Animated Units for Civ 2 ToT

[Civinator]

Blake00 and many other Civ 2 ToT modders, thank you very much for your continuing interest in animated units for Civ 2 ToT.

There are two big problems in the programming of Civ 2ToT that let me stop creating new animated units for Civ 2 ToT:

1. An error in the programming of Civ 2 ToT concerning the combat animations: Only the attacking unit is animated. The defending unit uses only the static animations of the static sprite in Civ 2 ToT. These static animations are only one image of the unit in each direction. Therefore the defending unit stands there without any defense action, while the attacking unit is beating or firing at that unit like crazy.

2. There is no option for individual movement sounds for animated units.

What is the use of movement animations for a tank with even animated moving chains, when the sound for this movement is only a clack, clack, clack ?


Longer time ago, I posted problem 1 with the missing defense actions for animated Civ 2 ToT units in the TOTPP thread:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-test-of-time-patch-project.517282/page-41#post-14968273
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-test-of-time-patch-project.517282/page-40#post-14966349

These were the answers I received by TNO (who opened a new wonderful modding world for Civ 2 ToT ):

I might look into it for a later release. Right now, there are some other features I want to develop first. Maybe in the future.

The game is only capable of animating one unit at a time, so it would be some work to change this. Also, without having better ways of creating unit animation files (or making the game support a different format), I feel that no one will take advantage of such functionality.

Unfortunately it seems, that animated units for Civ 2 ToT only have a very low priority in ToTPP. From time to time, I post some animated sprites in the Civ 2 forums (more about it below) in the hope that they will remind him, that here something could be massively improved, too. It would be enough, if the defending unit activates its attack animation each time it is hit (in some way like TNO has achieved it to bring back the simple combat animation from Civ 2 to Civ 2 ToT). The defending unit must show some action during combat, but unfortunately I am no programmer and not able to find a correction of this error myself.

Problem 2 (the missing individual unit sound for movement) is concerning static Civ 2 units, too. Unfortunately until today in TOTPP an "enmovement trigger" is missing.

Here Prof. Garfield suggested a partly solution: "An option would be to make a silent unit movement sound, and play a sound when a direction key is pressed. You could then choose what sound to play based on the active unit."

But: What happens with the movement sounds for AI units ? The AI cannot press a direction key, or am I wrong here ?

I really appreciate your animated units. What do you need to make new animated units for ToT? Can you take an existing Fairline graphic and create one, or do you need some additional graphic material?

In post 1 of this thread I showed, that (and how) even normal Civ 2 and Civ 2 ToT units can receive simple animations. These animated units can face only in two directions, but they were useful to provide some combat animations for Civ 2 ToT in the long times, when even the simple combat animations for Civ 2 were not working for Civ 2 ToT. When remembering well in some hours of a weekend I created about 30 spaceships with a simple animation for my space mod. Since TNO found a solution for bringing back the simple combat graphics of Civ 2 with TOTPP, these simple animated units in my eyes are no longer needed, with the exception of normal Civ 2 units, that should be combined with other animated units converted from Civ 3 units.

The main source for high detailed units for Civ 2 ToT comes from Civ 3 units. When looking into the CFC download section for Civ 3, there are more than 9.600 animated high class units available, that could be converted to Civ 2 ToT units. They have animations for all 8 directions that are needed for Civ 2 ToT.
The problem is, that these animations must fit into the 64x64 box of Civ 2 ToT, but Civ 3 animations have a size up to 250x250. This means, that most units above the size of foot units (which mostly fit very nice in the 64x64 box) must be shrinked, recentered and sharpened in the graphics.

Here is an example with a unit, that could be converted without bigger problems into a nice animated Civ 2 ToT unit: A German WW2 Kradschütze:

Let us have a view into the structure of a Civ 3 unit, in this case of the Kradschütze, that is shown above:

The Civ 3 units hold all files, that are needed for converting them into animated Civ 2 ToT units:

The default graphics are needed for the static units sprite, the other redmarked graphics are self explaining.

