A few very newbish questions

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by tylertoo:
1) Is there a map editor? (Sorry, I'm sure this is mentioned somewhere, can't seem to find it.)

Map Editing can be done with any programs. I use NotePad and Paint. Im trying to learn GIMP as a better paint program (its free and what the devs use). The maps are made up of 2 files. An image of .TGA extension. And a text file of .MAP extension. The .map file uses commands such as
#dom2title Hard2Beat
#imagefile hard.tga
#description "a game I made. best with 4-6 players"

There is a mapeditor as part of the game but at the momnet it just makes some things easier for making the map file such as assiging terrains and neighbor commands.

2) Do most of you vets just bypass the battle replays? It seems like it would get old after a bit. Is there any strategic/educational value to watching these?

I skip alot but end up watching maybe 1 of every 10 combats. There would be something I need to know such as if my latest tactic worked, was my mage smart enough to use the item I gave him or do I need to script the commands, who was left at the end of a battle I lost and how banged up were they, what mages did the other guy have and what tactics did he use.

3) Who are the two guys who made this game? Where are they from? Do they post here? What is their experience with post-release support?

Kristoffer Osterman , Johan Karlsson. Both are here in this group. Also Johan Osterman which is a brother will often field questions. Southern Sweden near Lund I believe. Yes they post here often. Well they read here often, they post rarely. But they definetly listen to us. They seem to let us do the debating and just toss in formulas and such occassionally.

With Dom1 (which I played for 3 years) patches were frequent and rarely needed to fix bugs. They tended to be full of any suggestions or tweaks we requested and could convince them were a good idea. The support of Dom1 can be seen in the Version history on the illwinter site, and in googling for the conversations that happened in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic newsgroup.

4) How is MP hosted? Is PBEM more popular than real time?

Real time is more popular. But the PBEM Version will support a web server hosting hundreds of games at once. Even if it uses some sort of easy drag-n-drop arrangment instead of actual emails.

additional 1) Is there a way to save your preferred camera angles for the battle replays?

I dont think so.

additional 2) Is there a way to have multiple save games? The save game thing confuses me a bit.

The save game is based on being PBEM. A player makes his turn, saves it, sends the turn file to the host. When all turn files are in then the host processes them together to get the results. A result file is created for each player and sent back to them. The player views the results of his actions, gives instructions to his units, and saves another turn file. Understanding the PBEM structure tends to exaplain alot. Such as why combat cant be managed. Its already managed at the host. What you watch is already history. A report from your commanders.

And the game saves. When you hit save, it creates a file that has all your plans and actions. If you hit save too fast then you can pick it back up and make changes. But once you hit host, everything is history.

You can have multiple saves but (for now, maybe changed later) its all done outside the game. If I have a game called "mygame" then its in a subdirectory off of the Dominions 2 directory. I can manually make a copy of that at any point before hitting host thereby having that turn saved. Some people have written 3rd party routines to do this. For my larger test games I just have a desktop icon to copy mygame to mygame2, and another icon to copy mygame2 back to mygame. Its kludgy but it works.