Animated Civ 2 ToT Units

[Blue Lion]

And here is the Static units file.

Edited: Deleted the completely outdated file.

[Blue Lion]

I´m still working with animating Civ 2 ToT units. The problem, that the unit was firing in another direction was bound to a "rotate before attack command" in the Civ 3 flc-files. It was fixed easily by changing the attack animations of the different directions, so that each attack animation now gets the image number of the direction it fires.

About "massproduction" of animated Civ 2 ToT units: I don´t think, that this is possible with Civ 3 units if you want to have somewhat of a quality immage. Here are too much problems with shrinking and transparency issues that must be solved manually.

But it shouldn´t be a great problem to give the Civ 2 ToT units back a kind of battle images and of death immages.

To add an explosion as it was used in the later versions of Civ 2 is really no problem.

For battle images with old units (pre-gunpowder), may be the old battle animation with the crossed swords can be used as animated part inside such a unit. For later units some light effects can be used.

The movement can be on a static base as it is now done with the direct bmp pictures in ToT. I hope it is still figured out, what kind of run-directions here are melted together.

At the end of this post I attache the attack animation of my ironclad in the original size of 64x64 pixel and the death animation in the same size. I think it is astonishing what is still possible with this very small size.

[Blue Lion]

...and here is the death animation:

[Blue Lion]

To convert Civ 3 modern infantry units to Civ 2 Tot can be much easier. If one sacrifices the axis of the unit (where it has to turn around with its animations) here even 1:1 conversions are possible.

Here is an attack animation of a German MG unit in 64x64 pixels (ToT format). If the movements of this unit should all be centered around an axis of the body, the size of the unit must at least shrinked down to the half.

[Mercator]

Do those ships look good in-game too? The animations might look clear, but they'll be a lot harder to spot and distinguish from eachother in muddy terrain graphics.

The ships in that screenshot you posted earlier seem tiny compared to what we're used to.

But nice work.

I'm afraid I haven't done much on my part yet. You can blame techumseh for that. He hired me for another task.

[Blue Lion]

The attack and death animations look good in game, too. The ship, I take as ironclad (a predreadnought) is smaller than a normal 64x64 unit as there must be some place for the rotations.

The problem is, I can´t do a screenshot from such an unit in action with the print/paste-methode. My methode to convert these units has massively improved. I now use much better filter methods. The silhouette of the ship in the dowload and the in-game-screenshot was sharpened a lot. To do a screene of such an unit in action in the game in the moment isn´t so easy as I must replace the static graphics with an attack or death animation to have a chance for such a screenshot.

And Mercator you did such a lot with doing this editor and with giving me some hints. So you have done your part more as enough in the past and it´s only somewhat dreary, that nobody did use your tool.

In the moment I´m experimenting with this unit: A Russian KV 2, done by Riptide, and I will try to do some in-game screenes of it. Here are the 64x64 attack animations:

[Blue Lion]

Here are some screenes with the KV2. A standard zoom view and a High Zoom view. In the moment the unit still has some transparency issues (I´m working with that unit since today´s late afternoon). This is no normal combat, so this functions without problems. But I could do the screenshots only after I switched the attack animation to the normal static animation.

[Blue Lion]

...and High Zoom:

[Blue Lion]

For a new version of CivSprite, may be it would be a good idea -if possible- to show, how many frames the sprite has in each direction. At present I have to open all these sprites to find the right one that has the sufficiant number of frames. Flicster gives the frames-info for the Civ 3 unit that should be converted without any problems.

[Mercator]

Do you prefer working with the single frame images or the "storyboard"? If I go for the storyboard showing the number of frames wouldn't be necessary, right?

Also, why do you want to know the number? Is it because you have to find an existing unit that matches the number of frames for the new unit you want to create?

If it's only because of that it shouldn't be an issue at all. In an eventual next version of CivSprite you'd be able to create sprite animations from scratch, so you're not limited anymore to editing the existing animations.

It would probably have the option of importing a collection of 64x64 bitmap images or an Nx64 bitmap storyboard (where N is a multiple of 64) to create a new animation or something.

Please feel free to give any more suggestions. And try to forget what CivSprite (or even Flicster) looks like now. What would you ask for if you wanted the ultimate sprite editor?

[techumseh]

Woo-hoo!

[Blue Lion]

Mercator, this is great news.

