Animated Civ 2 ToT Units

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Blue Lion
What images in the right format do you need?

In the right format would be 64x64 bitmaps/bitmap storyboards. My main focus will first be to make an animation editor, so you can pick frames and make loops and stuff. After that I'll worry about pre-processign steps.

Can it be here the tools CivSprite and CivSwap are mixed up? I thought CivSwap is for batch files.

Whoops! I'm currently working on an update for CivSwap, so I mixed them up.

Simple death animation for standard Civ 2 units:
(...)
Simple combat animation for standard Civ 2 units:

I'm not seeing them... But since they're in the standard game, I have them too.

May be for standard Civ 2 units there should be an option in an ultimate CivSprite to give some flickering colours in the zone of the attacking unit, that borders to the unit that is to be attacked.

I don't think that's really possible. For Northeast and Northwest maybe, but the other directions are going to be tricky, and the Southern directions are probably undoable.

For the animated civ 2 ToT units: Is there a possibility with the static sprites of the unit, that is attacked, to give it a possibility of firing back in a combat? (...) What happens, if the static sprite has more than one frame in each direction?

Static sprites are just that: static. They're not animations. They only have one picture per unit... But hmmm... You gave me an idea...

Of course this are only dreams for an ultimate CivSprite editor. Presumable this is not possible.

Well, some are impossible to do, some are difficult and some are easy.

And the word size was edited to the correct spelling. Thank you for that hint. This word with my wrong spelling was used much too often in my last post.

No problem.


That swordsman looks excellent!
I think that one could benefit from using a civ mask too. Different colour clothes isn't so funny as different colour ships.

[BillyBud]

Blue Lion:

This is excellent news! Those sprites look terrific

I just might switch to ToT.

All the best Mercator with your efforts as well!

[McMonkey]

I don't know if you have seen this forum already or if these units would be useful/possible to convert but they looked similar to what you are working on:

Civ Fan Animated CivIII Units

[Blue Lion]

Mercator, BillyBud and McMonkey:

Thank you all for you encouraging replies.

@ Mercator, you will get 64x64 storyboards and I´m of course curious about your idea with the static files.

@BillyBud, in the moment there is only one unit completely ready: The ironclad, but here I have to redo two directions of gunfire animation, as here an other position of the ship is necessairy. This unit looks a lot better than the "first-try-prototype" I posted here for download.

@ McMonkey, the main point of this thread is the conversion of Civ 3 units to Civ 2 ToT format and a side point is to give the existing Civ 2 units an additional combat and death animation. So it´s no wonder, that these conversions are remembering you to Civ 3 units,
as they are all civ 3 units.

If you do a search at CFC , you will see, that I did there more than 1,000 posts, mostly in the Civ 3modding forums. AT CFC I post with the name Civinator as the name Blue Lion is blocked there by an other civer. The reason, why I didn´t have more posts at Apolyton - so I´m much longer a member at Apolyton as at CFC - is, that for a long time I couldn´t receive an activation code from Apolyton . Whith the Aprils joke about Civjunction some prominent members of Apolyton posted at CFC, amongst them Solver. I sent him a pm and Solver solved my problem. Therefore I´m very thankful to him.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Blue Lion
@ Mercator, you will get 64x64 storyboards and I´m of course curious about your idea with the static files.

Well, I don't need those storyboards, you do. People using the (as of yet imaginary) CivSprite 2 need such storyboards before CivSprite could turn them into ToT animations.

The idea with the static file didn't work out. Static sprite files don't have animation information so can't be animated. But I thought that maybe they would animate if I added animation info to them (like in the other sprite files). But that doesn't work.

[Boco]

Originally posted by Blue Lion


Yes. In the next days I will post here a little bit more:
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=169829

[Blue Lion]

Here is a -so I hope- fully useable swordman sprite that replaces the ugly Legion animation of the Civ2 ToT Original game. It is a transferred and massivly reworked Civ 3 unit. At present I don´t know the original artist of the Civ 3 unit.

Standard-zoom view on the static sprite:



Maximum-zoom view on the static sprite:



Here are the single animations:

a) The Swordman-run animation:



b) The Swordman-attack animation:



c) The Swordman-death animation:




The attack and death animations show each 14 animated bmp-images, the run-animation 10 bmp-images. For the swordman-sprite I couldn´t find an existing sprite that has all these settings. So I had to cut down the attack and death-animations from each 14 images to ten images (but I think this sprite looks well in these animations, too).

Mercator, if you should decide to work again on Civ-Sprite, please give the possibility to customize the number of images for a sprite a high priority.

Here is a zip-file that replaces the Unit 05-Sprite and the static sprite for the Legion-unit in the Civ2 TOT Original game. For those who want to try this unit themselves, please first make a backup copy of your static-sprite and the unit05-sprite and then simply unzip the zip-file in the folder with the Civ2 ToT Original game.

Edited: Reloaded the zip after I found some small graphical glitches in the static sprite. And after I changed some images in the static file, I was not able to reopen that file with Civ Sprite again. So please really do these backups before trying these files:

http://apolyton.net/upload/view/21721_Swordman.zip

[Mercator]

Thanks

How do the death animations look in-game? Everything below the terrain tile diamond will disappear, so it'll get cut off. But I suppose they fade anyway, so you won't see it as much.

[Blue Lion]

The death animation looks like it is shown in my last post and you can see all terrain around the unit as normal. After death the unit fades away, so there is no problem with the terrain tile underneath that unit.

If you replace the ToT unit file of sprite 05 in the original game with the new sprite and let two of these units fight against each other in the cheat mode, you can make your own picture about the death animation.

[Mercator]

I think you misunderstood me. But the problem isn't as bad as I thought it would be...

When the legion is attacked from the square below it and dies, the bottom end of his shield disappears (because it extends below the diamond-shape of the square it stands on).

The colourful legion looks a bit off against the drab standard ToT colours now.

[Blue Lion]

Originally posted by Mercator
I think you misunderstood me. But the problem isn't as bad as I thought it would be...

When the legion is attacked from the square below it and dies, the bottom end of his shield disappears (because it extends below the diamond-shape of the square it stands on).

The colourful legion looks a bit off against the drab standard ToT colours now.

Yes, now I understand what you have said..and the swordsman will get some adequate enemies.

[techumseh]

All I can do is sit on the sidelines and cheer!

[Blue Lion]

As there are now more than 1.000 views on this thread, here I show another Civ 2 ToT unit I´m experimenting with. It´s a Civ 3 junk that was made by Aaglo (so I suppose).

[yaroslav]

Very, very impressive. Being so clumsy as I am, specially with graphs, I really admire this

[Blue Lion]

Boco, techumseh and yaroslav,
thank you all for your encouraging replies.

This post focuses on one of the - in my eyes - most important themes, the partly animation of existing standard Civ 2 ToT non animated one-bitmap-unit-images.

Here is a kind of combat animation for a normally not animated T-34 tank of the reworked Red Front scenario.

What do you think about such a kind of animation?