Animated Civ 2 ToT Units

[Blue Lion]

Are there any animated alternative unit sets for Civ 2 ToT out there? If yes, can you please give me a link to them.

Mercator´s CivSprite-utility is available now for a long time but I have never found some unit sets done with that utility.

[techumseh]

I am not aware of any. It seems to be overly complex and far too much work. Is anyone aware of a program that would make it easier?

[techumseh]

I just checked Mercator's site, and it's been recently updated (and I thought he said he was retired! ), including this piece on ToT animated sprites: http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/re...pr_format.html

My question to Merc is: Do you think it would be possible to create a simplified, standardized spr format that would provide a basic level of animation?

If we could create one each for infantry, cavalry, vehicles, ships and aircraft, folks could use them as a template to draw more realistic versions of specific units.

[Mercator]

CivSprite is fairly horrible. It was more a proof-of-concept than something with real practical value...

It would certainly be possible to simplify things. The advantage of templates is that animations might be easier to make, but the drawback is that they can restrict things a bit too much. The artists would have to fit their work into the templates... Like how Harry Tuttle has been trying to work with the resource animations.

An easy way to simplify things would be to remove the different facing directions by just making them all the same. That reduces the number of animations per unit from 32 to 4.

In the short term I'll have to see what things I can do quickly that will make things easier for you lot.

I'm starting my first (proper) job tomorrow, so I'll have to see how much time that leaves me. But it involves programming, so I might very well be motivated to pick that up again in my spare time as well.

Now I know the full sprite file format, I should be able to create a utility that can create animations from scratch. That would make templates unnecessary, because creators can just make animations however simple or complex they want them.

I never really retired. I was just preoccupied with other things and Civ2 has dropped a good few places on my list of priorities so I don't do much anymore. And that might change... or it might not. I'm always full of ideas anyway, but rarely take the time to actually do anything with them.

[techumseh]

I'm very pleased to hear that you're still on the team!

[Blue Lion]

Thank you for replies. And this by two Civ 2 modding-legends!

My thought is, may be it´s possible to transfer the Civ 3 units to Civ 2 ToT. We open the Civ 3 units with the free utility "Flicster" and get pcx.storyboards for every direction of the unit that can easy be transformed to bmp or gif. May be for resize duties we can use the utility SBB. All these utilities can be downloaded at CFC and may be here on Apolyton too.

The civ-series with Civ IV and Civ Revolution moves away more and more from the parts I did like. When I reflect about my ideal combination of existing civ versions, I came to the conclusion, that I like the events of Civ 2 and the units of Civ 3. May be such a synthesis is possible.

Mercator, much luck with your new job.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by techumseh
I'm very pleased to hear that you're still on the team!

Though on the bench for the time being.


@Blue Lion: Thanks for the Civ3 info. I don't have it, but I just had a look at FLICster... I don't know what SBB is, though a Google search threw up a CivFanatics thread saying it should not be used for resizing.

Being able to easily convert Civ3 animations should probably be a priority, if only because that would give the ToT sprite editor a good library of material to start off with.

I don't know how (or if) the resizing can be done elegantly though.

Feel free to keep posting more animation related things and animation utility ideas... Keeping this thread alive for a while will probably make it more likely I'll start working on this.

What kind of animations do Civ3 units have? Are they all 120x120 big? Are there any other Civ3 utilities that can edit the FLCs? What sort of things would you like to be able to do with a sprite animation utility?

Mercator, much luck with your new job.

Thanks!

[techumseh]

Here's a guide to Civ3 animations (in pdf).

[techumseh]

Originally posted by Mercator

Feel free to keep posting more animation related things and animation utility ideas... Keeping this thread alive for a while will probably make it more likely I'll start working on this.

[Blue Lion]

As I posted here in another thread, may be it´s the best if I do such an animated unit first with the existing possibilities to see what´s really the best.

