GRAPHICS (ver1.0): Hosted by Evil Conquerer

[yin26]

Evil was having trouble registering his name here for some reason, so he asked me start the thread for him. I had a big speech ready about the importance of great graphics, but I'll leave that for the Graphics Thread Master himself...

[JT]

Didn't he already register?

[Ecce Homo]

Remember Civ 1, where waves on the shores and flows in the rivers were animated? That feature disappeared in Civ 2.

If not too hard to make, I would love to see peasants working on the fields outside my cities, and smokestacks above factories...

[JT]

I'd like to see visible wonders, ie, the city that builds the SoL has the Statue placed somewhere in the radius. It doesn't affect the square in terms of food/minerals/gold, but it would sure look cool.

[Pythagoras]

Ecce - I think adding that would make it completly impossible to edit/modify shoreline terrain, unless it was a gif . . .

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"I think you're all f*cked in the head!"
Chevy Chase-Nat'l Lampoon's Vacation.

[Fugi the Great]

Nicer graphics may be nice, but what kind of hardware are we going to need to run the next incarnation. If it is anything like CTP with its beautiful graphic, hay great, but not if it's so blasted slow on a fairly fast computer. Are we all going to have to upgrade to 450, 600, or 800Mhz machines with dual video cards and half a gig of memory? I would rather have toned down graphics if it means that I could actually enjoy playing the game and not have to wait several minutes between turns. Use the extra memory to add more nations played at a time or more features to the game.

Then there's the cute wonder movies that everybody watches once and then disables because it interrupts game play. The build your throne room and palace screen, though cute serve no real purpose, you can never build it exactly the way you want anyway. These things are not really needed in the game and should be left out to make it cheaper and faster to produce. If you really want the extra graphics, then sell a companion disk with this junk on it. You can leave the replay in though unless of course you put it on the companion disk so I buy it. I rarely if ever play CivII with the disk in, and SMAC all animations are disabled, and after a actually finish the game of CTP I started last month I'm going to do the same thing there. If your going to animate anything, them animate the leaders of the different nations like you did in Civ1.

Unit graphics that you can modify yourself, if that means going back to 2d, then so be it. I'd rather have a tank attack backwards than a aircraft carrier that doesn't look like it is supposed to. If you are going 3d then put the unit in a file format we can use with the average 3d program. Or even better yet, put a 3d modeling program on the companion disk, now you just made it worth while buying. I suppose the best would be to make it in 2d, but make it look 3d and just swap pictures when the unit changes direction. Do we really need to animate units? I don't really think so, it doesn't do anything for me. Hopefully it would be something you could disable to speed things up a bit for slow machines.

I guess what I am saying, if it doesn't add anything worthwhile, don't make it any cuter than it already is. Half the stuff you put into the program to make it more eye appealing I look at once and turn it off. Put your time and energy to making a game that is both enjoyable and as realistic as possible. I realize that there are others that will say just the opposite of me, got to have better graphics, more eye candy. If you have to have more eye candy to play this game, then your playing it for the wrong reason - you play because it's fun.

[meowser]

Since CIV is a game that lets you recreate history, I want to have the ability like in CIV II to be able to chose which architectural style my cities will look like. Unlike CIV II, give us more than just 4 styles to choose from

[EnochF]

Fugi: Actually, there are certain wonder movies that I actually still watch, and I've been playing Civ II since Christmas. Darwin's, United Nations, J.S. Bach's, sometimes Adam Smith. I love the Manhattan Project movie. I always skip past Liberty, SETI and Pyramids, but some of those movies are great.

Meow: I'd like to see a few different cultural styles of decoration in the Throne Room. Let's say the throne room is surrounded by suits of armor. They might be wooden samurai armor, plate mail, Greek style bronze chest plates, y'know, variety. There would be a handful of choices for each area of the throne room, so that you could actually customize it to some extent. (Throne room instead of monument screen, of course.)

[evil conquerer]

This is from the original thread at the official SMAC site, and I'm sending it over here so it doesn't get lost.

