Are there any mods to make Civ2 look like Civ1?

[DukeNukem]

I prefer the charming low res graphics of Civ1. But I kinda grew up with Civ2.

Moderator Action: Download links added - Blake00
John Valdez's Civ1 Graphics mod for Civ2 can be found here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civilization-1-scenario-modpack-for-civ2-fw.29443/
Blake's 'Demaster' mod of John's mod (using authentic Civ1 graphics) can be found here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/284136/#post-16031579
KasiusKlej's expanded mod of Blake & John's mods can be found here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/284136/post-16049488

 

[wonx2150]

I haven't heard of one my self but that dosnt mean there isn't. I hardly ever played civ 1 so i cant remember what it looks like. It wouldnt be that hard would it 2 modify civ 2's graphics to make it look like civ 1? The same way we make new units and differnt terrain.

 

[DukeNukem]

I wonder if it is even possible. That would be so cool if someone could make it.

 

[wonx2150]

Ill take a look at civ 1 and see what i think

Ill let you know how i get on

--
On closer inspection no i think it wouldn't be that easy , yes it could be done how i don't know. I might if I'm feeling nice do some experiments. It wont be 100% the same that's to hard but i could possibly make it look a bit like it .

anyone know how you print screen in dos?

 

[Mercator]

There's a Civ1 modpack here ("Civilization 1 Modpack", about 2/3 down the page):
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ2/downloads/modpacks

And a Civ1 world map here (the first map download link):
http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/maps/legacy/world.html

 

[DukeNukem]

There's a Civ1 modpack here ("Civilization 1 Modpack", about 2/3 down the page):
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ2/downloads/modpacks

And a Civ1 world map here (the first map download link):
http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/maps/legacy/world.html

Wow great! Do modpacks actually change the gameplay? Ideally I would like Civ2 gameplay with Civ1 graphics.

EDIT: I have taken a look at the sprite files and it looks pretty cool! I have never modded Civ2 before. Is it possible for me to just overwrite the graphics files and not touch any of the gameplay stuff like RULES.TXT?

 

[wonx2150]

A mod pack can do both it depends on what its designed to do i haven't tried these so i don't know, if they just change the graphics or the game play to. Im guessing they must a bit to make it like Civ 1.

It is in theory possible to use just the grapic files from the mod and not the rules. Then you would in theory only be changing the graphics

In response to your edit, yes it is . Simply leave the rules out and use the graphic files .

 

[DukeNukem]

Thanks.

I'm unsure of which files I can and can't copy across if I just want the graphics.

Can anyone advise?

 

[wonx2150]

hmm looking at my mod I'm working on atm, Id suggests the following to just change the graphics.

Icons
terrain1
terrain2
units
city (Possibly see if its differnt to the original)
cities

files that end in gif, jpg or bmp are graphic files. Files that end in txt are the rules and games lables and so on.

Those are it let me know how you get on .

 

[Blake00]

There's a Civ1 modpack here ("Civilization 1 Modpack", about 2/3 down the page):
http://www.civfanatics.com/civ2/downloads/modpacks

And a Civ1 world map here (the first map download link):
http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/maps/legacy/world.html

Wow haha! A Civ1 mod for Civ2! Now I've seen everything lol.

John Valdez's Civilization 1 Graphics Modpack mentioned above is really cool, what a fun idea! Although the OCD and modder part of me is finding all sorts of flaws so I'm tempted to have a play around with this and make it better. Cause you know it's not like I don't have enough Civ2 mod projects to finish up already!

