Diplomat Photos

[Tutankhamun]

First I would like to thank all of you who have mods and other helpful things for others to download. I have had a lot of fun re-writing my games with the things that you have shared.
I have gone and made my own 63 nations, assigned new leader names and given each 50 cities. I also used the blank tga file background for diplomat photos and pasted the new characters on them. So now my game has everything in place for the 63 nations to play normally. Everything works except the photos. When the diplomat screen comes up I get a blueish jumble of pixels. Everything is in order in the civ-str.txt and the civilization.txt
I have also tried various options in the diplomat mat wizard ldl
but have not been able to fix it. All 63 nations coordinate with the diplomat photos and thier updg #'s. I thought that maybe the parchment # had some thing to do with it, but no matter what I try I cannot get the diplomat windo to pull up anything other than fuzz.
So if anyone could enlighten me on how to cure this problem I would be most grateful.

Thanks

[hexagonian]

Did you save the images as 16-bit RGB Targa files?

[Tutankhamun]

I pasted the new photos onto the games blank updg.tga file and did a save as. I figured that would keep it the correct size. Are you talking about 16 color as opposed to 256 ?

[Martin Gühmann]

No he is talking about 16 bit color encoding meaning you have a picture with 16 Million colors.

-Martin

[Lab Rat]

I thought 16-bit colour had 65 thousand colours and 24-bit had 16 million colours? forgive me if im wrong.

[Locutus]

Re: Diplomat Photos

Originally posted by Tutankhamun
I have gone and made my own 63 nations, assigned new leader names and given each 50 cities.

Oow, I'm a sucker for city lists myself, any chance you could post your civilization.txt and civ_str.txt files or email them to me? I'd love to see what you've done and I think others (particularly kaan) might be interested in them as well...

As to the photo problem, don't 'save as', just 'save'. Before you start, make a copy of the blank file and give it the name the new file should have, then copy-paste the leader, then 'save'. This is the best way to ensure the color and other settings are maintained.


And yes, Lab Rat, you're right: 16-bit is 65536 (64k) colors, 24-bit is 16777216 (16M) colors.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Locutus
And yes, Lab Rat, you're right: 16-bit is 65536 (64k) colors, 24-bit is 16777216 (16M) colors.

you are right these *.tga files have 16 million colors and have 24 bits per pixel, but my PSP4 tells me, too that these images are of 16 bit sub type and uncompressed.

-Martin

[Tutankhamun]

Update

I checked out my diplomat photos as suggested and they all checked out just fine. So out of frustration I went back to the basics. I re-installed CTP2 as it is out of the box and added the official patch. Then I got into the game and checked out the diplomat screen. It was clean and contained a parchment with an eagle, but no photos of anyone, the screen looked the same for all civs.
Then I copied the game under a new folder and added the apolyton pack so that I could compare the files. When I checked that game in normal mode the diplomat screen was a blueish fuzz of pixel soup, similar to my original problem, but not exact.
Then I ran the modswapper mode and checked out the picture. The good news is that the picture was clean, it was the one of caesar. The problem is that is was caesar for every civ. Since I did nothing else but add the patch and then the aployton pack I would assume that someone else would have encountered the problem and figured out how to fix it.
I have tried several variations to the civilization.txt and the civ_str.txt, including various file names for the tga files.
Can anyone please tell me how to make the program reconize the various photos for each civ and to show them clearly in the diplomat window ?

Thanks.

[Locutus]

Re: Update

Originally posted by Tutankhamun
Then I copied the game under a new folder and added the apolyton pack so that I could compare the files. When I checked that game in normal mode the diplomat screen was a blueish fuzz of pixel soup, similar to my original problem, but not exact.

I'm not 100% clear on this: do your pictures work or not? The Ceasar picture you use as an example, is that the Ceasar you added yourself or an existing picture (from the original game or one of the mods)?

Then I ran the modswapper mode and checked out the picture. The good news is that the picture was clean, it was the one of caesar. The problem is that is was caesar for every civ. Since I did nothing else but add the patch and then the aployton pack I would assume that someone else would have encountered the problem and figured out how to fix it.

