Animated Units for Civ 2 ToT

Catfish this is great, that you can produce sprites with different frame counts. In my eyes the combat animation is a big step forward for Civ 2 ToT units. But the best I like about this unit is the fading out death animation -that´s really great for all units that didn´t explode in reality.

For the crossing swords I thought about an old Civ 2 combat animation. I reduced it here to two graphics. The advantage of these graphics are that they can be easily pasted in the corner of an existing unit and the whole unit can be shown during combat.

May be with an additional frame to the idle graphic of the catapult (unit 23) even a blinking effect, that some die-hart fellowers of MGE are missing , could be created.
The death animation of the catapult could be reduced to that fade away effect in the unit xx sprite. May be this would be a good base to animate all ancient/fantasy and industrial-foot units.

I have been trying to convince some of the guys at Civ Webring to take up ToT and one issue that was putting them off was the fact that the ToT units don't blink. Another issue for me sometimes with ToT is the lack of combat animation making it hard to quickly spot where the fight is happening on a large map, especially if the hit points of the units involved are low.

This progress looks amazing guys!

Here comes another one

Civinator said:

For the crossing swords I thought about an old Civ 2 combat animation. I reduced it here to two graphics. The advantage of these graphics are that they can be easily pasted in the corner of an existing unit and the whole unit can be shown during combat.

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Can do (attached). It's a little on the small side; didn't really catch my eye in the game, so I'll stick with the larger swords for now. I've created a test mod for my WotR scenario that uses the 2-frame sprite format to make combat more visible (also attached).

There's a bug in CivSprite where it sometimes incorrectly writes the last offset in the image offsets list. It should point to the end of the file, ie, 1 byte longer than the file. If it doesn't, CivSprite will no longer be able to import or export. I can hex edit the fix in no time at all, but for everyone else, keep your bitmap frames handy, so you can import into a 'good' file. Where's Mercator when you need him?

Civinator said:

May be with an additional frame to the idle graphic of the catapult (unit 23) even a blinking effect, that some die-hart fellowers of MGE are missing , could be created.

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I tried that on Saturday using a blank frame. Not very successful. It appears that ToT uses the idle frames to draw the unit even when you switch to View Pieces mode. As you move around the map, different parts of the screen are refreshed. The animation clock runs in the background and whatever frame happens to be playing at the time is the one that's displayed - and sometimes only part of the icon, depending on which tiles are refreshed. That means you get an icon that disappears and reappears on the screen as you click around the map. The lack of blinking units in ToT is not something that bothers me, so I'm not particularly enthusiastic about finding a solution.

Do you have a preferred frame layout for converting Civ3 units to ToT? Note that ToT's mirroring of E-W-facing units is optional. ToT actually allows 8 distinct orientations, the same as Civ3; it's just not possible with the any of the game's default animation sequences.

Catfish, one more time thank you very much for all your help and work.
I have downloaded your files and will do some testings with them next weekend.

Catfish said:

Do you have a preferred frame layout for converting Civ3 units to ToT?

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I hope next weekend I also have the time to look for the most used frame combinations of Civ 3 PTW units. These units are a little bit easier to convert as they are using red shadow colours.

A big step forward in converting Civ 3 units would be to find a simple way to completely remove the shadows in these units. Otherwise these shadows always would be seen in the units as tons of pink and violett pixels. I will do some screenshots about that problem when I have the time for it.

Yes, on the weekend I downloaded a few Civ3 units from the database and looked at them in FLICster. They used partial transparency, which ToT lacks. I have a script that'll remove that in Paint Shop Pro, but it will remove the entire shadow: description and download. You should be able to do something similar with other graphics editors. Maybe you could use a colour replacer tool with a high tolerance on the shadow areas before applying the script, because it's not just the shadow that's the problem, it's the whole outline of the unit.

Most of the units I looked at used the following format:

8 directions x (15 attack, 15 death, 15 idle (default/fidget), 12 move). That's big.

I briefly tested the WotR pack I released the other day - let the AI run around for a few turns. I noticed a problem: the train animation. Whenever a unit moves along railway lines (or the scenario equivalent), it turns into a ****ing steam train. What's more, deselecting and reselecting it can result in ToT crashing to the desktop - probably due to the alternating sprite formats. The only way around this seems to be to remove or rename unit99.spr (the train animation) in the Original folder. [Edit: Scratch that. A dummy unit99.spr file in the scenario directory works; much like the dummy resource.spr file I created years ago. Hah.]

Updated WotR_VisibleCombat.rar: Forgot to include unit 75 and a mirror sequence for unit 55. Dummy unit99.spr included.

In my spacemod I had the solution of removing the unit99.spr. I agree, the steamlocomotive looks nice, but not as a spaceship between some suns and planets.

