GRAPHICS: Smiley People - a Fun and useful Graphic Mod

This silly mod brought to you by Il Mafioso, author of Wonders With Info, Usability Pack 1.0 and Elvis 2.1

A FUN MOD!!!

Not for those who take themselves (or CIV3) too seriously, yet, once you get over the funny factor, possibly a very useful mod from a ease-of-use point of view.

CivIII brought us the "look like real people" people.

Graphically speaking and heck even artistically speaking, those real looking folks look really cool. They have expressions that resemble real humans, they are different depending on your culture, and heck,they even change as the ages go by.

Two big thumbs up for Firaxis!!!

But.

(You knew a Butt was coming, no )

If their purpose is to immediatelly convey the happyness status of a city, methinks (and the people mods already available suggest I'm not the only one) they fail the test. It's just too hard to distinguish between happy, content, unhappy... sure if you "LOOK at them, you can tell the difference, but hey this should just be info interface, the info should jump out at me!).

Well, I tried two of the mods already available... one retains the Firaxis graphics and adds a border that identifies happy, unhappy etc. based on the border color, the other revives the icons from CivI.

Both excellent mods, and both by far better than what Firaxis did. Try them out, if you want CivIII to have more of a serious tone than what my mod, I assure you that one of those will make you happy!

Ok, now that there's just the two of us here's a description of my mod.

Your people are emoticons.

Yep, that's right, the little silly faces we put in our posts on the message boards, well similar to them anyway.

There's happy, content, unhappy and revolting (sorry couldn't get a screenshot with revolting ... I guess I'm just *THAT* good ).

Happy is a yellow smiley with a big a$$ laughter on his or her face (chick smileys have blond hair and red lips)

Content is a bluish smiley with a grin

Unhappy is a grayish smiley with a frown, looking up

Revolting is a red smiley with vampire fangs. (oh yeah, the girls' hair style gets wild for unhappy and crazy for revolting).

then there are the specialists.

Entertainer is a smiley singing into a microphone

Scientist is an albert einstein smiley

Tax Collector is a purple smiley holding two huge gold coins.

Some additional stuff...

The Smileys have cylindrical necks. The necks serve two purposes:

1. Happy people, entertainers, tax collectors and scientists have the longest necks. Content folks have slightly shorter necks, Unhappy's necks are shorter yet, and revolting people have the shortest necks of all. This has the advantage that in the advisor screen you can just glance and the different types of people just pop out at you (I hope they do anyway for their color and expressions, but when it gets REALLY CROWDED in your city, I'm thinking the different height may play a role (the difference while not huge is definitelly noticeable)

2. The necks are automatically colored by Civ3 to match your civilization! So when you look at a city (or the advisor screen) you can immediatelly identify those nasty foreigners.

I hope you find this entertaining and useful.

Alessandro

adisciascio@hotmail.com

I'll attach a chopped up screenshot (actually two screenshots) here and post the mod in my next post

The zipped file contains information and installation instructions in the included README.TXT file.

You will need an unzipping utility in order to unleash the power within

If you don't have an unzipping utility, please download the demo for winzip by clicking here

Please let me know what you think.

Alessandro Di Sciascio
adisciascio@hotmail.com

Attachment deleted after 279 downloads.

download link:

http://www.civfanatics.net/downloads/civ3/modpack/smileypeople.zip

How about we get the Icons from Civ2, and stick then in Civ3, I love ohow real civ2's Icons look, but I reallly NEED to see elvis's as my cultural entertaioners. it just makes SOOO much sence (really!) and the faces & looks of all the icons were very easily recognisable.

I think the main difference between civ2 & civ3 is how the approched the damn design of the game. Firaxis didn't take the right angle ont he interface, they kinda figured that wasn't much of a concern, if you relaly thignk about it.

As compared with civ2 where you get the feelign alot of time and effort went into creating an updated look that still conveyes as clearly as posible all the information that is important in the game, Firaxis, (as they ALWAYS do) Tried to hard to make a break from previous versions of the game and to try and make somthgin "Ultra-real" withotu thinkign enough about the impact on playability when it came to graphics. I mean... look at Alpha Ceti.......

Originally posted by Atreidis_42o
How about we get the Icons from Civ2, and stick then in Civ3, I love ohow real civ2's Icons look, but I reallly NEED to see elvis's as my cultural entertaioners. it just makes SOOO much sence (really!) and the faces & looks of all the icons were very easily recognisable.

I think the main difference between civ2 & civ3 is how the approched the damn design of the game. Firaxis didn't take the right angle ont he interface, they kinda figured that wasn't much of a concern, if you relaly thignk about it.

As compared with civ2 where you get the feelign alot of time and effort went into creating an updated look that still conveyes as clearly as posible all the information that is important in the game, Firaxis, (as they ALWAYS do) Tried to hard to make a break from previous versions of the game and to try and make somthgin "Ultra-real" withotu thinkign enough about the impact on playability when it came to graphics. I mean... look at Alpha Ceti.......

Click to expand...

I dunno about your thoughts on Firaxis.

If you read some of the reviews of the game, they often get slammed for their graphics. It's unfortunate that reviewers (and some gamers, based on threads I've read) are so obtuse to expect realistic graphics from a TBS, which imho should have a strong game engine and focus interface efforts towards ease of use rather than aesthetic value.

Since F is in the business to sell games, not defy self-appointed pundits and loud whiners, I can understand why they decided to focus a tremendous amount of resources on improving graphics.

To me and you, this brought about a decrease in user interface friendliness, to those accustomed to 3d first person action games, this might just be the ticket to get them to try out something they're likely to play much longer than Tomb Raider (and I apologize if my choice of game titles is obsolete... unfortunatelly I play none of those games and therefore don't keep up to date).

Thankfully, Firaxis, for whatever reason choose to use industry standard files for large parts of their graphics. This allows us to modify much of the interface to our liking.

As per your request for Civ2 people, I would be extremely surprised if someone somewhere isn't already working on that... it's a little too obvious to be missed, so I think it'd be wise for me to allow someone else to make you happy. Plus, I like my smiley people. They look ridiculous, but heck you can't beat them as far as immediate feedback... and in the end all the mods I've done (and all the ones I'll do if I do more) are mods that I make for MY game and then release... any other way and it'd be a job... and I get enough of that at work

Alessandro

Neet views.

Noooo! A *three-year* bump! It's not possible!

Can someone get control of this guy? I've got almost a whole page of bumped threds.