Actually, it's supposed to be like that. You were playing with the Romans (assuming that Ceasar was the leader of the Romans in that particular mod setup). It's a bug/feature (not sure which one) of the CtP2 source code that it always displays the civ that is talking, not the civ that is being talked to. So if you're the Roman player and you're sending a proposal to the Greeks, you'll see a picture of Ceasar. If/when the Greeks counter your proposal or make a new proposal to you, you'll see a picture of Alexander. A bit confusing and disappointing ('cause in practice this means you'll be looking at a picture of yourself 80-90% of the time) but at least it's not something you did wrong...

Hope this helps.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Locutus
It's a bug/feature (not sure which one) of the CtP2 source code that it always displays the civ that is talking, not the civ that is being talked to.

Actual you are looking on the civ parchment and not on a diplomat photo. It was intended that the diplomatic photos were shown in the upper left corner of the civ parchment, where Dave added on his civ parchments a leader photo. You can find all the CTP2 diplomat photos in the huge *.zfs file in *.rim format. You will notice that the CTP2 ones are smaller than the CTP1 ones, therefore I prefer the ones from CTP1. Unfortunatly the programers didn't have the time to finish this feature. Finally Dale find this solution to put the diplomatic photos on the civ parchment. Of course it is not the best solution.

-Martin

[Locutus]

D'oh! You're right of course, now I remember. There's still a remnant of the actual diplo photo code left in the LDL files, but I was never able to get that to work properly (I know it worked in an alpha/beta version of the game, so I always found it odd that it was disabled later).

[Martin Gühmann]

I am courious about in the differences between the actual *.ldl file and the alpha/beta *.ldl.

-Martin

[Locutus]

It's minimal, IIRC. I can't give you the actual file but I'll see if I can dig up any old CDs I still have and post the differences between various versions for the ldl file in question...

[Locutus]

Martin,
Sorry it took so long but I kept forgetting.
The file we're talking about here is dipwizard.ldl. In this file there is in the release version of the game a small section outcommented (starting at line 68). In the earliest alpha version of the game that I have (the beta is in this respect identical to the release version), this is not outcommented and preceded by the line string pattern "updg01.tga". It also looks slightly different. To recreate the original situation, select all the outcommented lines and replace them with the following:

		string pattern "updg01.tga"

		Picture:CTP2_STATIC_BASE {
			int xpix 4
			int ypix 4
			int widthpix 64
			int heightpix 64
			string image0 "updf01.tga"
			string imageblttype "stretch"
		}

Also, the parchment section of the wizard (lines 138-144 in the release version) are not present and the coordinates of teh proposal section are different (but this shouldn't affect the diplomat faces).

I tried getting this to work in the release version of the game but that was a long time ago and it's quite possible that I didn't copy everything carefully. Feel free to play around with it yourself (I think I'll do this myself as well sometime soon).

[Martin Gühmann]

The updg01.tga can be find in the parchment code of the release version this implies that in the alpha version the civ parchment were static for every civ one parchment.

So the qestion would be if you can find more parchments than one in the alpha.

string imageblttype "stretch"

I uess this line is in, because the experimented with the bigger CTP1 one diplomat photos, and had to shrink them down by the game first. Maybe that is the problem of the resync problems, in CTP1 you had a lot of reduced targas for buildings, wonders and IIRC advaces.

string image0 "updf01.tga"

I only wonder about this line, I never found in the release version this image therefore I took a Civ2 image that was converted to CTP1 and renamed it, it showed up with its original size, with the code of the alpha it showed up with reduced size. And after renaming this image and restarting CTP2 it crashed when I opend the dip-wizard, with a nice targa error. I still wonder why the referenced targa is called updf01.tga, is it part of the alpha version? So far I can produce nice screenshots that pretends as the diplomacy picture feature works but nothing more that Activion has already on their CTP2 previev side.

-Martin