Civ 3 Unit FLCs to be converted Part 2

[Maquiladora]

1) I think either scale all the sprites being converted or none, and seeing as you started work on the bowman without scaling, its best to just convert them at the same size. I tried to upscale the Cossack slightly, but seperating the shadows from the unit image takes aaaages to do after its been enlarged so.

2) I think definately some units need to be altered. Especially the modern units, they look bad with bright colours on. It shouldnt be too hard to alter the blues and reds in there.

3) Same as i was doing,

4) Im not sure about this, generally NE looks the same as NW, to me anyway, and using the Eastern ones means you dont have to flip them.

5) I havent got as far as the script yet so i dont know.

6) Yeah i like the look of the Cavalry one too I started working on the Man-O-War and im not sure what complication a sea unit is going to throw up yet, with the water, but it seems straight foward. Okay ill start on the Cossack, without increase in size this time.

7) Increasing the size of the flic will merge the shadows with the pink and merge the unit with the shadows and pink so it will more than double the time of the shadows and alpha channel work, so im not going to scale the size up at all.

[Caranorn]

Yes, I tried to scale one image up to test this. If I scale before I switch to the CTP colour scheme, I end up with a pixel wide border around each unit (I think those may be easily removed, again through automating the task, assuming the border is a single colour). If I scale after changing colours, I end up with ugly partial borders (which I doubt can be separated easily). In both cases I feel the quality of the Civ3 images suffers needlessly (they are not bad after all, just darn small).

So I for one would recommend not scaling.

Marc aka Caran...

P.S.: How about petitioning Activision, Firaxis and MS to use a common system and style in future to make our work easier;-) On that thought, how does AoE and AoK store it's sprites? I only captured them so far but found it an unrewarding attempt. If they could be extracted they would be as easy to work with as the Civ3 ones.

[Maquiladora]

Okay i finally found a way to increase the size of the flc without merging the edges of the shadows an stuff. I saved the flc frames as 8bit targa files then, in Paint Shop Pro i worked out what 120% of the original would be and resized and the shadows and other stuff stayed the same, because it used its own palette. I dunno why i didnt do that before.

[Maquiladora]

Cross post

Immortal Wombat made some sprites from AOE2. I think one was the battering ram(?).

[Maquiladora]

Heres the original civ3 size.

[Maquiladora]

And this at 120%

[SMIFFGIG]

Three things, Maquiladora if that way u mentioned works well to increase the civ3 .flc's then i really think you should enlarge them I think it would look alot better

I think you should recolour them too cause if there all blue it will look lame and boring if there re- coloured then i think they will look great

In MM2 there are 2 units from AoE1 the first is the catapult (or seige engine) as it called and it looks good as it has no movement animations (or no complex ones) just different facings but it looks good

Second is the horse archer from AoE1 and it looks shi t. Its like all pixely and stuff with black bits (only unit in MM2 that looks bad in my opinion)

[SMIFFGIG]

Hey maquiladora that 120% image looks really good. I cant wait to see these units in CtP2 there going to look great. Its already by far the best civ game but its gunna be the ultimate civ game

(dont know the difference just that the second sounds better )

[Caranorn]

Yes, that ship upscaled looks good, though for some units at least scaling up means cropping part of the picture (or more work to align it and then get the center point right in the script).

Do targa files keep their own palettes? I will try this and see whether I can duplicate it. If so we should definitelly scale up all the time (with a few exceptions). If the targas store the palette and it's modifiable that would also allow easy modification of the unit colours.

Concerning the AOE sprites, I know there are at least two complete ones (the horseman is indeed horible, for a time I even avoided building that type of unit in MM). I also tried to capture some AOE pics last year but gave up seing the low quality it produced. But I am certain the original AOE and AOK material is sufficiently good to convert, if we could only get at it. (If I had those two games installed right now I'd go digging through their files once again).

Marc aka Caran...

P.S.: If we do scale up I might have spent the past 2 hours working on two sprites for nothing On the other hand I got 2/3rds of my macros clean and working fine, so that time won't have been lost alltogether. I can now work most files as fast as my computer can read and write to the disk (plus the instant it takes me to hit the correct function key). Renaming is still the slowest thing by far.

[Caranorn]

Ok, I got this to work in Photoshop too, so scaling up the pictures shouldn't be a problem after all.

So I'm all for the 120% increase.

Marc aka Caran...

[Maquiladora]

I think for some units its easiest to just cut out the unit and "paste as transparent selection" (in psp) onto the white diamond that comes with makespr.exe but to make sure its pasted in exactly the same place with each frame, that will be time consuming, but worth the effort for some of the units.

As far as i know *.tga files do keep their own palettes, ive only been using 8bit uncompressed because thats all thats needed.

Ive got got AOK but i havent played it in sooooo long, i might have a look.

I think its okay to finish the Bowman you were working on, i dont think anyone would begrudge you all the work youve already done.

[Maquiladora]

Cross post again, im gettin pretty good at this

So will you be increasing the Bowman to 120%?

[Maquiladora]

Somewhat ironically in the example i gave of increasing the size of the ship (man-o-war) it seems that none of the Civ3 naval units need to be increased for CtP2, in fact some may need to be decreased, but it wont mean theyre too small because theyre actually made to be very large in Civ3 while CtP2 naval units are similarly sized to the ground and air units. Also i think Civ3 units can overlap tiles a little, not sure though.

[Caranorn]

CTP sprites can overlap as well, not sure how much though.

I expect the main idea is to keep the same rules for similar types of units (foot, horse, air, sea etc.).

I have completed the bowman and chariot graphics and also did a quick scale up of the bowman (from the half finished civ3 scale one). I can't do anymore at this point till I get a useable script. I think I'll install AOK and AOE now to take a look at them.

Marc aka Caran...

[Ekmek]

AWesome work guys. I'm stuck with dial up now, but if any flcs are needed I can post them, hopefully. BUt as a tip. If you go to forums.civfanatics.com and go to the creation thread you'll see more unit graphics and a library including AoK units that people have converted for civ3.