As you mentioned, with your existing editor CivSprite, I have to find an existing sprite with the appropriate number of frames for each animation and direction.
Normally for converting Civ 3 units, you need 15 or more frames (mostly 15) for an animation/direction.

A great help for doing these conversions is, that the civ3 units in Flicster always are centered and therefor cutouts of the images you get by Flicster can easily be centered, too.

In the moment I do the conversions with PSP7 the following way (you can see it with my attached screene about the Greek swordsman and my other conversions at present in work):

1. Find an appropriate Civ3 unit and extract that Civ 3 unit with flicster in single pcx-files to a created new folder with the subfolders a) Attack b) Move c) Death

2. Set the transparency (for PSP7) to 255 and enlarge the colour depth to 24 Bit.

3. Make a cutout of each image of the unit centered around the unit with the command (in German): Leinwandgröße "X" and the the order vertical and horizontal centered. "X" is the smallest size of the cutout that fits around all animations of the unit in all directions.

Note: For some "non-spear"-foot units, that step isn´t necessairy as their size in flicster is only somewhat over 70 and here direct shrinking to 64x64 format without loss of too much quality of the images is possible.

4. Resize the pictures with the command "Bildgröße" to 64x64 format, sharpen them and save them in a new folder in bmp-format (I called it 64x64 in the screene)

5. Fix the transparency issues in each image. This is the most time consuming step and that´s why at present I prefer the tons of single images. Each image, even with animations in the same direction can have different transparency problems (for example you can see some in my screene of the KW2-tank around the wheels).

6 Rename the needed images to the name of the used sprite, give them in one folder and import them with CivSprite to the sprite you have chosen (with enough frames for the animations).

For the ultimate sprite editor:

I´m sure here I will have some additional ideas to the following if I reflect a little bit longer about it.

The steps 1,2 can be done much quicker, if the new CivSprite editor has the option to import storyboards and this would harmonize better with flicster, which has the possibility to extract storyboards from the Civ 3 unit.

The problem is, that for a proper quality of most extracted Civ3 units, each single image of that unit must be cut out around the center to a smaller size, that should not exceed 128x128 (the best case would be a 64x64 size, as here no shrinking is needed what is possible for some Civ 3 foot units).

If the whole flicster-storyboard, which can have a size of 240x240 for each single image, is shrinked to 64x64 you can see nothing of the unit in each of the pictures as most parts of these pictures are transparency. For example my Ironclad animation is converted from a 240x240 flicster size and when I went the easy way to shrink the whole flicster storyboard, all single pictures only did contain one colour and not a single pixle from the unit in those images did left.

So an ultimate CivSprite editor must have the option to cut out centered pictures in a setable size of each image inside that storyboard. This would be a great help if all cutouts of an animation sequenze could be done with a single command.

These cutout-pictures centered around the Civ3-unit have a much smaller size, but contain the same size of the unit inside this image. So for example for my Ironclad unit, I made centered cutouts of 120x120 and than I only had to shrink down 120x120 images to the 64x64 size needed for Civ2 ToT. With this methode the shrink down from 240x240, where you can´t see anything of the unit after doint it, was avoided. To shrink Civ 3 units to more than half of their size mostly leads to an inacceptable loss of quality of that unit.

An automated name function for each of the reimported images would be great, too.

An ultimate CivSprite should additionally have an option to give conventional Civ2 graphics back some kind of a battle and death animation that previous versions of Civ 2 had and that were cancelled for Civ2 ToT as the creators thought here these animations are not longer needed (what was without doubt a bad decision).

So an option to add automatically some light effects (like different battle explosions in the background or combatting swords animations) to the attack animation of normal static units, as there exist in myriards of high quality for Civ 2, would be nice. The same for an option to add automatically a standard death animation to static conventional Civ 2 units. May be an option to automatically add the standard explosion of former Civ2 versions as a simple death animation for these units would be nice too. So all existing normal Civ 2 units can have a nice update for Civ2 ToT, too.

At the end I want to say, that I´m not a graphic-specialist and may be there are much better solutions to handle such conversions, but on the other side, nothing happened with animated Civ2 ToT units in the last years and one fact is sure: It´s much more fun to play Civ2 ToT with animated units on an acceptable standard.






Edited 17th Nov. 2007; reason wrong spelling of the frequently used word size

[Mercator]

Don't cheer just yet. CivSprite 2 is still on hold, probably till next year. And after that it'll take at least 3 months to do, probably closer to 6.

