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- May 5, 2005
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Animated Units for Civ 2 ToT
Mercator´s animation tool for Civ 2 ToT sprites "CivSprite" is there for a lot of years but it wasn´t used as nearly all civers (including Mercator himself) thought it is more of a theoretic value and not useable for normal modding.
Mercator´s tool still can be found here: http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/mapedit/downloads.html
Some years ago, I made a thread at Apolyton to show some animated units converting Civ 3 units with Mercator´s tool. The thread still can be found at Apolyton, but all graphics and sprites are gone due to the decline of that site: http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/169829-Animated-Civ-2-ToT-Units?pp=30
So my old pc cought fire some time ago and I lost a lot of my old Civ2 modding stuff, I had made some backups and will see, if I still have the old unit sprites of the converted Civ 3 units. These units in my eyes looked very spectacular in Civ 2 ToT, but beside an enormous amount of work that was needed to do such an unit, they had a severe drawback: Firaxis had forgotten to add the defensive graphics to the unit sprites in Civ 2 ToT! So one animated unit attacked the other unit with wonderful animations and the attacked unit only stood in the landscape and did nothing until one of both units was killed and the death animations did start. Bad quality in the initial releases of Firaxis is not only a story of Civ 4 and 5, even Civ 2 ToT had some major flaws in its design, but as the animated graphics in Civ2 Tot were so ugly, that nearly evrybody stopped to use them, most civers didnt take notice of that flaw. When Mercator found no way to add the missing defense graphics to his tool, I stopped the work on the animated Civ2 units.
Now with the move of the Scenario League, that gave me such a lot of knowledge in modding Civ 2 long ago (that at present I have unfortunately mostly forgotten by modding Civ 3 over a lot of years), I was remembered to add animated spaceship graphics to my space mod with an abstract way of combat, to overcome the missing defense graphics in the unit sprites.
Here I made an - at least for me -astonishing discovery. I have reflected much too long about the backsides of Mercators tool and much too less about the different possibilities of the different unit sprites. It was the sprite of the catapult (unit 23) that had a different structure for movement and fidget (idle graphics) than most other graphic sprites in Civ 2 ToT. This unit only used one image for movement and fidget in every direction and it could move on the map! The use of these "one-image-sprites" reduces the number of graphics that are needed for animated units massively as dozends (and with the mask images hundreds) of movement- and fidget graphics are no longer needed.
But it still comes better. The units with the 1-image movement sprites exactly move like the unanimated Civ 2 Tot units, but now combat and death graphics can be added to these units in an acceptable amount of time (with other words, they can regain the graphical possibilities of units in older versions of Civ 2, that many civers in Civ 2 ToT were missing - so the units do not exactly behave like in the old versions of Civ 2).
To start the "massproduction" of animated Civ 2 ToT spaceships I added an explosion cloud for all death animations, so there was no more work to do for these images, too. Now there is only left to copy the image of the unit in the Civ 2 ToT units file and to paste it ten times in the last image numbers of the sprite images. For the combat animations an additional paste of that image to the first five images in the sprite file is needed, than the combat animations are added to these five files and than these files are pasted in turns of five to the remaining 45 image slots of the sprite. With this methode I created 30 working animated spaceships in only some hours this weekend.
For the abstract combat animation of SF units, I used old explosion combat animations of Civ 2. For ancient units the old combat animation with the crossing swords can work well. May be some of you have other abstract Civ 2 combat animations. In that case please let me know.
But it even came better: These units are working without problems next to unanimated Civ 2 ToT units - the normal Civ 2 ToT units only show no explosion when dying and no combat animations. So if you add only one or some animated units to the other units, they should be able to interact with the other units.
Another observation I made when using these 1-image-units was, that these units didn´t need static sprites. They showed the image of the normal Civ 2 ToT units-file. I was surprised to see the civ 2 symbol for an Kilrathi unit that was contained in the Civ 2 ToT unit file on the map of my testgame, when the unit wasn´t in action, while the animations in that unit´s sprite didn´t carry this symbol. It seems the civ symbols can stay on the normal Civ 2 ToT units file for identification duties on the map, and for combat the place of the symbols in the unit graphic can be used for combat animations.
Attached to this post is a zip-file with the 30 animated spaceships I created this weekend for Civ 2 ToT. They work very well in my space mod replacing the SF-Mod in Civ 2 ToT.
How to do these animated graphics?
1. Download and install Mercator´s tool.
2. Create a folder and unzip the bmp-files of the Excelsior folder into that folder. I gave the folder the name of the new animated unit.
3. Replace the images in the Excelsior folder with the bmp images of your new unit.
4. Backup Sprite 23 of the "Original" folder of Civ 2 Tot.
5. Start "CivSprite" and open Spritefile 23 and the Bitmap folder containing the bitmaps.
6. Import the bitmaps to Sprite 23, make the bak and exit CivSprite. Sprite 23 now should contain the new images.
7. Copy Sprite 23 and rename that copy to the spritenumber you need for that unit.
Mercator´s animation tool for Civ 2 ToT sprites "CivSprite" is there for a lot of years but it wasn´t used as nearly all civers (including Mercator himself) thought it is more of a theoretic value and not useable for normal modding.
