Here's a hex editing document. Page three has this:
View attachment 620102
Thanks mate! I'll give that try when the time comes.
Well after so long since the last proper one I guess it's time to post a new project update as I've taken a break from the last of
my preservation work and done some more work on the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod. I've recently been chatting with Civ2 modding legend John Valdez
@CivPartisan and while telling him about all the crazy stuff
@Metro Polis and I did with this project it got the old creative juices flowing again and I started thinking about the final 3 things that Metro and I never replaced.
The first one was that back in 2019 I talked with MetroPolis in our dev convo about how I planned to make the Civilization 2
Diplomacy Screen look like the HoMM2 campaign selection screen with the stone wall and the picture frames. I then went to try and do it and realised pretty quickly that the bricks were too big and there was both torch and window light bouncing off everything at different angles (see pic below) so trying to copy and paste the bricks into a bigger wall and resizing the picture frames seemed too difficult so I gave up and never did it.
Then I last year I saw that
@Knighttime had made something very similar for his awesome
Medieval Millennium ToT mod and it was literally what I wanted.. stone brick wall with a wooden picture frame haha.
So I recently asked his permission to use it and credit him in our mod and he said yes! However a problem with using Knighttime's awesome medieval background is that I've destroyed the floor all our custom video herald monsters stand on. So I decided to take a peak in the the vanilla Civ2 throne room pv dll to see if it had some nice floors and sure enough it did. So I recoloured one of them and stuck it in for the herald monsters to stand on and I think the end result looks pretty good. I also finally fixed the problem of modern day strength icons being displayed on the sides and have made them all ancient style now which suits better. Then finally Knighttime went above and beyond and offered to get his original source files and resize his wooden picture frame to fit our custom HoMM2 leaderhead's! So by actually doing work that contributed to this mod he's officially inserted himself into the HoMM2 mod team list haha. Here's the finished results which I'm really liking!
So that leaves only 2 things left that Metro and I haven't replaced or messed with in our HoMM2 mod, which is the Spaceship and High Counsel Video advisors which we originally deemed too hard to change.
For the
Spaceship I decided to use the awesome 'breeding your own dragon' spaceship replacement from
@MattDempsey 's excellent
Game of Thrones mod and give it a HoMM2 background and stick him in our mod credits too so that will fix that problem. I've got some ideas for the spaceship launch and landing video replacements too.
GoT Mod
HoMMafied!
As for the
High Council video advisors as far as I know no one has ever changed them before but I came up with an idea the other night to replace them too. Metro & I only used a portion of the HoMM2 hero portraits for our Civ2 diplomacy leaders so there's plenty of spare ones. So I'm thinking I'll mount a hero portrait over the top of the original video (the free video editor ShotCut supports layers/tracks and putting tracks over the top of others) and do some simple mouth moving and blinking animations (similar to what Metro and Kasius did with the
animating leader faces diplomacy experiment). Because I'm still using the original video file underneath it will retain all the important audio timing cues. I'm thinking I'll have a knight or barbarian over the top of the military advisor, a couple of fancy rich wizard, knight or bard looking guys over the science, economy & entertainment guys, and a sorceress over the spy chick.
So I did a test and just stuck one of the knight pictures over a couple of the advisors video sections. I managed to find a legacy mpg
export setting in ShotCut that is loadable with the old 90s Ulead Indeo video editing program (running in a XP VM lol) that Metro used to do all our custom Wonder and Herald videos and exported it in Indeo video format and tested in Civ2 and boom! It worked!
NOTE: this is a very quick and dirty test.. obviously in the final product I'll make sure the Heroes face covers the entire advisor haha. Despite all the codec format changes and recompressing the audio timing cues match up perfectly still.