Request for mod: usability mod for top-down view

[VetLegion]

I never liked isometric. I would like to play with map zoomed out as much as possible and from a straight bird's eye perspective, like it was in Civ1.

This is somewhat possible with Civ4, except I can't discern units from each other, I can't figure out what resources are there and so on.

I (and possibly others?) would like to see a mod that would make it comfortable to play at that perspective and level of zoom.

Something akin to this:

[VetLegion]

The point is making units and resources (and terrain, but that's not so big a problem) distinguishable at a glance.

The cursor is not neccessary but would be a nice touch

[Stone-D]

Units and resources would be easy to mod for this purpose, as it is a simple matter to edit the textures. Run them through a contrast filter or something.

The camera perspective, though, dunno.

To edit the textures (if you wanna try yourself) you need a graphics package that can edit DDS textures.

Photoshop, for example, can do it, but you need to download nVidia's DDS plugin from somewhere on nvidia.com.

I've been using that plugin myself for several days, downsizing the bigger textures and microsizing the less important ones, purely for performance's sake.

[VetLegion]

The perspective is OK, I think, I've just got the game and maybe this level of zoom wouldn't be optimal in the long run, it seems cool enough. Maybe a little more zoomed in than this:



Compare with:

[VetLegion]

Thanks for the tip about tools, unfortunately I'm not really a modder so I won't be doing this but hopefully someone else has the same wish to play like this and we can find someone who would do it. No rush.

[VetLegion]

flobi on CivFanatics seems to think along similar lines, though I'd prefer to keep Civ4 terrain and just get usable resources and units. But this is great work anyway:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=142767

[flobi]

Just a note, I am flobi here too, just not as frequent here.

[flobi]

About the resources, one of the buttons above the mini-map let's you see those at a glance. Like this:



You can do this with military, but you have to zoom out one more level. I think you can tell them to do stuff while zoomed out that far but it's harder to tell cause you don't see their animations.

[Blake00]

Damn.. apologies for the necro but sadly the download for this doesn't work anymore over inflobi 's thread at CFC and he's been away from both there and here for a while now. Anyone still have a copy of it somewhere? I have large file upload access to CFC and have been rescuing lots of old long lost mods around the place so will do the same with this one if it resurfaces.

I did actually manage to find another site that hosted it as the old gamespy Civ downloads area had a copy however that download sadly failed too! It did have a picture though..



Why try? Well a lot of the old mod rescues I'm doing are also for a Civ video series I'm making and I also recently worked on a Civ1 graphics mod for Civ2 . I will be doing a video on that and had the thought that I should look to see if there were Civ1 mods for later Civ games I could mention and sure enough there are! Problem is they're all missing now days lol.

[destroyer of many worlds]

Civ IV lags like hell