A lot of his unit and city shield/size boxes are badly located and chopped off, even the city square itself is misshaped and misaligned resulting in clipping. There's also weird mix of high res assets where he sort of upscaled/redrew something from Civ1 and simple blown up (sometimes not evenly resulting in a stretched look) low res Civ1 assets resulting in some areas looking blocky and others not. Upscaling all assets is too much work and wouldn't look as much like classic Civ1 anymore, but maybe making the high res stuff blockier would make it all match up better. His forests and jungles look weird too with lots of bright white stuff in them (I think it's because he accidentally used the transparent bright green you're not supposed to use). I'm not a huge fan of the water either haha.. jeez I sound like I'm sh*tting all over John which I'm not, as I have HUGE respect for his talent. His name is all over the history of all the Civ sites due to his incredible total conversion mods, so friggin many of them too. So maybe this was one of his earlier projects before he became the guru everyone knew him to be, and I can see from his readme that he had a lot of troubles and nightmares with the conversion (eg palette differences and a dead copy of Civ1). However there's so much good stuff here, eg I LOVE his city screen background, I love how he's put in all the old resource icons and building pics, and the slightly retro GUI changes. It just needs some polishing which perhaps I'll have a go at (as it would be good practice for my Master of Magic ToT scenario retro graphics 2D to 2.5D conversion plans). Also John even did some custom DLLs that presumably make Civ2 look even more like Civ1 however sadly they're not MGE compatible so maybe I can transfer his work over into MGE's DLLs.

 

[Kasius Klej]

It just needs some polishing which perhaps I'll have a go at...

View attachment 587333

I had a go at adapting the civ1 tech tree to civ2 units recently, and there's always this detail left out. When you accidentaly press "e" with settlers, it says "can't build airport until discovery of the radio." Yet there is no radio in this scenario.
I see the same bug with Civ1 mod.

If you're going to upgrade the Civ1 mod, my advice is you correct that first, or else you might forget like I did when building my scenario recently.
By the way, if you need leaders portraits from civ 1 for your polishing, or tiles and background graphics, you can download Minimap. It's not exactly Civ1, but has some elements of it.

If you don't mind this advice about graphics, the color or the sea is the easiest to correct, and whoever takes this project, should perhaps only correct that, and forests and perhaps find better blueprints for resources.
Other that that improving graphics is difficult. The most difficult part of improving this graphics is the last bit, making hills and mountains chain up. I took this challenge yesterday, but gave up. One should take civ1 blueprints, in my opinion, upscale them, rotate 45 degrees, squish them 50 %, combine them in mountain chains, cut them up in diamonds, and downscale them and made the gifs from them again. That would be perfect. Just like the rivers. Rivers are almost perfect in Civ1 mod, as they're not just individual lakes, they're lakes chained up.

It would be worthwhile to experiment with units size as well. When you transform square terrain into a diamond shaped one, the area becomes smaller. Not usually in math, but in civ1 to civ2 there is such a transformation. So when you migrate an unit from square terrain to a diamond terrain, the unit too should transform to a smaller one.

 

[Metro Polis]

I think I've seen something like that before. Maybe some of the other users know about it. I'll have a look at my files at the weekend.

 

[Kasius Klej]

John Valdez's Civilization 1 Graphics Modpack

I had a go at this game. Loaded civ1 mod, entered cheat mode and built myself a tank in Europe. A tank is an awesome weapon in civ1. I was play testing. At first everything was like in civ1, except movements on the river. I was hitting militias with my tank, and horsemen, and when they attack my armor, not a scratch. Just like in civ1. Then I put an enemy tank nearby. We went tank on tank. Now it wasn't exactly like in civ1. Now there was hit points, my unit got wounded.
I'm getting involved now in this project as well, looked at John Valdez code.

Armor, nil, 0, 3.,0, 10a,5d, 3h,1f, 8,0, 0, Aut, 000000000000000

This tank has 3 hit points. Can this be corrected? This is the thing I should find out this week.
There's also two wonders not included and one tech missing.
A few minor bugs mentioned yesterday and a few things around pedia.

I'll see if I can come up with improved txt files for this modpack.

 

[Blake00]

Sounds good @Kasius Klej , I've been busy with John files too.

