I'm having difficulty motivating myself in to doing any animating at the moment, I sit down at the computer, planning to do some work, and end up spending all day on the internet!

So as a bit of a break from the evil torture of trying to animate units Im going to do some terrain and city set modifications. I wanted to do some city styles for the Alexander the great scenario and Iv'e been trying to make my terrain graphics a bit better while waiting for Snoopys new modpack (still waiting snoopy) So I thought I might actualy put my mind to making something out of Womoks terrain modifications- They look great, but He didn't realy finish them before disapearing mysteriously from the forums, so they don't mix properly witht he existing firaxis graphics, and have a tendancy to float about, looking like theyv'e just dropped out of the sky.

So for the first part of this project (Don't worry I hav'nt given up on the units I'm currently working on, but I need a break) I'm going to do some terrain modifications.
Here is a preview of some of Womoks mountains, merged on to a base of firaxis mountains;

Those are pretty cool. If they worked with my base terrain I'd probably use those. Unfortunately, my base terrain won't mesh with those :( Maybe, I'll mod those when your done to work with my terrain.

Originally posted by Smoking mirror
I sit down at the computer, planning to do some work, and end up spending all day on the internet!


Self control springs to mind. :rolleyes: :lol:

Nice mountains though. :goodjob:

SM, you still working on the british UU?

Yes, I love the look of Womok's mountains, but the grass colour didn't match the grass that comes with the game. I'm glad you're working on 'em!

Yes I am still working on all the units I started, I just need some thing to break up the boredem of Animating. I'm also going to do an Egyptian city set (preveiw by the end of the day hopefully) and some other modifications to the terrain.

The mountains, as well as being smoothed and having the contrast reduced to match that of Civ III have been grafted on to the same base as the civ III mountains- they will look as natural as the ones that come with the game (hopefully; I havn't tried it yet).

Hey! Good job on those mountains. :) And I can understand one need to take a break from animations sometimes. Thats when I created a map plus my circular railroads. :D

Heres another preview, I started making a Egyptian city, but I soon ran in to difficulties realy trying to capture the esential character of the egyptian civilization. People would just say "stick a pyramid on it" but that didn't quite work. Also Iv'e been having problems ith city styles because I keep including too much detail in my 3d models- I made a tree that actualy looks like a tree, despite the fact that the tree in the game will be only 3 pixels high. I put windows in my buildings forgeting that it would bee too small for these details to show up, but the effect on rendering time was terrible, 10-20 minuites for a scene not more than 150 pixels across!

I'm going to have another go at the egyptian set, but for the moment, I decided to use what I had to make an Ancient Indian City set for The Alexander the great mod- Having the Asian city set won't look right.

Heres a preview;

The mountains look good but I even more like that city model.

It would be nice to have each civilization their own culture so each civilizations cities would look different.

Hey, I just wanted to say, Well Done! on those city graphics, they are brilliantly done. You've captured the look of hugeness and powerness and on top of that it is the correct perspective on civ3's terrain. it fits well with everything. I tried them out, and they look fantastic!

I really hope you finish them all off, if you don't, then I will, I simply cannot play Civ3 without that city style.

Now if someone would shrink the units to 1/5 their size and mutiply them into an army, instead of a singular giant unit.. :D

That, Snoopy, is a great idea. The other day I was thinking how cool it would be if you could see your unit lining up and firing a big, smokey volley from their rifles.

And that is exactly how it should have been done from the start.

Agreed about the units. Ships should proably stay the way they are, but the units would have been cooler if they were all just smaller. And I too liked Smoking Mirror's city graphics. I was hoping he'd do a whole set of them. Think of how cool that could look with all the little buildings he made, with some skyscrapers in the middle for the modern age!!

Maybe they should do something like Heroes of Might and Magic and have a totally different system for the combat. That would allow for much in the way of tactical warfare, more than pushing one big unit onto another one. Of course, some of the charm of the civ games is the simplicity.

can you make all the city sets like the one you posted? I like that look much more then the Friaxis one

SmokingMirror, let me know if you're gonna finish the cities off

I'd really love to use them

Oh that center thing is the palace!! I thought it was a huge arch (also really cool if it was an arch!)

could you make it bright white!?!? Like the taj mahal! But leave the gold!! The gold is excellent! SHOWING OFF ITS RAW POWER!

