Excuse me, help appreciated...

[Luke Gevaerts]

For starters, allow me to quickly introduce myself: I'm Luke Gevaerts, and I've recently started to explore the magnificent work of Civ2 scenario design.

Setting: after playing Captain Nemo's brilliant "Red Front", I figured it might be nice to create a scenario that covers the fighting in just one city - for example, Stalingrad. The idea is simple, yet doing it is not: take a small map, fill it with city-like terrain (graphical modifications nescessary, naturally), position Nazi and Soviet cities and units... Etcetera. The graphical part is where I go wrong. Much as I hate to say it, I'm a crappy graphics designer - but I would like to improve.

Question: I was attempting to alter the way the ocean borders are displayed. Right now, it's the basic green borderline, but I would like to change it to a grey, dock-line-like outcropping that contains the water. I'd like to try it myself - so could anybody give me advice on how to create good-looking graphics with pixels? Thanks in advance.

Yours respectfully,

Luke Gevaerts

[fairline]

Not sure I can help with the terrain graphics Luke. Have a look through the non-unit graphics thread to see if there's anything there. As far as a Stalingrad scenario goes it may be of interest to know that Field Marshal Klesh had a playtest version completed and was working on a refined version when he stopped working on Civ. I used to have a copy and it's posted on a thread here somewhere. Try a search on Stalingrad or check through the Field Marshal's post list under his profile.

[Stefan Härtel]

Generally, it's very easy. In your particular case:
*The coastlines are in the file terrain.gif
*In this case, all you have to do it somehow alter the existing graphics.
*A simple method would be: trace the shoreline with a simple line of pixels. Then, just recolorize what you want to recolorize. It's really simple. All you need is a decent graphics editor (I personally prefer Adobe photoshop, but Paint Shop pro will also do the trick. In general, you can just use any graphics editor which supports gif files and one-by-one pixel drawing.

[Luke Gevaerts]

@ fairline: Thanks for the pointer... FMK's mod is a nice piece of art, but it didn't contain anything particulary useful for my goal. However, a handful of graphics did stimulate me.

@ Stefan Härtel: I figured that much... I've been working with Paint Shop Pro for a while, so pixel-by-pixel isn't really the problem. Getting something that doesn't look like crap is.

But lo and behold: many curses later, I actually produced something that looks somewhat reasonable, even though the "3-D" needs work.

However, another problem crossed my path. Can anybody explain me how the Dither algorithm/system/name-the-function works? I've been trying to eliminate it so the tile textures align smoothly, but altering it causes some irritating and even bizarre effects, and it seems irreversable in the way that I have to load a previously saved GIF and re-save it to remove the problems... Anyone?

[fairline]

I've not tried this, but surely if you just make the whole of the 'dither' box pink (R:255 G:0 B:255) - ie remove the black pixels from the edges or the tile- it will remove the dither effect. The cell in question is bottom left in 'terrain1'

On another note, a nice looking scenario which is city-based and may provide graphics pointers is St Leo's Roman Riot's 2:

http://sleague.apolyton.net/Files/0civilisation2/stleo_romriot2.zip

This replaces most terrain with rips from the city terrain in 'Ceasar III'. There may be similar rips available for ww2-based games (?)

[Prometeus]

There's an old thread about Stalingrad battle on this forum... try to search into archives.