With Animation Shop an animation for these forums can be created very easily.

The Civ 3 flc animation can be automatically converted into a gif animation and is automatically optimized by the program. Therefore to do such an animation for the posts here at CFC is only a matter of seconds.

To transform these graphics into a Civ 2 ToT unit lasts a lot longer. The size of each image must be reduced to 64x64 and some animations must be recentered. Bigger units must additionally be shrinked - but to create such an animated working Civ 2 ToT unit can be a lot of fun.

 

[Pablostuka]

Lol, I see this thread and I see myself 20 years ago making WW2 3D animated units for Civ3 using some software called Moray & POVRay. That's how I actually started posting in CivFanatics back in the day, some of my gifs have survived, see below



Unit animation in ToT has potential but as mentioned, the limitations are big (sounds, only one unit animated on combat, etc), not sure if it's worth the effort...

 

[Blake00]

Blake00 and many other Civ 2 ToT modders, thank you very much for your continuing interest in animated units for Civ 2 ToT.

There are two big problems in the programming of Civ 2ToT that let me stop creating new animated units for Civ 2 ToT:

1. An error in the programming of Civ 2 ToT concerning the combat animations: Only the attacking unit is animated. The defending unit uses only the static animations of the static sprite in Civ 2 ToT. These static animations are only one image of the unit in each direction. Therefore the defending unit stands there without any defense action, while the attacking unit is beating or firing at that unit like crazy.

2. There is no option for individual movement sounds for animated units.

What is the use of movement animations for a tank with even animated moving chains, when the sound for this movement is only a clack, clack, clack ?


Longer time ago, I posted problem 1 with the missing defense actions for animated Civ 2 ToT units in the TOTPP thread:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-test-of-time-patch-project.517282/page-41#post-14968273
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-test-of-time-patch-project.517282/page-40#post-14966349

These were the answers I received by TNO (who opened a new wonderful modding world for Civ 2 ToT ):





Unfortunately it seems, that animated units for Civ 2 ToT only have a very low priority in ToTPP. From time to time, I post some animated sprites in the Civ 2 forums (more about it below) in the hope that they will remind him, that here something could be massively improved, too. It would be enough, if the defending unit activates its attack animation each time it is hit (in some way like TNO has achieved it to bring back the simple combat animation from Civ 2 to Civ 2 ToT). The defending unit must show some action during combat, but unfortunately I am no programmer and not able to find a correction of this error myself.

Problem 2 (the missing individual unit sound for movement) is concerning static Civ 2 units, too. Unfortunately until today in TOTPP an "enmovement trigger" is missing.

Here Prof. Garfield suggested a partly solution: "An option would be to make a silent unit movement sound, and play a sound when a direction key is pressed. You could then choose what sound to play based on the active unit."

But: What happens with the movement sounds for AI units ? The AI cannot press a direction key, or am I wrong here ?



In post 1 of this thread I showed, that (and how) even normal Civ 2 and Civ 2 ToT units can receive simple animations. These animated units can face only in two directions, but they were useful to provide some combat animations for Civ 2 ToT in the long times, when even the simple combat animations for Civ 2 were not working for Civ 2 ToT. When remembering well in some hours of a weekend I created about 30 spaceships with a simple animation for my space mod. Since TNO found a solution for bringing back the simple combat graphics of Civ 2 with TOTPP, these simple animated units in my eyes are no longer needed, with the exception of normal Civ 2 units, that should be combined with other animated units converted from Civ 3 units.

The main source for high detailed units for Civ 2 ToT comes from Civ 3 units. When looking into the CFC download section for Civ 3, there are more than 9.600 animated high class units available, that could be converted to Civ 2 ToT units. They have animations for all 8 directions that are needed for Civ 2 ToT.
The problem is, that these animations must fit into the 64x64 box of Civ 2 ToT, but Civ 3 animations have a size up to 250x250. This means, that most units above the size of foot units (which mostly fit very nice in the 64x64 box) must be shrinked, recentered and sharpened in the graphics.

