Apolyton Civilization Site - CtP2 Creation

Trouble with images

BureauBert — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:32:07 GMT

This is beginning to drive me crazy: It used to be as easy as it should be with my old Photoshop 6 to edit the simple images after having them converted from *.tga to anything else and to reconvert them back to *.tga after my modifications. But helas! Trusty old Photoshop 6 no longer runs on the world-dominating OS. With current Photoshop Elements, Gimp and any other image editing software i'm now runnig into troubles without end: First of all they all tend to add an alpha-channel even if the original image had none, they change bit-depth of the encoding, add unvisible layers which I can only detect by giving the command to delete them and so on and so forth. This causes endless clicking back and forth to edit a small, simple image which I could edit in 2 minutes only a couple of years ago.

And in one case I am completely clueless what may still be in the image (or being lacking from it) that causes this result: I created this Start Screen for MoT-Mod:

exported it as *.tga, RGB, 8-bit, w/o alpha-channel -- and the in-game result is the following:

If I add the darn alpha-channel the game just crashes.

I would be extremely thankful if someone out there could give me a clue or hint on what is happening there.

(An extremely helpful alternative would be an instruction on how to get Photoshop 6 running again on the "cutting edge"-W-OS ...)

For forensic puposes I also attach the *.tga-file that gives the black surface and does not crash the game:

City Surroundings Explained

BureauBert — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:58:17 GMT

Another thing I always found hard to understand (squared radius?!) and hard to keep in mind when modding DB-files used to be "city surroundings data". To overcome this annoyance I created a small image as a memory card:

The image shows the city radii as the city grows. The numbers indicate the following:

first number: the INT-radius
second number (T): number of tiles the radius comprises
third number (SQ): the SQUARED radius. You shalt count diagonally from the center tile to the edge tile of the respective radius, which from int-radius 2 onwards already belongs to the next radius (to no mans land for the last radius), then you shalt multiply this number by 4 (not by 3, except you proceed to the 4 -- 5 is right out).

In the hopes this might be helpful for someone -- cheers Bert

Adding Sound Effects to the game

BureauBert — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:56:40 GMT

In the background I am heavily working on MoT-Mod 2.0. I revised almost each and every file, did a lot of cleanup etc. and my latest playtests are promising. I even got rid of all SLIC-errors with DebugSlic on (except for one that apparently has to do with players not yet having founded a city and hence not yet being alive [at least for some part of the exe], which all IsPlayerAlive-checks don't eliminate).

However ... I have achieved a nice success regarding SOUNDS: I thought it would add to the atmosphere of the game to replace the odd "building complete"-audio message by sounds/sound effects that match the character of the building (e.g. flowing water for the aqueduct, some religious atmosphere for the shrine, etc.). Now there is only one explicit sound-function in SLIC, and that's PlaySound.

The disadvantage of PlaySound is, that the sound gets played unconditionally for all players and regardless if the city is visible. I wanted the "building complete"-sound to be played only for the city owner (who naturally can see it), but not for other players (even if they *can* see the city). After quite a while of pondering I came to this solution:

Code:

HandleEvent(CreateBuilding) 'BuildingSound' post {
location_t sfxLoc;
int_t sfxBldg;
int_t sfxPlayer;
int_t sfxCurrPlayer;

sfxLoc = city[0].location;
sfxBldg = value[0].value;
sfxPlayer = city[0].owner;
sfxCurrPlayer = g.player;

if(sfxPlayer == sfxCurrPlayer) {
if(sfxBldg == BuildingDB(IMPROVE_SHRINE)) {
AddEffect(sfxLoc, "SPECEFFECT_BLANC", "SOUND_SHRINE");
}
... and so on for all buildings ...

One tricky part of adding an effect just to play a sound is the effect sprite. In the first place I used "SPECEFFECT_NONE" which already exists in speceffectid.txt with sprite number -1. This does not work, obviously because the invalid sprite number causes the exe to omit the entire effect. So I had to create an effect sprite which consists of nothing else but transparency, gave it the number 98 and named it SPECEFFECT_BLANC. And hooray: this works just fine.

I attach "GX98.SPR" (the blanc effect sprite) for those who want to experiment with this method themselves.