However mostly just graphics, the only text editing I've done so far was to rename Civ2 special resources to Civ1 equivalents. I'm not hugely interested in messing with all the configuration stuff so it's a good thing that's an area you're interested in mate haha. Although I would like to use the 2 techs that access the 5th and 6th city graphics rows to allow 2 more Civs to have their own city colour (like what Metropolis did in our soon to be released Heroes of Might & Magic scenario)

For a hybrid mod Johns work is pretty cool as on closer inspection his upscaled Civ1 terrains are quite nice (eg he painstakingly drew grass and flowers etc). It's just the forests, hills and mountains that don't look good. Unfortunately I suspect your suggestion or 45 degree rotation with vertical squishing was exactly what John did with those 3 and it just didn't look good. As obviously we've got no 'mountain range' linking going on but also the titles look completely squashed flat like a Super Nintendo Mode 7 world lol. I wasn't really game to mess with that stuff and I had a different idea anyway.



I thought it would be fun to something different to a upscaled hybrid and instead go 'full authentic retro' or at least as much as possible. Using JCivEd (a popular and modern Civ1 map editor) I created a custom Civ1 map to create lots of terrain formations, took screenshots and then cut those bits out of the screenshots, doubled their pixel size and then used a Civ2 terrain diamond cell 'cutout' to take what I wanted. Then I'd do a few touch ups to make it fit and look better.



Just as John talked about in his readme I had a LOT of colour issues as all those greens and yellows in Civ1 are not in the Civ2 palette so I had to try and pick the nearest Civ2 equivalents which are probably a bit too strong but its either that or too bland lol. Going double size on everything means the terrain matches the resolution of the special resource icons now plus it gives a nice retro oldschool Civ1 DOS look. Not many have done double sized assets in Civ2 before so I had no guides to go by and had to experiment endlessly as obviously diamond edges are not blocky double sized and neither is the raster making the terrain not join together very well. In the end even a 2x blocky raster didn't go well so I removed the raster all together as thankfully all Civ1 terrain is very green and has green edges that blend together quite well mostly removing the need for a raster (although deserts could use more work). I made sure the imported forests and jungles were nice and 'fluffy' with branches coming out over the top of the diamond to make them more 3D and get rid of the squashed flat look. As for rivers, hills, mountains and shorelines, to avoid the problems John had I simply went through a huge Civ2 modding resource collection @Metro Polis kindly gave me a while back and found Civ 2 equivalents that looked most like Civ1's versions, I then downsized them to 50% and the put them back up to 100% again to deliberately make them more blockier to match the Civ1 assets. I then recoloured them to match Civ1 assets even more (eg green hills). As always shorelines were a bloody nightmare.. especially when you make them blockier haha. I reimported all special resources at 2x (as John's were unevenly stretched too) and then changed all the remaining Civ2 ones (Civ2 has twice as many as Civ1) to either use modified versions of Civ1 special resources (eg Ore & silk variants of gold & gems) or I created low colour blocky retro versions of Civ2 special resources (eg Whales, Wheat & Fur).

I've also imported 2x sized city square sprites which look better then the weird unevenly stretched ones in Johns original. Will work on terrain improvements next, and then units. All of johns units are unevenly resized so I'm gonna need to re-impoirt the whole lot from Civ1 as nice even 2x size actually fits in the Civ2 unit cells just fine. Will try to get them all comfortably fitting inside a Fortification graphic too.

 

[Metro Polis]

Looks good, guys. It doesn't seem as you would be in any need of assistance. How will you solve the problem of the cities' colours?

 

[Metro Polis]

enhanced version below

 

[Metro Polis]

That's what it looks like: there is a unit inside the city on the left and none on the right. I used the flag in cities.gif and turned it into a rectangle mimicking being a city. Unfortunately the flag wasn't given too much space, so the rectangle is somewhat smaller than the original city.
But it works: Now the colour always adjusts to the nation and you can even start a random game. City size is there right in the middle to keep colours while there are no troops inside the city. It's translucent now, but if you want, you can paint such a city grey or whatever you like.