In the first window of Flicster you see the informations about the flc-animation, among them the size and the frames. The first rows in the flc-pallettes show the civ-colour where the flc-animation is set to transparency. In the extracted single pictures with Flicster and Mercator´s existing tool, these colours always look blue. This does the same effect in Civ 3 as the masks in the civ2 ToT-animations. But they spoil the unit with the civ-colours in it. That´s why in Civ 4 this idea was abandonned and the civ-colour in the health-bars of Civ2 ToT is the better solution.

If possible, if we could get rid of the masks in Civ2 Tot, this would be an improvement. The extracted pictures would be reduced to the half and the masks are no good solution.

The maximum size of a single frame in Civ 3 flicster is 240x240, in civ2 ToT 64x64. But this size in Civ2 Tot can be overclocked. Is there a known border of it for the Civ2 game mechanics?

The number of frames in Civ 3 animations is higher as in the Tot sprites, so there must be choosen what frames of the flc-animation should be used in the ToT-animation. To automate this is not easy, may be impossible.

And there is another tool for doing Civ 3 units, too, the
Civ3FlcEdit. It adds an additional frame to the animation, that´s why some some modders don´t like it.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by techumseh

That doesn't mean I'll post about it though.

The guide you posted was interesting, but probably more interesting for prospective Civ2 animators than for me.

I have sort of started, but nothing more than just trying to put some ideas on paper.

Originally posted by Blue Lion
If possible, if we could get rid of the masks in Civ2 Tot, this would be an improvement. The extracted pictures would be reduced to the half and the masks are no good solution.

I'm not sure what you're on about with these masks. Don't you like the blue colour, or each civ having its own colour? You can change the blue to something else easily enough in an image editor.

Removing the mask from the ToT animations is almost as easy. Export a .spr file to a folder of images. Delete all *.msk.bmp images from that folder and then import the images in the folder back into the original sprite file.

Or are you simply talking about the awful way CivSprite deals with the images, resulting in a load of small images?

The maximum size of a single frame in Civ 3 flicster is 240x240, in civ2 ToT 64x64. But this size in Civ2 Tot can be overclocked. Is there a known border of it for the Civ2 game mechanics?

It can't really be increased. It is possible in theory, but anything larger than 64x64 creates serious graphical glitches. Not to mention that the graphics aren't centered on a tile but aligned to the lower-left corner, so the bigger the graphic the further it will expand up and to the right. A settler doubled in size to 128x128 looks like it's standing on the tile to the Northeast of the tile it's actually standing on.

The number of frames in Civ 3 animations is higher as in the Tot sprites, so there must be choosen what frames of the flc-animation should be used in the ToT-animation. To automate this is not easy, may be impossible.

Civ3 certainly has more animations per unit, but I doubt it uses more frames per animation... I just read Civ3 animations are typically 15 frames. ToT has room for 1024 images per file, which means there's room for 32 frames, on average, for each of the 32 animations.

[Blue Lion]

1. Masks: The civ-colours in the units are disturbing.
When the sprits are working while the masks are deleted then this is the best solution in my eyes.

And the flood of images is a pain. But if stripes of images are better, i can only say, when the first unit is done.

2. At time I try to do a replacement for one of the most ugliest units in Civ ToT: The Ironclad.

When I use Civ Sprite, I get 10 images of the original ironclad in each direction. The Civ 3 file for the unit, that should replace the old ironclad, has 20 images in each direction.

Did I understand you well, that i can take all 20 images of the Civ 3unit in the new sprite for one direction and must not cut out 10 of the twenty Civ 3 images (as I thought)?

Per example: The extracted images for the old ToT Ironclad with the run-action "South" are the images 190-199. When I replace them with the new Civ 3 run "South" images is it possible to add the 20 images as 190-209? Or have I to cut out 10 of the replacing images?

Thanks for your help.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Blue Lion
1. Masks: The civ-colours in the units are disturbing.
When the sprits are working while the masks are deleted then this is the best solution in my eyes.