The most important part of the graphics, IMNSHO, is whether or not it slows down the game. The high-resolution images in SMAC were great, but they were unacceptably slow, even on my PII 300 with 64MB of RAM. The low-resolution files, which looked just fine and ran super-fast, were buried on the CD. There should be a choice during installation of if you want high- or low-resolution graphics (if that option is available).
The graphics should not get in the way of gameplay. In games like Command & Conquer, poor gameplay could be overlooked if the game had awesome graphics. But people don't play Civilization III for the graphics. So make the graphics as good as you can without hindering the true reason for TBS games: gameplay.

A 3D format is a must. In modern games, 2D isometric units, such as those in CivII are simply not acceptable. The system in SMAC was great, but it will obviously need updating because it will be old technology by the time CivIII comes out. If a modular system is used for units (choosing the chassis, weapon, etc. to make custom units), the individual parts should be clearly visible. I found it just fine in SMAC, but some people were complaining about not being able to distinguish different weapon types on the main map.

If a proprietary 3D format is used, there should be an alternate format (such as .pcx) for user-made units. In SMAC, you cannot customize the unit graphics, making MOD packs less flexible. For example, I'm currently working on a historical MOD for SMAC, but it will look really wierd with the regular units. A user-editable graphics file would be really useful.

[Shining1]

From the city interface thread:

I've made the suggestion that, because terraforming can now be done from inside a city, there needs to be a 'work in progress' type icon to show terraforming that is underway but not yet complete.

Also, the idea of regions within a civilisation has been suggested, so there may need to be regional borders as well as global ones. These are 8*8 around the edge of the capital of each region.


Finally, something unrelated - it would be good if the building types for each civilisation were unique to begin with, and if the four types concept from civII was extended into the later part of the game (e.g downtown shanghai still has some asian looking buildings, while new york has none, and london still has some historical type structures, reflecting a different arcitextual style.

I guess I'm asking for the late game buildings to retain some trace of their ancestry.

[Trachmyr]

I believe not only city arcitecture should vary upon the CIV selected, but the style of units... esp. ancient units.

This can settle problems of who gets samuari? Everyone does, but they look diffrent, and if a UNIT WORKSHOP is implemented (I hope it is) they'll be named diffrent.

I also suggested in Social Engineering, that they're be a way to change or add options to Architecture/Garb during the game. After you conquer an Asian-style city, you could reaserch the architecture and choose to build new cities with new architecture. This is mostly aesthetics, but can give you a real feel for your civ.

[meowser]

EnochF

Great idea about the throne room. I certainly miss it. The throne room was just one of the many things about CIV II that made you feel like your empire was trully growing and expanding. For some reason, I feel detached somehow in CTP's monument screen. Probably because the background stays the same. As for that space thing CTP has, I don't even want to go there.

[Mo]

I like some of the wonder movies of alpha centauri, so I would keep them in the game. I wouldn't make the graphics so complex that you need as fast computer to run the game. The throne rooms were nice for the first few times of playing but then I just switched them off because it was always the same.

[EnochF]

Hmmm... nobody's summarized the ideas in the Suggestions forum.

I'll just repost this one, which got some favorable response in the earlier thread.

AGE-VARIABLE MAPS

In other words, in the beginning of the game, the screen is drawn up like a primitive papyrus scroll with the now familiar Civ game screen on it. The city names are scrawled in hieroglyphic-looking script.

In the Renaissance, a compass appears in the corner, the map begins to look more like something Amerigo Vespucci would draw, the script for city names becomes fancy European cursive, there are little dragons appearing in the water for no reason, trade routes are on the map.

Eventually, you get to the Modern Age, and the map is criss-crossed with latitude and longitude lines, there's an option to view the map as a globe, the script becomes standardized Times New Roman, there are more complex borders (dotted in times of dispute), that sort of thing.

Those of you who haven't already heard this idea, what d'you think?

[JT]

I love the map idea. It would add a lot to the game. Maybe in the future(if the game has one) there it could look like it's being brought up on a veiwscreen?

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-Civ3 Thread Master of OTHER and UNITS.
"We get the paperwork, you get the game!"