Here is an example with a unit, that could be converted without bigger problems into a nice animated Civ 2 ToT unit: A German WW2 Kradschütze:

View attachment 620247

Let us have a view into the structure of a Civ 3 unit, in this case of the Kradschütze, that is shown above:

View attachment 620249

The Civ 3 units hold all files, that are needed for converting them into animated Civ 2 ToT units:

The default graphics are needed for the static units sprite, the other redmarked graphics are self explaining.

With Animation Shop an animation for these forums can be created very easily.

The Civ 3 flc animation can be automatically converted into a gif animation and is automatically optimized by the program. Therefore to do such an animation for the posts here at CFC is only a matter of seconds.

View attachment 620250

View attachment 620251

To transform these graphics into a Civ 2 ToT unit lasts a lot longer. The size of each image must be reduced to 64x64 and some animations must be recentered. Bigger units must additionally be shrinked - but to create such an animated working Civ 2 ToT unit can be a lot of fun.

Wow thanks for the extra info and guides @Civinator ! Yeah we all keep bombarding @TheNamelessOne with our wishlists lol but hopefully he considers your suggestions one day. @Prof. Garfield 's solution is an interesting one although yeah presumably the AI units would make no noise, but your units making noise would be better than nothing I guess. I feel like a Renaissance of animating unit making almost happened as a result of this thread but it just didn't quite take off due to those problems sadly.

I'm curious to know if anyone has done much with terrain animation as this thread pretty much been all unit talk. I was quite surprised when I discovered the Empire Earth ToT Mod by Leif had animating custom terrain as I'd never seen it in any other fan mod (even catfish I think just did animating units and not terrain in his epic LOTR mod) so correct me if I'm wrong but is he the old one to do it? When I see stuff like that it makes me think about having moving burning flames on my super skyscrapers in a ToT version of my Red Alert 2 Siege of New York scenario one day. Not to mention animating terrain in a ToT version of @Metro Polis 's and my Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod as we were able to extract all the graphics out of HoMM2 so I'm pretty sure all the animation frames are accessible.

Anyway thank you for this guide as this is very helpful. What version of Jasc Animation shop are you using? My old Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 that I've been using for 25 years for all my modding came with a separate Jasc Animation Shop (v3 I think) on the cd but sadly the crack I had (I was a teen in the 90s, don't judge me haha) didn't work for that one so I've never been able to use the animation stuff. I should try to find another copy out there. I have several programs I used to create animating gifs but animation shop looks way better.

Also have you played around with the newer version of @Mercator 's Civ2Sprite tool? Am curious to know if that has made things easier with the importing compared to 10 years ago.

Lol, I see this thread and I see myself 20 years ago making WW2 3D animated units for Civ3 using some software called Moray & POVRay. That's how I actually started posting in CivFanatics back in the day, some of my gifs have survived, see below

View attachment 620297 View attachment 620298 View attachment 620299

Unit animation in ToT has potential but as mentioned, the limitations are big (sounds, only one unit animated on combat, etc), not sure if it's worth the effort...

Those are awesome! Glad to see you took my advise and are sticking around to see all the great stuff going on mate. That reminds me I was gonna PM you about some of that cool Civ2 work you might like. I'll do it soon!

.

 

[Civinator]

I'm curious to know if anyone has done much with terrain animation as this thread pretty much been all unit talk. I was quite surprised when I discovered the Empire Earth ToT Mod by Leif had animating custom terrain as I'd never seen it in any other fan mod (even catfish I think just did animating units and not terrain in his epic LOTR mod) so correct me if I'm wrong but is he the old one to do it? When I see stuff like that it makes me think about having moving burning flames on my super skyscrapers in a ToT version of my Red Alert 2 Siege of New York scenario one day. Not to mention animating terrain in a ToT version of @Metro Polis 's and my Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod as we were able to extract all the graphics out of HoMM2 so I'm pretty sure all the animation frames are accessible.

Animated Civ 2 TOT terrain can be done as it can be done with animated units. I did not use animated terrain for my Civ 2 ToT space mod, as this distracts me always in my gameplay. There are existing many "burning" animations for C3C that could be converted, among them even graphics for burning cities (used in C3C for cities in rebellion).