Mercator´s tool still can be found here: http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/mapedit/downloads.html
Some years ago, I made a thread at Apolyton to show some animated units converting Civ 3 units with Mercator´s tool. The thread still can be found at Apolyton, but all graphics and sprites are gone due to the decline of that site: http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/169829-Animated-Civ-2-ToT-Units?pp=30
So my old pc cought fire some time ago and I lost a lot of my old Civ2 modding stuff, I had made some backups and will see, if I still have the old unit sprites of the converted Civ 3 units. These units in my eyes looked very spectacular in Civ 2 ToT, but beside an enormous amount of work that was needed to do such an unit, they had a severe drawback: Firaxis had forgotten to add the defensive graphics to the unit sprites in Civ 2 ToT! So one animated unit attacked the other unit with wonderful animations and the attacked unit only stood in the landscape and did nothing until one of both units was killed and the death animations did start. Bad quality in the initial releases of Firaxis is not only a story of Civ 4 and 5, even Civ 2 ToT had some major flaws in its design, but as the animated graphics in Civ2 Tot were so ugly, that nearly evrybody stopped to use them, most civers didnt take notice of that flaw. When Mercator found no way to add the missing defense graphics to his tool, I stopped the work on the animated Civ2 units.
Now with the move of the Scenario League, that gave me such a lot of knowledge in modding Civ 2 long ago (that at present I have unfortunately mostly forgotten by modding Civ 3 over a lot of years), I was remembered to add animated spaceship graphics to my space mod with an abstract way of combat, to overcome the missing defense graphics in the unit sprites.
Here I made an - at least for me -astonishing discovery. I have reflected much too long about the backsides of Mercators tool and much too less about the different possibilities of the different unit sprites. It was the sprite of the catapult (unit 23) that had a different structure for movement and fidget (idle graphics) than most other graphic sprites in Civ 2 ToT. This unit only used one image for movement and fidget in every direction and it could move on the map! The use of these "one-image-sprites" reduces the number of graphics that are needed for animated units massively as dozends (and with the mask images hundreds) of movement- and fidget graphics are no longer needed.
But it still comes better. The units with the 1-image movement sprites exactly move like the unanimated Civ 2 Tot units, but now combat and death graphics can be added to these units in an acceptable amount of time (with other words, they can regain the graphical possibilities of units in older versions of Civ 2, that many civers in Civ 2 ToT were missing - so the units do not exactly behave like in the old versions of Civ 2).
To start the "massproduction" of animated Civ 2 ToT spaceships I added an explosion cloud for all death animations, so there was no more work to do for these images, too. Now there is only left to copy the image of the unit in the Civ 2 ToT units file and to paste it ten times in the last image numbers of the sprite images. For the combat animations an additional paste of that image to the first five images in the sprite file is needed, than the combat animations are added to these five files and than these files are pasted in turns of five to the remaining 45 image slots of the sprite. With this methode I created 30 working animated spaceships in only some hours this weekend.
Spoiler :
For the abstract combat animation of SF units, I used old explosion combat animations of Civ 2. For ancient units the old combat animation with the crossing swords can work well. May be some of you have other abstract Civ 2 combat animations. In that case please let me know.
But it even came better: These units are working without problems next to unanimated Civ 2 ToT units - the normal Civ 2 ToT units only show no explosion when dying and no combat animations. So if you add only one or some animated units to the other units, they should be able to interact with the other units.
Another observation I made when using these 1-image-units was, that these units didn´t need static sprites. They showed the image of the normal Civ 2 ToT units-file. I was surprised to see the civ 2 symbol for an Kilrathi unit that was contained in the Civ 2 ToT unit file on the map of my testgame, when the unit wasn´t in action, while the animations in that unit´s sprite didn´t carry this symbol. It seems the civ symbols can stay on the normal Civ 2 ToT units file for identification duties on the map, and for combat the place of the symbols in the unit graphic can be used for combat animations.
Attached to this post is a zip-file with the 30 animated spaceships I created this weekend for Civ 2 ToT. They work very well in my space mod replacing the SF-Mod in Civ 2 ToT.
How to do these animated graphics?
1. Download and install Mercator´s tool.
2. Create a folder and unzip the bmp-files of the Excelsior folder into that folder. I gave the folder the name of the new animated unit.
3. Replace the images in the Excelsior folder with the bmp images of your new unit.
4. Backup Sprite 23 of the "Original" folder of Civ 2 Tot.
5. Start "CivSprite" and open Spritefile 23 and the Bitmap folder containing the bitmaps.
6. Import the bitmaps to Sprite 23, make the bak and exit CivSprite. Sprite 23 now should contain the new images.
7. Copy Sprite 23 and rename that copy to the spritenumber you need for that unit.
). With other words: Creating such an animated unit isn´t a big effort any longer. 
