

During the not quite 5,000 years it took to do that, I managed to find myself at war with every single one of 18 civilizations except one: Pericles, who pretty much kicked back in Australia and sailed around in caravels a lot.

Pacal II of the Mayans and Ragnar of the Vikings, I partially conquered and left with viable holdings as my chief vassals.

Julius Caesar of the Romans, Peter of the Russians, and Churchill of the English were less lucky - I relieved them of all but a handful of worthless cities, then made them my vassals.

As for Isabella of Spain, Shaka of the Zulus, Hammurabi of Babylon, Bismarck of Germany, Asoka of India, and Montezuma of the Aztecs? Dead, their empires mine.

Justinian of Byzantium, whose empires in Turkey and South America I took from him, ended up precipitating a world war by becoming a vassal of George Washington, my only serious rival, who had at the time as vassals Charlemagne, Darius of Persia, Charles DeGaulle, Montezuma, and Bismarck.

And it was a pretty serious war, although by that point I was driving around with a not-quite 500 unit army of battle-hardened veterans, and cranking more each turn. Guys like:

Charles Martel, who started off as a maceman in my initial wars against the Aztecs and Mayans in BC days, and was at the forefront of every conflict I ever fought;

Heinz Guderian, who got his start as an infantry unit fighting the Zulus, then went on to become the scourge of the Americas;

Georgy Zhukov, my best tank general, who fought his way through two North American campaigns before returning home to lead the struggle against the Aztec threat.

And as struggles go, it was pretty one-sided. I lost 108 units, mostly at sea where I lacked any sort of technological edge. On the other hand, I ultimately killed 1,320 of other people's units, which is slightly better than 12 to 1 in my favor, and was worth a total of 11(!) great generals.

It also took 22 hours of playing to do all this, which is one reason I don't do it very often. The other reason is the domination victory movie, which is so irrevocably lame I can't believe it. The space movie? It suffers by being lame compared to the Civ 2 space movie. The domination movie is just worthless. But I've been blathering about my hate for Civ 4's movies for like 4 years now, so.

A couple other thoughts:

- 51% land. Jesus that was a slog. Granted it's a custom map size and land ratio, but holy shit.

- As it turns out, once you hit a certain point, bonus to specialist wonders combined with the Statue of Liberty that gives a free specialist are pretty much like buttons labeled "Win." Representation in particular was letting me run stupid amounts of cash (I ended with 20k, after a whole series of multiple-hundred unit upgrades) while cranking technology at a ridiculous pace. The whole future era took me, oh, I don't know, less than 20 turns. I ended up skipping straight over most industrial warfare simply because by the time I got the resources hooked up I was two turns from modern armor and stealth bombers.

- Marines are pretty great in this game (finally!) and always have been. I can't say the same about naval warfare, which essentially consists of "throw units at one ship until it dies, then watch the AI do the same to you" at any level of technological parity, or "win instantly" if you have anything not sail powered, and they don't. Here we are, still fucking about with battleship navies, subs still suck, and there's basically no reason for all the guided missile units because you'll never get the chance to kill anything with them. All of the subtlety and complexity of land-based warfare is lacking, and that's sad, because it doesn't need to be the case.

- OTOH, Paratroopers are probably the best addition to Beyond the Sword for units. I got great use out of them this game in conjunction with air units for bombardment, both as an early form of blitzkreig before I had tanks, and then to capture remote settlements over water and mountains. Considering how much they sucked previously, this is great.

- The whole modern era unit progression is whack with regards to air units, and always has been. Also, with the advent of the F-22 Raptor, can we finally get a stealth fighter in one of these games that's not just a shitty version of the stealth bomber, and can actually go shoot guys? Because seriously, the jet war I was having with Charlemagne got really old, compounded by...

- ...my legions of mobile SAM batteries doing precisely nothing. Zero, zilch, nothing. Incredibly useless. Great idea, but if I'm supposed to have mega interception chances, I want to actually, you know, intercept dudes.

- Also, getting to that point where you can watch somebody's empire crumble completely in 2-3 turns? Awesome. Just awesome.

Since I was thinking about this earlier, a little bit more blathering on The Civil War. Which is going to be mostly YouTube clips of the thing, hitting what I think are some of the emotional high points, starting with:

This clip from Episode 1, which lays out the basis for the thing about as well as anything can, I suppose, or at least gives you enough graphic reason to convince you that slavery is a bad, bad thing.

As to these next three, the first 1.5 are the bittersweet ending, and the second 1.5 cover Lincoln's assassination, a topic I will return to in a moment.

This clip from the end of Episode 1, which contains a letter you should listen to.

Also, that music. Gods, the music. Listen to that top embedded clip, and you'll understand why the music of this film has stuck with me half my life.

Now, as to Abraham Lincoln, it occurs to me, and I imagine I am not the first, that his assassination may well be the most tragic event in American history. On one level this seems obvious, but consider. Here's the man that freed the slaves, and transformed the Civil War from a squabble over political powers to a struggle for the freedom of a people. And that was done before he was killed. And you end up with this brief moment, something on order of ten years, where you really do get something approximating equality for black people. And then the whole thing goes down in a blaze of corruption, greed, and entrenched racism that took us a century to overcome, and nevermind the intense sectional rivalries and hatreds.