Thanks for the input, thouh. Keep it coming!

I'm not sure to what extent I can or will support any preprocessing like you're saying. I'll be focussing first on what happens when you've already got images in the right format. I'd need to find some existing code that allows me to deal with PCX files in any case, if I want to do that properly...

Originally posted by Blue Lion
So an ultimate CivSprite editor must have the option to cut out centered pictures in a setable seize of each image inside that storyboard. This would be a great help if all cutouts of an animation sequenze could be done with a single command.

... But doing the cropping could be very handy. I suppose it's not entirely CivSprite's job to ensure that the animations actually look good, so if it can just ease the conversion job and still allow importing/exporting too, then CivSprite could create a working sprite file in a few simple steps and leave it up to you to clean up shadows etc.

An automated name function for each of the reimported images would be great, too.

Quite. Better file names will make things easier on the eye.

An ultimate CivSprite should additionally have an option to give conventional Civ2 graphics back some kind of a battle and death animation that previous versions of Civ 2 had and that were cancelled for Civ2 ToT as the creators thought here these animations are not longer needed (what was without doubt a bad decision).

(...)

Interesting...
I don't remember seeing a death animation in standard Civ2. And adding a battle animation is rather limited. ToT only animates the attacking unit, not the defender, so it's impossible to do the back and forth cloud thingy like you see in Civ2.

But that's a good idea. In fact, another simple animation could be to make an Idle unit blink, since people are having trouble spotting the blinking "cursor."

And a little side-note: it's size not seize.

[Blue Lion]

Originally posted by Mercator
Don't cheer just yet. CivSprite 2 is still on hold, probably till next year. And after that it'll take at least 3 months to do, probably closer to 6.

The job still can be done with your existing CivSprite and it´s great that you did this tool.

Originally posted by Mercator I'll be focussing first on what happens when you've already got images in the right format. I'd need to find some existing code that allows me to deal with PCX files in any case, if I want to do that properly...

What images in the right format do you need? I can post here some finished animated units and all images that were done on the way to the finished Civ 2 ToT unit.

Additionally I will have a closer look on the Civ3 utilities section at CFC, if there is something that we can use in addition to flicster.

Originally posted by Mercator
I suppose it's not entirely CivSwap's job to ensure that the animations actually look good, so if it can just ease the conversion job and still allow importing/exporting too, then CivSwap could create a working sprite file in a few simple steps and leave it up to you to clean up shadows etc.

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

Originally posted by Mercator
I don't remember seeing a death animation in standard Civ2. And adding a battle animation is rather limited. ToT only animates the attacking unit, not the defender, so it's impossible to do the back and forth cloud thingy like you see in Civ2.

But that's a good idea. In fact, another simple animation could be to make an Idle unit blink, since people are having trouble spotting the blinking "cursor."

Simple death animation for standard Civ 2 units:

I thought there was a version of Civ 2, when the unit, that lost the combat, exploded. But this was all long ago and may be here my memory is wrong. But at least the standard Civ 2 battle animation with an explosion can be automatically added to standard Civ 2 units as a kind of simple death animation.

Simple combat animation for standard Civ 2 units:

It´s a problem that only the attacking unit is animated. 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. May be flickering explosion colours (yellow, orange, white) for modern units and the crossing swords animation for ancient units. Here not the whole image should be flickering but only the zone, where the combat occurs. Per example if the attacking unit is fighting in the direction North-East, the battle animation should be in the North-East zone of the unit.

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? To give the unit some additional static frames with combat animations, that are only activated, if the the focus is longer on that unit, as this occurs in a combat? If I remember well, the static sprites had to be removed if you wanted to use the direct bmp- unit graphics in Civ 2 ToT. Otherwise you would always see the first frame of the static sprite. What happens, if the static sprite has more than one frame in each direction?

An option for a flickering unit when the unit is activated is a nice addition.

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


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.

[Blue Lion]

As I now post with my normal avatar in this forum, I show you another unit I´m experimenting with. It´s a swordsman in Civ2 Tot format. To form the feet out of the shaddows of the Civ 3 animation is difficult.

Edited 19th Nov.2007: replaced the swordsman slow motion animation with a normal motion animation.

You can see the swordman running animation now here together with the other swordman animations:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=5153246#post5153246