For your Heroes of Might & Magic 2 scenario, nearly all graphics of that game were converted to Civ 3 animations by tom2050. Blake, you are aware of his great Conquests Of Might Magic3 scenario (COMM3), that holds all these animations, among them of course the animated terrain graphics. 160 animation graphics (mostly about animated terrain ) can also separately be downloaded here in the CFC Civ 3 download base (the same with all his animated HOMM units):

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/99-prop-units-for-mods-and-scenarios.17101/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/61-prop-units-for-scenarios.17021/

I attache some of them here as Animation Shop sprites (plus a Royal Griffin unit and one of the spell animations):

Spoiler :

Anyway thank you for this guide as this is very helpful. What version of Jasc Animation shop are you using? My old Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 that I've been using for 25 years for all my modding came with a separate Jasc Animation Shop (v3 I think) on the cd but sadly the crack I had (I was a teen in the 90s, don't judge me haha) didn't work for that one so I've never been able to use the animation stuff. I should try to find another copy out there. I have several programs I used to create animating gifs but animation shop looks way better.

In my last post I only showed how easily sprites can be done for posting them in these forums. To create working high class sprites for Civ 2 ToT (not these simple animations as I did them in post 1 of this thread or Catfish in his LOTR scenario to substitute the, at that time missing, simple Civ 2 combat graphics) is not so easy. I made many of these sprites short after the first expansion of Civ 3, nearly 20 years ago (p.e. the swordsman, the Churchill tank and the bowman).

At that time I had to use the Mercator sprite tool, PSP 7 and additionally the Civ 3 tool flicster. In the meantime some other Civ 3 tools are available, may be speeding up the cropping and resizing process (I haven´t tried them yet).

Also have you played around with the newer version of @Mercator 's Civ2Sprite tool? Am curious to know if that has made things easier with the importing compared to 10 years ago.

It seems that the download for that tool is no longer working. I have a download of it, but I haven´t tested it yet, as no solution for the problems, I listed in my last post, is in sight and therefore at present creating animations for Civ 2 ToT in my eyes is somewhat useless.

 

[Blake00]

For your Heroes of Might & Magic 2 scenario, nearly all graphics of that game were converted to Civ 3 animations by tom2050. Blake, you are aware of his great Conquests Of Might Magic3 scenario (COMM3), that holds all these animations, among them of course the animated terrain graphics. 160 animation graphics (mostly about animated terrain ) can also separately be downloaded here in the CFC Civ 3 download base (the same with all his animated HOMM units):

Cheers mate but Tom's mod is based on Heroes of Might & Magic 3 which uses completely different graphics to Heroes of Might & Magic 2 so unfortunately none of his assets are of any use to me for our HoMM2 mod. However I do have a possible (making zero promises or guarantees) future plan for converting our HoMM2 mod to ToT and using it as a template for doing other HoMM game mods eg HoMM3 and adding a cool extra underground world so in that hypothetical scenario then his assets might be useful after all!

In my last post I only showed how easily sprites can be done for posting them in these forums.

Yeah I know that, I was talking about creating gifs too, hence why I wanted to know what version of animation shop you're using?

It seems that the download for that tool is no longer working. I have a download of it, but I haven´t tested it yet, as no solution for the problems, I listed in my last post, is in sight and therefore at present creating animations for Civ 2 ToT in my eyes is somewhat useless.

Nah his download is fine mate, just tell chrome to open it in a separate new window instead of a tab. I get a similar issue when trying to use the old CFC legacy downloads. Some bloody security thing in chrome. This time is probably the fact its an http download instead of a https one.

.

 

[Civinator]

Yeah I know that, I was talking about creating gifs too, hence why I wanted to know what version of animation shop you're using?

I use the version attached to my PSP7.

Nah his download is fine mate, just tell chrome to open it in a separate new window instead of a tab. I get a similar issue when trying to use the old CFC legacy downloads. Some bloody security thing in chrome. This time is probably the fact its an http download instead of a https one.