Imagine castles and skyscapers.. yep.. yep... *drool*

Oh and if you do the cities, could you make it scatter? like put buildings around the outside, some merging outwards from the city and some alone (not connected to any buildings).

Also it would be very cool if you could see a market area.

I'm really pushing my luck here, but hey, I'd love to help, yknow, if you do it up to that stage like you have done, then I will take over and add bits to it, like people and a market, etc, that way we get the job done twice as fast, coz I know how the detailed bits take so long

Love the city... I would agree with Snoopy on making the largest city sprawl out a little more... Just not so much a square :)

Originally posted by Snoopy
Hey, I just wanted to say, Well Done! on those city graphics, they are brilliantly done. You've captured the look of hugeness and powerness and on top of that it is the correct perspective on civ3's terrain. it fits well with everything. I tried them out, and they look fantastic!

I really hope you finish them all off, if you don't, then I will, I simply cannot play Civ3 without that city style.

Now if someone would shrink the units to 1/5 their size and mutiply them into an army, instead of a singular giant unit.. :D

Into an army yes, but only if there had been a zoom function with the game :) or for instance the possiblity to make armies appear with the units they contain (i.e. a tank and two infantry advancing on the map)

---

I like the City tile a lot- although I will see if I will use them as cities- ever thought about making barbarian cities look like great cultural sites ?

Does anybody know if it is possible to add another city tile for "Mega-Metropolis" or sth- I was thinking that it would be great if the Capital City gets its own majestous appearance to differenciate itself from other major cities (so far the capital just gets a bonus but looks the same when other cities grow bigger in size) :(

I like the city graphics aswell, although, am I the only person here who at the first look thought it looked like Rubble?

And thank you for working on Womoks mountains.

And about this unit size discussion. The units would look ugly, no details, just a havoc of pixels :)

No Grey Fox you're not the only one! :o

I thought it was rubble too, I thought it was Firaxis's rubble artwork!

But thats the other reason I like it, you have to look at it to identify it, giving the illusion that it's detailed.

where is smokingmirror anyway?

Thanks for all the praise, especialy from snoopy; Ive spent the last few days testing all my units on your exelent new terrain grapics; I especialy enjoyed seeing my Iron frigate on your Sea graphics!

I will probably do some more city graphics soon, though I've just got a day job (starting on moday), so I will be restricted to doing CivIII graphics on weekends and evenings. Depending on how long it takes to do the modifications I should also get the womoks mountains done.

If anyone can find some aeral photos of Inda or indian cities I would be very happy to do all the era sets.

I also wish that Civ III came with a zoom function though you can bet that after a while all the little battles would start to look the same (Imagine all the Swordsmen vs swordsmen battles) with the player having little control over the outcome and people would revert to the standard size.

One thing I have thought of doing since the early civ II days is doing a middle ages scenario that looke like an antiquarian animated map, with pen and ink style drawings of cities and little coloured flags to mark the armies. It would be fairly easy to do, more of a 2d project than a 3d one; one of the reasons it apealed to me with civ II, however problems with the pallette made me abandon the project, however Civ III uses custom pallettes so you could get a realy good looking map.
A major problem would be that civ III uses some "standard" elements that I think are probably unmodifiable, such as the city bar which apears under the city and the Hp bar next to the units.

My next project is a "palette shift" of my 90% done Watercolor Terrain map to look like it is done on old parchment (after I finish the final "10%").

I actually wished that the cities had flags like in civ2, I liked being able to make american flags, british flags, russian flags, etc, it adds a lot to the game.

There's just so many things that Firaxis didn't include.

warpstorm, what do you mean by palette shift?

btw, it wouldn't be hard to shrink the units and have them fight battles. Someone should really get into it. It'd be a big first in Civ.

I saw a brilliant version of what you are sugesting in a Civ II scenario by john Ellis (called bonapart) about the napoleonic wars. Obviously its only 2d and unanimated but imagine how good a 3d animated version would be!