Now, there's only so much Lincoln can do in a single term as President, and unless he pulls an FDR and goes for 3 and 4 terms, he'd mostly be an elder statesman, but could he have dealt with the excesses of the Radical Republicans? Could he have somehow helped heal the country, forge real political and maybe even social equality for the former slaves? I sure dunno, and it's a pretty big task, but if there was anyone to do it, Lincoln was that guy.

Andrew Johnson? Not so much. Not so much.

Tall ships and tall kings
three times three
what brought they from the foundered land
over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
and one white tree.

---J.R.R. Tolkein

In that continued saga of looking at the possibility of editing for various games, let us take a brief glimpse at Civilization IV's editor.

A very brief glance, since, so far as I can tell, the editor that has been provided with the game may as well not actually exist. It turns out that, for something like half of the editing I do, which is random civs in specific spots on a specific map, it turns out that the easiest, most efficient way to make any changes I have is to open the file in Notepad and edit a bunch of random things that look like this:

BeginPlot
x=19,y=49
BonusType=BONUS_GOLD
FeatureType=FEATURE_FOREST, FeatureVariety=0
TerrainType=TERRAIN_PLAINS
PlotType=1
EndPlot

Deriving the proper X and Y coordinates from loading up the map in the editor and looking. Since there's no way to figure out the coordinates from inside the editor, what this essentially means is picking a place you know the X, Y coordinates of (starting locations are good for this), and then tile counting until you get the right spot. By way of the penalties for missing, let me note to you that it is indeed entirely possible to have copper in the ocean, although I have no idea what good this does you.

This whole process comes about from the fact that to get to the editor, you have to, get this, start up an in-process game, then go to the menu and go to the editor. It's even better if you use the load button to load up a different map. It loads great - as a savegame, so you can PLAY it. The lack of sense here is astounding, but if you get past it, there's actually a reasonable map editor, if not so much a scenario editor, in there. Works great if you're creating something with a specific set of civs in a specific set of spots.

And if you're like me, doing something with a set of random civs in a set of specific spots? You hack files to make terrain changes. Or else every time you use the editor, you get to wipe out and recreate by hand, all your start locations, all your civs, all your teams, all that.

Oh, and every time you want to check if your changes worked? Close the game, restart it, let it load, start a new game, go to the editor, and check. Takes about 5 minutes. You COULD just quit to the main menu and save about half that time, but then your changes only have about a 50/50 chance of being reflected.

Now, supposing you want to do some modding, and I actually do. Well, I hope you like hacking up XML files, because oooh boy are there a lot of XML files to hack up to do just about anything. And, as these things go, they're mostly pretty well laid out XML files that are, as these things go, a joy to work with.

It's just that, and this should sound familiar to most of you, if you don't know what you're looking at, it's pretty well impossible to get anything done. And documentation for all of this is by and large nonexistant, inconsistent, and/or fragmentary. This should sound pretty familiar to some, but man, it's BAD. Oblivion, BFV, BF2? Wikis, and pretty good ones, plus forum support. Civ? Couple main forums, and...it's not good, so far as I can find.

This isn't helped by the near obligatory hacking of Python files for half the things you might want to add, like, oh, I don't know, techs, let's say. Religions. Little things of that nature. Great if you know Python, not so great if you don't. Again, there's a lot of playing Dude, Where's My Docs? to get anything done. And speaking of Python, if you know it, you can write all sorts of crazy cool map scripts for random maps. If you know it. If you can figure out WTF these people are talking about. I can't, so no random maps out of me. Makes me long for the days of Age of Kings, where at least they gave you documentation for the complex scripting language.

In short, awesomely editable game. Looks pretty fun to do, even, and as a long-time modder of Civ games, I'm pretty aware of the gratification you can get. But I'm pretty sure I won't be doing much for this one, because they've made it so damn impenetrable.

Which is a whole other rant. From the days of Civ 2, where I started, the game has gotten progressively better as a game. As an editing environment, we're actually worse off in a lot of ways than we were when Fantastic Worlds was released in 1997. Ten years later, in 2007, we JUST now got workable random events back.

But hey, at least outside of unit graphics you can still get by with Notepad and Paintshop Pro 4, which is pretty much what I was using to edit Civ 2, so that's a plus. The XML also makes it really hard to fatally crash, which is also handy. It could be a great editing environment, if I could ever figure out what the hell to do.

As fireworks are called in some parts. In honor of the thing, two versions of a quote, and a little blather.

As is my wont from time to time, I'm rewatching that immortal Ken Burns epic, The Civil War. I've talked about this series before, and last year at this time, no less, and others have said a lot about it too. And I could say lots more about it, like how the first episode is perhaps the finest piece of documentary filmmaking ever done, but instead I'll just say this:

For the last 15 years or so, I've had The Battle Cry of Freedom stuck in my head. It's my default humming music.

Now, as to the quote:

"Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever, or die by suicide."

---Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in The Civil War

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.

At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we will live through all time, or die by suicide."

---Abraham Lincoln, Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1837 (from The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln)