Add your own Buildings and Wonders to City Aerial View

[josefgiven]

pesoloco,

This is splendid work, you have the skills, sir! Can I ask your advice?

I am currently working on a mod that will replace the tech-graphics with some that I hope will look better. I've saved the finished articles to the .PCX format and to the right pixel size, but I can't get them to work in the game. Is it possible that the .PCX format I've used has too many colours? The original tech pictures are a lot smaller in terms of the amount of disk space they take up.

Damn, I tried to upload an image so's you could have a look at the format, but I don't know how to. But can anyone here think what I could be doing wrong?

Many thanks,

Josef

 

[pesoloco]

Originally posted by josefgiven
pesoloco,

This is splendid work, you have the skills, sir! Can I ask your advice?

I am currently working on a mod that will replace the tech-graphics with some that I hope will look better. I've saved the finished articles to the .PCX format and to the right pixel size, but I can't get them to work in the game. Is it possible that the .PCX format I've used has too many colours? The original tech pictures are a lot smaller in terms of the amount of disk space they take up.

Damn, I tried to upload an image so's you could have a look at the format, but I don't know how to. But can anyone here think what I could be doing wrong?

Many thanks,

Josef

If your files are signifcantly larger it is possible that when you saved them the editor used a different format. This happened to me a few weeks ago when working on some graphics. I just found a better image editor.

Probably the easiest way to get your graphics to work is to do what I did:

Load the original graphic and draw your new graphic (or paste it) over the old one then save.
In most editors this will keep the original format but with the new picture.

I will post my wonder pictures in PCX format soon.

 

[josefgiven]

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Peso

Originally posted by pesoloco
If your files are signifcantly larger it is possible that when you saved them the editor used a different format. This happened to me a few weeks ago when working on some graphics. I just found a better image editor.

Hmm, I checked the new images, and unless something I don't understand has gone wrong, I can pretty much 100% say that they are the PCX format (they have the correct .PCX suffix, for instance).

Probably the easiest way to get your graphics to work is to do what I did:

Load the original graphic and draw your new graphic (or paste it) over the old one then save.
In most editors this will keep the original format but with the new picture.

Sure, I'll give it a go, but do you think that my problem could be that I haven't tried to syncronise the images' palettes with the one Civ III uses? I notice in the Art directory, there is a .PCX image called 'palette'... Perhaps I should spend some time seeing if I could export the colours from that into the tech-tree icons...

I will post my wonder pictures in PCX format soon.

Cool, man; looking forward to seeing them.

Josef

 

[josefgiven]

PS: D'oh! Sorry, I misunderstood what you said... Great idea!

Josef

 

[pesoloco]

dear Josef,
If you load an image and then change it, the pallette should still remain the same.

Good luck with your pictures!

 

[josefgiven]

peso,

Your idea worked fine. In fact, after I had arsed about with the files for a bit, I found that all I needed to do was to change the colour mode from RGB to Indexed which I think is Photoshop's unnecessarily fancy way of altering an image's palatte from 16 million colours to 256. Interestingly, this change was all it took to get any of the images to work in Civ III, whether or not I syncronised them with the original palatte or not.

But still no joy for me; now that I can see the new images in Civ III, it's become clear that the images use the (two?) masking colours, which I think are pure black (#000000) and pure white (#FFFFFF) although I'm not sure. Wherever the images use either colour, it shows up as that pink colour that Civ uses as a transparency.

Given the fact that it is very hard to see pitch black amongst very, very dark grey (which isn't masked in Civ III) in Photoshop, could you please give me some advice on how you managed to eliminate the colours in your graphics that 'show up wrong' in Civ III?

Thanks for your help

Josef

 

[pesoloco]

so far, no word from firaxis except "I'll see if I can find out anything about the
'Additional_Buildings.pcx' file. "

Perhaps in the next patch we will be able to use this file. Right now it seems this file was an idea that got scratched.

 

[pesoloco]

Originally posted by josefgiven
peso,

Your idea worked fine. In fact, after I had arsed about with the files for a bit, I found that all I needed to do was to change the colour mode from RGB to Indexed which I think is Photoshop's unnecessarily fancy way of altering an image's palatte from 16 million colours to 256. Interestingly, this change was all it took to get any of the images to work in Civ III, whether or not I syncronised them with the original palatte or not.

But still no joy for me; now that I can see the new images in Civ III, it's become clear that the images use the (two?) masking colours, which I think are pure black (#000000) and pure white (#FFFFFF) although I'm not sure. Wherever the images use either colour, it shows up as that pink colour that Civ uses as a transparency.

Given the fact that it is very hard to see pitch black amongst very, very dark grey (which isn't masked in Civ III) in Photoshop, could you please give me some advice on how you managed to eliminate the colours in your graphics that 'show up wrong' in Civ III?

Thanks for your help

Josef

You can use PhotoShop to edit the pallette. For many of the graphics in Civ, there are extra colors (the default pink color) that can be changed to whatever color you need. Use the Edit Pallette command in PhotoShop to change those colors. Most of the time, the last two colors are the two that need to be left alone

 

[josefgiven]

You can use PhotoShop to edit the pallette. For many of the graphics in Civ, there are extra colors (the default pink color) that can be changed to whatever color you need. Use the Edit Pallette command in PhotoShop to change those colors. Most of the time, the last two colors are the two that need to be left alone

Nice one, peso,

That's done the trick perfectly, although I found that it was the first two colours in the palette that were the mask colours in the end. Perhaps that's just the way Photoshop does things.

Still, thanks very much for your help with this project. If it wasn't for your advice, I imagine I would have given up by now.

One last thing, could you please tell me how to attach images to a post so I can show off a few tasters? I can't seem to get them to upload at all.

Thanks again,

Josef

 

[pesoloco]

Noah's Ark Wonder:

 

[pesoloco]

more buildings:
oasis, stables, arena, public meeting place (forum)


Oasis:

 

[pesoloco]

stables:

 

[pesoloco]

arena:

 

[pesoloco]

public meeting place:

 

[hzm]

Can you do a world trade center and statue of liberty?

 

[pesoloco]

I already have a picture done for the statue of liberty. I will post it later today.

I will make a graphic for the WTC ASAP

 

[hzm]

Thank you. I had been experimenting with this a couple months or so ago but I'm very bad at anything graphics so I stopped.

 

[pesoloco]

statue of liberty
(carefully taken from Civ II)

 

[pesoloco]

and in case anybody's interested,
here is the eiffel tower
(also from Civ II)

 

[pesoloco]

World Trade Center