I attached the zipped cities.gif if you want to try it yourselves. As you will see, I only altered the first two rows of cities. In a scenario you could use this idea to have all civs with a specific city colour (5 using unique city styles and two would share the funky rectangle flag). In a random game or mod you would have to use the funky flags.

You can use a similar trick even for the units using their shields as background colour - but again, the shields are smaller than the original coloured square around units.

 

[Blake00]

Looks good, guys. It doesn't seem as you would be in any need of assistance.

oh if you're bored then there's plenty you could do to help if this crazy project interests you mate haha. Eg imagine a Civ1 upgrade your palace replacement for the throne room, or a Civ1 buildings replacement for the Civ2 ones in the city sky view.. but yeah those would tough challenges!

As tempting as it is to get into big advanced changes like those I'm instead gonna finish up my terrain & unit work and then be on my way out of here as I need to get back to finishing my other projects lol!

Speaking of which I've been busy doing settler terrain improvements:

• John had 2D irrigation and mines which didn't look so good on a busy isometric world map so I painstakingly created custom blocky isometric 2.5D versions of Civ1 irrigation (tried to make as exact as possible) that link up to each other (just water for irrigation and full original for farmland upgrade) which have come out looking pretty good! Although I think John has locked out refrigeration tech meaning no one will be able to build the farmland version which sucks a bit.
• Anyway I then drew custom blocky recreations of Civ1's roads and railroads as once again Johns were all weird looking.
• The mine is just a double sized Civ1 mine but I've moved the 2 objects (is it a mine shaft and a little red building? I dunno lol) further apart horizontally to give a more isometric look.
• Pollution is just Civ1's imported and double sized but I also rotated it 90 degrees as it was longer vertically in Civ1 which doesn't suit Civ2's diamond.
• As for white Forts John attempted an isometric version but it didn't look so good. Judging by my success with the irrigation I possibly could do a nice isometric 2.5D version of the Fort but for now I'm happy with a 2D version since units and cities are 2D and were originally designed to fit inside the transparent square inside the fort in Civ1 so why not continue that.
• Lastly John had a little 2D version of the letter A for Airbases but it looked weird, was misaligned so it didn't change colours for factions, and there was no different between a unoccupied and occupied version. So I've made a bigger 2D letter A that changes colour and I put a rotated Civ1 fighter plane on it as the icon for occupied heh.

View attachment 587922 View attachment 587923
That's what it looks like: there is a unit inside the city on the left and none on the right. I used the flag in cities.gif and turned it into a rectangle mimicking being a city. Unfortunately the flag wasn't given too much space, so the rectangle is somewhat smaller than the original city.
But it works: Now the colour always adjusts to the nation and you can even start a random game. City size is there right in the middle to keep colours while there are no troops inside the city. It's translucent now, but if you want, you can paint such a city grey or whatever you like.

I attached the zipped cities.gif if you want to try it yourselves. As you will see, I only altered the first two rows of cities. In a scenario you could use this idea to have all civs with a specific city colour (5 using unique city styles and two would share the funky rectangle flag). In a random game or mod you would have to use the funky flags.

You can use a similar trick even for the units using their shields as background colour - but again, the shields are smaller than the original coloured square around units.

Funnily enough I had the exact same idea with the city flags and unit shields as you did (you taught me well ) however yeah I quickly realised the flag and shield boxes are too darn small & skinny so I gave up on it. It's also a shame that city size number boxes have black borders as like you have demonstrated they could have sat in the center of the city square just like they did in Civ1.

How will you solve the problem of the cities' colours?

