Okay I want to get an idea where other people stand. I've seen it suggested that we should ignore Firaxis and just go ahead and do whatever we want, even to the point of directly defying Firaxis. My stance would be to try and slip a few small things past Firaxis but by no means try to upload all of the SMAC content. If Firaxis takes offense then we either have to do without or make SMAC/X a requirement for running the mod.
Anyway, onto some details. I'm including approximate size, using the most suitable compression (ie png's for graphics).
Media we can use (technically, not necessarily legal):
Small Logos: ~1mb in size. These are citizen icons, facility/tech icons etc. I'd be inclined to try and rip and bundle these with the mod itself.
Terrain Textures: ~200kb. These might make for the basis of placeholder art until we make stuff more suitable for Civ4's 3D engine.
Faction leader/base art: ~150kb per faction, for 12 factions that's ~2mb. Certainly this is small enough to bundle, but is starting to smell like something Firaxis is likely to take offense at. There does exist faction art made by 3rd parties.
Note: In order for the base art to look good as-is it would be necessary to lock the camera into a isometric view.
Voiceovers: ~35mb. Tech/Fac voiceovers and the "Drones need you!" one. I suppose this is small enough to upload separately, but it stinks like trampling over intellectual property. It'd be easy to support this as an optional addon (could just include blank mp3's that users can overwrite with the mp3's from the SMACX installation/CD and this could be automated by script, the only thing that could foul up this plan is Civ4 being anal about all files being identical for multiplayer gaming).
Movies: ~370mb. It'd be fairly hard to find people willing to host or players who can be bothered downloading these. The technical challenges are significant as the format is obscure and no open source player can play them (apparently SMAC .wve's are different to normal .wve's). However a free player does exist Wing Commander Movie player this is reverse-engineered from a Wing Commander executable and it seems the format used by that WC game happens to be the same as used by SMAC, handy. Anyway wcmv can rip to raw avi, but it would be necessary to use another utility to compress the avi.
Another (possible) alternative would be to get in contact with the author of wcmv and get some code that could then be put in a dll that could be loaded by Civ4 enabling it to play .wve's - this may or may not be technically possible and is likely to be harder than just using a batch conversion.
Either way we'd do the same thing as with voiceovers - including blank movie files and include a script that the user can run to rip the movies from SMAC to C4:AC.
Note: It might be possible to compress the movies down to about 150mb using a modern codec.
Blurbs, Book of Planet etc: Tiny. In principle there's no reason why we can't convert these files to .xml and use them directely. The blurbs are labelled the same as the icon/voice files. Script (ie diplomacy dialoug) Information could also possibly be extracted into a usable form - if so this could be of some benefit in reusing existing language translations.
Media we can't use:
Unit graphics: There Are No Unit Graphics. The units are constructed on-the-fly from a complex combination of 3D voxel models that use an obscure format. Pretty much the best we can do is screenshot the units. The exception is native life, battle ogres and a few others.
Music: Appears to be composed on the fly from lots of little .wav files. It's unlikely we'll have the resources to rebuild this custom music player.
Anyway, onto some details. I'm including approximate size, using the most suitable compression (ie png's for graphics).
Media we can use (technically, not necessarily legal):
Small Logos: ~1mb in size. These are citizen icons, facility/tech icons etc. I'd be inclined to try and rip and bundle these with the mod itself.
Terrain Textures: ~200kb. These might make for the basis of placeholder art until we make stuff more suitable for Civ4's 3D engine.
Faction leader/base art: ~150kb per faction, for 12 factions that's ~2mb. Certainly this is small enough to bundle, but is starting to smell like something Firaxis is likely to take offense at. There does exist faction art made by 3rd parties.
Note: In order for the base art to look good as-is it would be necessary to lock the camera into a isometric view.
Voiceovers: ~35mb. Tech/Fac voiceovers and the "Drones need you!" one. I suppose this is small enough to upload separately, but it stinks like trampling over intellectual property. It'd be easy to support this as an optional addon (could just include blank mp3's that users can overwrite with the mp3's from the SMACX installation/CD and this could be automated by script, the only thing that could foul up this plan is Civ4 being anal about all files being identical for multiplayer gaming).
Movies: ~370mb. It'd be fairly hard to find people willing to host or players who can be bothered downloading these. The technical challenges are significant as the format is obscure and no open source player can play them (apparently SMAC .wve's are different to normal .wve's). However a free player does exist Wing Commander Movie player this is reverse-engineered from a Wing Commander executable and it seems the format used by that WC game happens to be the same as used by SMAC, handy. Anyway wcmv can rip to raw avi, but it would be necessary to use another utility to compress the avi.
Another (possible) alternative would be to get in contact with the author of wcmv and get some code that could then be put in a dll that could be loaded by Civ4 enabling it to play .wve's - this may or may not be technically possible and is likely to be harder than just using a batch conversion.
Either way we'd do the same thing as with voiceovers - including blank movie files and include a script that the user can run to rip the movies from SMAC to C4:AC.
Note: It might be possible to compress the movies down to about 150mb using a modern codec.
Blurbs, Book of Planet etc: Tiny. In principle there's no reason why we can't convert these files to .xml and use them directely. The blurbs are labelled the same as the icon/voice files. Script (ie diplomacy dialoug) Information could also possibly be extracted into a usable form - if so this could be of some benefit in reusing existing language translations.
Media we can't use:
Unit graphics: There Are No Unit Graphics. The units are constructed on-the-fly from a complex combination of 3D voxel models that use an obscure format. Pretty much the best we can do is screenshot the units. The exception is native life, battle ogres and a few others.
Music: Appears to be composed on the fly from lots of little .wav files. It's unlikely we'll have the resources to rebuild this custom music player.
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