Help! Frustrated with what should be a simple graphics request

[Four Four Seven]

I'm trying to create a few new units "just for fun." Alright, I admit, I plan to go to my parent's house and add units to my father's machine without his knowing . He recently bought a tractor in real life - I want to make a tractor in Civ 3 that's essentially a fast-moving worker.

Here's all I want to do: Make a non-animated tractor icon. This is not for a big mod, so it doesn't need to look perfect or anything.

Here's what I've done:
1) Added a tractor icon to the units_32.pcx file. So far so good.
2) In civ3edit, made the unit "Tractor," assigned it abilities, and assigned my nifty tractor icon.
3) In the Civ3\Art\Units directory, made a new folder called "Tractor." For now, I just copied over the Modern Armor folder, and renamed it.
4) In my new Civ3\Art\Units\Tractor folder, renamed "modern armor.ini" to "tractor.ini."

At this point, if I go into the game and create a tractor, the picture when selecting it for creation is a tractor, but the actual vehicle looks and acts like a modern armor.

So, I go into "tractor.ini" and see that there are various animations it calls. I don't want animations, I just want a stationary picture of a tractor! So I:
5) Tried eliminating all the references to animations. No good. The game crashes when i try to build a tractor.
6) Tried making the "default" animation be "tractor.pcx" (my nifty still picture of a tractor, see below). No luck. Crash.
7) Knowing it was unlikely to work, renamed "tractor.pcx" to "tractor.flc". Got another crash.

Is there any way to make a non-animated unit? Am I missing something? I really don't want to get into making .flc files or anything like that.

Any help anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated...

 

[Neomega]

I just wrote a lengthy tutorial, and attatched a palette file, but alas, I cant attatch palette files and the whole thing (like 6 paragraphs) was lost so sorry, here is a palette, get FLICster in the tolls forum, but I am not re-writing the entire tutorial.... sorry.

 

[Four Four Seven]

Originally posted by Neomega
I just wrote a lengthy tutorial, and attatched a palette file, but alas, I cant attatch palette files and the whole thing (like 6 paragraphs) was lost so sorry, here is a palette, get FLICster in the tolls forum, but I am not re-writing the entire tutorial.... sorry.

Not a problem - thanks for trying!

I think I've got it. Here are the steps, as I see it. (After downloading FLICster).
1) Take an animation of something - I chose modern armor just because.
2) Export the animation in FLICster
3) In Paint Shop Pro, put some colors in the palatte that look like they belong in your animation (That's what you did, I gather. Only 4 or so colors, but it looks okay).
4) Cover over all the pretty modern armor pictures with the magenta color
5) Paste in my pretty tractor over and over (once for each direction, or, in my case since I exported the modern armor animation which has five frames, five times for each direction, which made a nice "jiggle" since I wasn't exact with my placement. Looks like a tractor idling to me!)
6) Create a new .flc in Flicster
7) Make sure the .ini file refers to the new .flc file in the "default" section.

That seems to be it! Let me know if I'm missing something. Lots of steps, but not really hard. That tractor is now cruising around my Civ world. Very funny.

Thanks for the help Neomega. Even though you lost your initial post, just posting the palatte and mentioning FLICster was a big help.

Think Firaxis will come up with an EASY, INTEGRATED unit editor for PTW?!?

 

[Neomega]

well, you coul've created a new file, with just 1 frame. and size probably about 60 x 60 to 70 x 70.