Regarding the city colours I was thinking to use the trick you taught me of gifting 2 factions the 2 techs required to unlock the industrial and modern city graphics slots as that will give us access 6 city colours. Which means only 2 factions will end up with the same city colour. Whereas right now in Johns original we've got 4 of the 7 factions with the same colour which doesn't look too good. However that would mean those 2 techs (is it Industrialization and Robotics?) would need to be taken out of the tech tree to ensure no one else can get them, and any techs that require them are relinked to other techs to make sure we don't break the tech tree. I dunno if I can be bothered messing with all that though haha. So the alternative is to just leave as is but make the industrial slot white and the modern slot grey as those are nice neutral colours, so when everyone ends up with grey cities in the late game it won't be all that different from the usual grey Civ2 modern cities lol. For example here's an old save I used with Johns mod where all the modern cities are grey (gameplay wise his mod is not compatible with regular saves for due to all the units, buildings and techs that are locked out/invisible but regular saves are still useful for some of my graphic tests!):

 

[Metro Polis]

Well, for the cities' colours: you could keep them gray for two civs and still place the flag right there in the middle of them. Would still look better than having all grayish or sharing colours. The units have to be placed a little bit downwards inside their squares. I playtested the scenario and happened to move units a direction I didn't want because they are placed to high and that misleads the user.

The way you want to have the cities means you only plan a scenario. And the city style can be altered by a tool even after you saved the scenario (Was it the barbarian tool? I can't remember.) As there are no unique units here, you don't need to link them to special units. Just kick the techs completely out of the game, if they should alter your city style in-game.

(That's a way to reduce pollution by the way: kick out Industrialization and Factories and all that stuff).

EDIT: I'm not quite sure what the reason is for a civ1 mod for civ2. I won't make any effort touching the .dll files. If I had to give an advice, I'd tell to stick with TOT here. There are many units slots you can use to have a coloured background (for unique units).

 

[Kasius Klej]

Here is the improved txt files for this.
rules.txt
game.txt
description.txt

Solved the things like aqueduct limits, unit support costs under monarchy, missing religion, Bach and Michelangelo. The new txt files are included in zip.
Also added an installer to this bundle, which was a thing I could do fast.

Something would take more time, though. In civ1, the development of combustion makes barracks obsolete again. To recreate that, the tech tree would have to be modified. And the same with automobile. The the tech tree ought to be modified, otherwise the development of the automobile will make all cities change it's appearance. Once all the civilizations will develop automobile, all the cities will look the same.
I will try to solve this next week, and will be sending updated rules.txt
I think user defined tech is needed here.

There are 3 things that can't be improved:
- settlers eat=1 under despotism and monarchy as well
- sentry graphics for units in city
- river movement is faster than in civ1
Who cares? I started a new game as Romans. I opened DOSbox, typed civ and so on, I entered EARTH. Just wanted to check something about resources. Yeah, the situation is tough for Romans on civ1 earth map, just as I remember, only fish and bare hills around newly settled Rome.
Don't have the exact same world map in civ2, but for Romans it is similar size. On this map the world is small as well, and Rome is a coastal city as well. I started the new game. However the life is easy for Romans the whales swam by. I don't know now, the game is not the same anymore. It's like the difficulty level changed. Two extra shields. Well.
Had to change that in rules.txt to somehow that civ1 defaults.
Other than that, the @terrain section in rules.txt is as it was, it's just a draft, I'd better not update the @terrain as Blake is also doing modification on terrain values and matching with graphics.

Yeah, this is great screenshot. See all the huts in north America. The looks of unexplored continent. That looks good.
Could you upload some gifs, Blake, so we could test how it plays in game?

Does anybody have a map identical to civ1 Earth map?

I can't open your attachment Metro Polis. But hey, this is a great idea. The flags. The way it is now, the map is somehow crowded with colors, there is 8 for civilizations plus 4 colors for cities, and by 12 it is getting difficult to orientate on the map.

I also made some experiment with units size. Made the smallest possible version of units to see how they would look on the map. Probably too small to be usable, however, I noticed two things. Shields are important to know who is who, and they require certain area, which is a problem with full size units, the lack of that area... then we can well see the green army crossing a river... I will do more experiments on unit size. Perhaps there is a resize ratio, a number that would then look best on the map, somewhere between the size of greens and whites I guess.