Catfish said:

Yes, on the weekend I downloaded a few Civ3 units from the database and looked at them in FLICster. They used partial transparency, which ToT lacks. I have a script that'll remove that in Paint Shop Pro, but it will remove the entire shadow: description and download. You should be able to do something similar with other graphics editors. Maybe you could use a colour replacer tool with a high tolerance on the shadow areas before applying the script, because it's not just the shadow that's the problem, it's the whole outline of the unit.

Most of the units I looked at used the following format:

8 directions x (15 attack, 15 death, 15 idle (default/fidget), 12 move). That's big.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately I only have PSP 7 and it seems, these scripts were introduced with PSP 8. And yes, the whole outline of the unit needs to be restored.

I made some very simply animated units for Fortress Europe using your two frame sprite: One image of the unit without an explosion and one image with an explosion behind the unit. The astonishing thing was, that the unit when it came to the turn to be drawn, was showing the attack animation and this gave a somewhat "blinking" image in the game. So we both don´t focus on that "blinking" wishes of some very old hardcore Civ 2 purists, this blinking seems possible, even with your simple two frame-animation. What´s about showing the unit in one image with bright colours and in the other animation with normal colours?

The unit would show some attackanimation by beeing brighter in every second frame and it also would blink when it´s on it´s turn.

Here is the SdKfz251, the main vehicle for German panzergrenadiers in WW II. The unit is based on an old Civ 3 unit made by Riptide and uses the catapult sprite. It can face in the approbiate directions when performing its actions.

Looking good!

McMonkey said:

Looking good!

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Thanks McMonkey.

Here is another one. It´s a high level unit containing 199 images, made from a PTW Civ 3 unit. The German WW II Infantry:

Civinator said:

Unfortunately I only have PSP 7 and it seems, these scripts were introduced with PSP 8. And yes, the whole outline of the unit needs to be restored.

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Does PSP7 have layers? I can't remember. If it does, you can still remove the partial transparency using the method described in that tutorial; it's just going to take you longer.

Civinator said:

What´s about showing the unit in one image with bright colours and in the other animation with normal colours?

Click to expand...

I had a similar thought after I tried the blank frame and decided it would be far less time-consuming to simply make a more prominent tile marker in icons.bmp. Of course, you've got a few more options using the sprite, but is it worth the effort?

Shortly after I last posted, I created a couple more template sprites. I'll bundle them all in one pack (attached). It includes those released earlier, plus the dummy unit99.spr. The file notation is: total number of frames, orientations, (number of frames/animation sequence). I'll leave it at that until Mercator decides what he's going to do with CivSprite (he's aware of this thread).

Catfish, thank you very much for the sprites.

Here is the next unit based on the catapult sprite and on a very old Civ 3 unit made for SOE (by Smoking Mirror?),

The Tiger I :

Here is the P-38 Lightning. The unit is based on a Civ 3 PTW unit and the catapult sprite.

Another Civ 3 PTW unit based on the catapult sprite:

The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 A fighter:

Hello Catfish, could yould you do an enlarged catapult-Sprite (Unit23) with 5 movement frames in the directions N / NE / E / SE / and S ? The ptw units I posted, all have 5 movement frames and as you can see in the posted attack animations, the roating propllers and (what you can´t see yet) the flickering jets are working very well in the 64x64 format. At present I have to give default running images (1 frame) in every directions to these units, but they could be upgraded easily.

Other PTW air-units using these 5 frames movement images are the Me-262, the P-51 Mustang, the Japanese Zero-fighter, the F4F Wildcat and the Il-2 Sturmovick.

This stuff is amazing. Good work, both of you. Alas, it will likely be awhile before there are enough sprites for a full scenario.

techumseh said:

This stuff is amazing. Good work, both of you. Alas, it will likely be awhile before there are enough sprites for a full scenario.

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techumseh, thank you very much for your kind words. This is a lot of motivation, as in my eyes you are one of the best Civ modders of all time. So instead of working on my Civ 3 WW II mod, I used the time today to finish the previews of the B-24 Liberator bomber. The unit has no North and South animations (but a doubled NE and SE animation), as I would have to resize the unit too much to get it with the full span into the 64x64 box.

Sorry for necro but I feel like this is an incredible thread that shouldn't be lost to time along with the old Apolyton animating units thread and Mercator's more recent Civ2Sprite version 2 beta release thread. Such an important resource for people interested in creating animating units for ToT.

Also I was stunned to see you guys talking about how to get rid of the silly train animation as I've been wanting to get rid of that for over 20 years haha! I'll have to try that dummy file catfish made.

Out of curiosity does anyone know how many brave souls created ToT scenarios with animating units over the decades? Want to eventually show them off in my ToT tour video. I only know of Civinator's ToT scifi scenario beta that's sadly no longer available and the awesome Empire Earth mod for ToT I recently preserved. Hopefully one day I'll do some enhanced versions of my existing scenarios for ToT with animating units too.

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