Transcribing units & terrain

[Michael Daumen]

What is everyone doing as far a making new units for ToT scenarios? Will you continue to make units the same way? If not, what have you changed? Will you import wholesale terrain and unit graphics from Civ2?

[techumseh]

I've tried to move units over from Civ2, then re-size them for the new frame. Guess what? They get the same "fuzzy" look as the units that come with ToT. (This might explain a lot.) So either keep them the same size as FW/MGE, or design new ones from scratch.

[William Keenan]

There are two primary differences in unit graphics in ToT:

• ToT offers more colors (16 million) then FW or MGE (256 colors).
• Unit height can be 23 pixels taller.

This means near photo quality units that can be in scale with each other. For example, check out the image quality difference between one of the best female FW units and one I did the other day for ToT.



Another plus is that scanned and resized images translate much clearer into ToT then FW so even non-artist types can produce original images for their scenarios.

IMHO when there are as many scenarios for ToT as there currently are for MGE it will be the ones with new art that get played.


[This message has been edited by William Keenan (edited October 07, 1999).]

[Michael Daumen]

I guess I don't see any reason NOT to use Civ2 graphics for a TOT scenario. Of course, the end product will look just like a Civ2 game. Will that bother anyone?

[mindseye]

Techumseh -

Increasing the size of a bitmap graphic will often introduce "blurriness" or other distortions. This is especially true with graphics as tiny as Civ2 units. Reducing a graphic is easier, as the graphics app is "discarding" information as it scales the image down. But when you attempt to increase the size, your graphics app must try to "create" information by interpolating what color the new additional pixels should be. This "averaging" process often results in the blurriness you noted.

There is little you can do to avoid this. Sometimes sharpening or other effects can offset the distortion. If you are lucky and started with a larger original, you can go back to it and shrink it down to the new ToT size.

Good luck!

- Tim Smith

[Archangel]

I've drawn several units from scratch, and used the old trick of stealing units from other games.