README.md

Civ6 post-game summary POC

This is a toy dataset which uses savefiles from a game called Civilization VI and generates a post-game video of the in-game tile ownership over time.

You can see the general workflow for generating a postgame replay video in the diagram below.

Requirements

Install Viash and Nextflow in a directory that are on the $PATH, e.g. $HOME/bin.

mkdir $HOME/bin
curl -fsSL http://dl.viash.io | bash; mv viash $HOME/bin
curl -s https://get.nextflow.io | bash; mv nextflow $HOME/bin

Make sure that Viash and Nextflow are on the $PATH by checking whether the following commands work:

viash -v
nextflow -v

Run a release build of the pipeline

NXF_VER=22.04.5 nextflow \
  run viash-io/civ6_pipeline \
  -r main_build \
  -main-script workflows/civ6_pipeline/main.nf \
  --input "data/*.Civ6Save" \
  --publishDir "output" \
  -resume \
  -with-docker

Run the development build of the pipeline

First build components for the pipeline. Building the docker containers from scratch will take a while.

viash ns build --parallel --setup cb

Generate the post-game summary movie (stored at output/output.webm) by running:

workflows/civ6_pipeline/run.sh

Known issues

Note that this pipeline may not extend its support beyond the specific assets used in this video. Rendering other world leaders, wonders, and additional elements may require further development.

Background on Civilization

Civilization is a series of six video strategy games where players oversee the development of a civilization, starting from the dawn of civilizations until present times. Not only is the series famous for having defined a lot of the game mechanics in the 4X genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate), it is also frequently associated with the “One More Turn Syndrome”.

Post-game replay map

Multiplayer games can take a few hours to finish – anywhere between 2 to 10 hours, depending on who you’re playing with. That’s why a perfect way of closing a session of Civilization V is by being able to watch a ‘postgame map replay’ of which owner owned which time at any given point in time.

However, for whatever reason, this feature did not make it in Civilization VI. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Rendering post-game replay maps

At Data Intuitive, we’re all about alleviating people’s suffering, so we developed a few scripts for rendering a postgame video for Civilization VI using open-source tools. It works by letting the game automatically creates saves for every turn of the game (called ‘autosaves’). An autosave contains all the information to resume the game from that point in time. Since the information that we need is stored in a format, we need scripts to: 1. extract the information from the binary format (in JavaScript), 2. generate a map visualisation (in R), 3. convert all the visualisations into a video (with ImageMagick and ffmpeg).

Inspiration

• pydt/civ6-save-parser

• lucienmaloney/civ6save-editing