Fine that it is still available. I have downloaded it soon after it was posted with my Chrome browser.

 

[Blake00]

As I start to entertain the idea more and more about maybe doing an enhanced animating ToT version of @Metro Polis & my Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod one day, I find myself wondering (like many other have with their own scenarios I'm sure) more and more whether I could even do such a thing, as I was still a bit intimidated by all this haha.

So I thought I'd have a go at following @Civinator 's excellent step by instructions with his test files from the original top post in this thread. BTW Civinator you might wanna update your download link for @Mercator 's CivSprite tool in that post as the old one doesn't work due to his site moving and you may as well stick in the link to the new tool while you're there editing the post too.
Working link for Original CivSprite: https://web.archive.org/web/2022070...il.fm.user.fm/mapedit/downloads.html#file0007
New CivSprite2Beta: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civsprite-2-beta-create-tot-sprite-files.658428/
And maybe stick in a note saying something like "Because both are hosted on a classic non SSL certified http website some browsers may give you warnings about downloading the files".

Anyway I tried your step by step guide on how to extract from existing spr files with the classic CivSprite tool which was cool although slightly intimidating as I quickly realised different units have different amounts of animation frames so like you did with the catapult I guess finding a more 'simple' original unit that doesn't have 50,000 frames might suit my plans better haha. Cause yeah when I was looking through Warrior Unit2 there's over 100 files and I just got lost in them trying to find specific actions.

I also then followed your guide on how to insert your example USS Excelsior graphics back into the unit23 spr file and inserted it back into ToT, loaded a test save, cheated in a catapult and sure enough there was a Excelsior! I attacked something and saw all the little explosion puffs you made which was cool too.

I then figured I'd try Mercator's new CivSprite2Beta tool again as I'd tried it the other day and got confused as hell since it 'appeared' like it only imports and exports spr files and some weird text files but not image frames. However this time I actually looked at his instructions in his beta tool thread and understood that the text file is essentially the new 'load in images' function because the text file has all the settings for the image files in it.

And of course the reverse works too where if you select a spr file and then export to a txt file it will extract all the images and create a new text file with all the frame settings. As you can see below the new tool is really nice in that it now creates grouped png images (standing, walking, fighting, dying etc) with their corresponding masks below so it takes less HDD space and is easier to understand instead of hundreds of separated frame & mask bmp files. As you can see below even the intimidating warrior looks far easier to understand now. I also love how they're presented with the usual green borders so it all feels very familiar and similar to the usual unit, terrain & city files we all spend endless hours editing in haha.

I also included the start of the generated text file in this picture so you can see how that works too. Once again Mercator has taken care to ensure this appears similar to the rules config txt file we usually use in Civ2 which is great.

I see that the image path contains grouped images file names. I can see that img x and img y tell it the pixel coordinates where to look for each sprite frame within the grouped image file. Width and height for each frame is self explanatory. Mask path is blank because they're in the same grouped images file below the sprites. And Mask x and mask y of course tell it to look at that bottom row of frames for each one. So it all makes sense, even to my noob eyes lol.

In those mask fields I can see the shield as presumably that's what changes colour for each Civ using the Warrior (now I finally see what Nicheal and you guys have been talking about with that ToT mask stuff haha). However I don't think I'll need that for my stuff (vast majority of my units are not shared between Civs) so I'll probably just leave it blank/black.

Resources look really simple in their groups. I believe I'll be able to create some great animating map stuff with this. Although the mask stuff on 7 of the resources confused me again since Civ colour doesn't apply to resources. So I'm guessing mask stuff is also about advanced shadows too. Although once again I don't really care about fancy shadows with my stuff so that should be fine.