Go for it... I think they can be used to great effect though, have a look at the multi-coloured spearmen in the image accompanying the 3rd news item down on this page: http://users.tpg.com.au/jpwbeest/

And the flood of images is a pain. But if stripes of images are better, i can only say, when the first unit is done.

Quite. It just killed my image editor loading all the images. It would certainly look much neater in the folder, just having a few stripes. But then I'm not really making animations, so please do tell me what you think is the most convenient way.

Did I understand you well, that i can take all 20 images of the Civ 3unit in the new sprite for one direction and must not cut out 10 of the twenty Civ 3 images (as I thought)?

Well, as soon as I'm finished with my brand-new, spiffy sprite editor you won't have to. But that'll take a good while. Using CivSprite you'll have to do some cutting.

Or, actually, you could see if there's another unit sprite file that uses more frames and use that as a base instead. Just change the number in that sprite's filename to whichever number the Ironclad is. All UnitXX.spr files are interchangeable.

[Blue Lion]

Today I had the time to work again on the Civ 2 Tot Ironclad sprite. The Civ 3 flc-files are 240 pixels size or a rip of out of ít. The Civ 3 flics had to be shrinked down. The biggest size Civ Sprite did accept were 128 pixel files. The unit looked very detailed on the map but it was not to operate without big graphical glitches (of course). The next size that was accepted by Civ Sprite were 64 pixels.

This means the Civ 3 unit had to be shrinked to about 1/4th of its normal size. When I did this shrinking by simply reducing the bmp-file to 64 pix., there was nothing more on the shrinked file to see. So the unit on the 240 pixel file, where it is always centered, had to be cut out in a quadratic box around that unit, that was much smaller as the 240 pix. file. I used a centered function of psp7 for this job. As a result I got an image that was much nearer to the 64 pixel size. Now the transparency had to be changed to the Civ 2 standard for each file.

I attache a prototype of the Ironclad Sprite, used as Sprite 36 in the Civ2 ToT Original game. The sprite still has transparency issues especially in the East-West directions and in this direction it is always falling back for a short moment to the original (incredible worse) Civ2 ToT Ironclad. Now I understand a little bit, why most of the original Civ2 ToT units are looking so bad. I think, the original modells were shrinked to an unbelievable small size and than it was tried to rework them manually, so that something could be seen.

Another problem seems to be, that only the attacking unit is animated. It mostly fires in the wrong direction.
On the other side: The attack animation and the death animation of these small units seem to be a big progress in Civ 2 ToT.

The normal landunits must only be shrinked by one half.

Thanks for the link to these wonderful Civ2 units. To use a mask can be a gag for a single type of unit if the players are not used to it. Im used to it more than enough with Civ 3 and I really don´t like this feature. If all units of a Civ have these red clothes or the tanks have blue parts in them, this is no fun for me. Such a unit, especially a technical unit is mostly spoiled with civ colours on it. Civ 2 players should be glad that they have the civ colour as a not so disturbing part of the health bar. In my eyes this is a much better solution as the civ-colours on units in Civ 3, that started with these -in my eyes- ugly masks in Civ2 ToT and continued with these also ugly flags in Civ 4.

I attache here a screene with the confrontation of 2 of my Civ2 ToT ironclads in the highest zoom-level. It´s a pity, that I wasn´t able to do a screenshot of a fight between two ironclads or the sinking of one of these units, as this would be really impressive.

Edited:Old screene replaced by new screenes that show the current state of the animated ironclad unit (or better: Predreadnought) in high zoom view and standard view. 10thNov.2007

Blue Lion/Civinator

[Blue Lion]

Here I attache the prototype of the ironclad as a zip file.
There are still some graphical glitches in it (see the post above), but may be somebody is interested in the attack and sinking graphics of that unit. The original Civ3 unit was done by Wyrmshadow.

Edited: Deleted the completely outdated file.