Here is the units.gif from the scenario- some units have more or less people depending on historical unit strengths, riflemen for example were usualy deployed in small groups ahead of the musketmen.
This would take a lot of work to do, but when I get a 3d program with proper animation routines Its something I will probably do. It would only work for a scenario realy, with the attack being a long flick, the ranks of men firing and then falling down dead, to be replaced by the next rank, till the survivours finaly drop down dead in the death sequence.

Here is a little something I put together, Because of the high detail of the original model the thing would take forever to render; Low details models would have to be made for the purpose. I tried 5 ranks by five as a kind of maximum- this of course would be too big- Ellis has his in ranks of 2x4 or 2x5 which would be more reasonable. (he has researched the comparable unit strengths of the day and it seems O.K.)

Also a flag bearer at the front would be great. Of course my 3d program makes doing this kind of thing properly extermely difficult and time consuming. I wouldn't even attempt a fully animated unit without a proper 3d animation program like poser or 3dmax. (perhaps its something someone else would enjoy doing. The models wouldn't have to be very detailed, though getting the uniforms right would eb a major part of the operation).

When I say too big, I mean it wouldn't fit in to the terrain square.
Also the early rifleman would be the rifle battalion from the units above; (second from the top right) in skirmish formation.

Should details be the cost of realism?

Well on the subject of detail, each of those figures has ten fingers and a belt buckle and gunpowder horn and a fairly complicated flintlock on his musket- the thing is, no one can see any of that because of the size, its the same as when I did my mobile infantry.

To be honest, although the little formations would be good for a scenario, I kind of prefer the old way of just having one guy represent the whole army. The whole idea of animating civ units is a bit strange, remember in civ I they started out as just icons.

Originally posted by Smoking mirror
Well on the subject of detail, each of those figures has ten fingers and a belt buckle and gunpowder horn and a fairly complicated flintlock on his musket- the thing is, no one can see any of that because of the size, its the same as when I did my mobile infantry.

To be honest, although the little formations would be good for a scenario, I kind of prefer the old way of just having one guy represent the whole army. The whole idea of animating civ units is a bit strange, remember in civ I they started out as just icons.

Two or three full sized units would look cool too :) (like in Nonnob's creation of the Kradfahrer Motorcicle or the Granatwerfer)

Originally posted by Snoopy
warpstorm, what do you mean by palette shift?


By this I mean, changing the palette to a different one for each file, but leaving the pixels the same index into the palette. In my case, I would shift light colors to a more faded browner color (in the palette).

Those units are really cool. They would really liven up the Napoleanic Era.

I did a short animation of the hoplite attacking SW. I didn't finish the animation coz its a time consuming job, but here it is.

I also think that it would be cool if when the units fortify, they turn into a camp, with a flag on it waving the type of unit. or something to tell you what type of units are fortified there.

Originally posted by Snoopy
I did a short animation of the hoplite attacking SW. I didn't finish the animation coz its a time consuming job, but here it is.

I also think that it would be cool if when the units fortify, they turn into a camp, with a flag on it waving the type of unit. or something to tell you what type of units are fortified there.

WOW :eek: looking amazing !!! Leave one hoplite outside the camp on guard duty

That looks great!!! I agree about the camp thing too, reminds me of the old final fantasy games when you used to use a tent and it would actually show up on the world map.

Snoopy I have to ask you, how do you get it so that all of the hoplites are so well centered? After I first heard about this idea I thought of taking it upon myself to do some of them, but then it came to mind that with flicster, from frame to frame units seem to jump with the cut and paste method sometimes, particularly between animations. Did you just do trial and error for a while, or did you use some trick to center them so well, so that it looks so smooth?

Smoking Mirror if u want poser u can get a full working version on kazaa;)

It's good to get all the artists into one forum discussing ideas (well for me anyway).

TVA22. It's time consuming, and the 'trick' REALLY IS A TRICK. In order for me to do it, I have to shrink the unit by 50%, press the print screen key, paste the screenshot onto a new doc, grab the unit that I shrunk, and just start lining them up on previously done tiles. complicated to explain