The other 2 settings areas in the text file pictured below seem familiar and easy to understand too. I like that you can go up to 1024 animation frames for a unit.. wow!!!!
The transparency scaling sounds interesting too as I had to use a friggin checkered pattern on my Red Alert 2 Stealth Tank to make it look cloaked in MGE haha.
The ability to make any resource animate continuously like the oil wells do is a very interesting prospect as well. Presumably nearly all terrain animation was staggered to reduce CPU load but that isn't an issue now lol.
And holy moly check out the line about how there are unused terrain animation slots in the various scenarios and that you can actually create animations for 2 special resources for all 11 terrain types across 4 maps making 88 slots, but that as we already know ToTPP supports more terrain slots and so this tool does too?? That's crazy!!! This system could be manipulated to generate way more map animation due to using extra terrain type animation slots!!!!

So now comes the time where I've gotta think about how on earth I get a HoMM2 animating unit into this thing haha. On the HoMM2 zoomed in tactical battlefield the big creature sprites have all sorts of animations however Metro and I didn't use those sprites as they're really big and would need significant downsizing to get them into Civ2's engine. However we made the pleasant discovery that all the creatures on the HoMM2 world map used a smaller sprite size that fit almost perfectly into the Civ2 sprite boxes so we just used them for our Civ2 unit sprites instead. These world map unit sprites also have some nice animations while they stand around going about their daily creature business but are much simpler than the battlefield stuff eg a Paladin swings his sword around, a titan looks around and does a small lightning blast so that's what gave me the idea that I could do some cool simple unit animations for their standing around stuff in ToT. I may even be able to use some of those frames as an attack frame too however if not then I'm thinking I'll just figure out a system where their attack animations are just oldschool standard 2D MGE like frozen ones with some of the usual 'puff' explosion effects (will also check out catfish's crossed swords animation too). Because of me lacking any proper battle animations then the issues you guys talked about above with 2 way battle animations doesn't really bother me. For me the creative vision is of a gorgeous HoMM2 like world map in Civ2 with HoMM2 units twitching and animating and various special resources animating too. Unused unit slots could even be used for some more animating map object decoration tricks too.

Another problem though is that HoMM2's animation frames are 'optimized' to save space by removing all repetitive pixels from each of the animation frames. So you have a incomplete base sprite with most of the details (0414) and then the followup ones only contain little changes that display over the top unless there's a big movement change (0421 where he leans forward to attack a bit).

Turning it into a gif is less than perfect but you get the idea.

So yeah converting broken up incomplete frames into usable frames for Civ stuff is not an appealing thought. Also in actual HoMM2 some of these units reuse frames in alternate/reverse for them spinning around and stuff meaning I'd have to sit there staring at them in the game just to see what their full animation sequence is since there's nothing in the source files that tell me when they spin around like that. Also not fun!

However thankfully a while back Metro found a site where someone had extracted all of HoMM2's sprites for both battles and world maps and I can see that his tiny world map spirits are full complete frames and also include alternate spinning around actions in their in-game order too. So I'm thinking I'll use his stuff instead!
https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/heroesofmightandmagic2/sheet/41798/

Just a matter of cutting out the frames and lining up the unit's 'feet' position properly which is where the old pink and purple diamond guides comes in handy.

Existing MGE Titan:

Animating Titan!:

Speaking of the diamond guides that gives me 2 questions..
1. Is the old purple colour still transparent within the animation system like the old pink one is? If so the old diamond positioning guides could be used in Mercators grouped frames image files.
2. In MGE & ToT Unit/City/Terrain files you can't have anything below the diamond in the bottom right and left corners of each sprite cell as the game just chops it off. I wonder what happens if you put something there in the animation frames, will the game still chop it off, or do you gain an extra area to use for 'sneaky' purposes lol.

To find out I replaced the standing sideways Warrior with frames of the twitching Titan, oldschool purple positioning guides, and some Titan heads in the bottom corners (because I couldn't think of anything better to stick there ).

Used CivSprite2Beta to convert the extracted warrior text file (which I didn't touch in any way) back to spr (which makes it re-import all the images the txt file refers to including my modified ones) and placed my unit2.spr file back in the tot original game folder, loaded up the test save and got my answers! The purples were invisible and no titan heads on the bottom, but there was my titan twitching and animating away!