Changing art assets

[TheManFromMars]

Hi there,
I'm not new to modding and that goes double for Civilization games but I'm having fits trying to edit some of the art assets like terrain or the colour of miasma.

When I try and open many of the dds files (not all of them) in GIMP, I get consistent loading errors stating it can't open the file format/compression. I've been editing Civ 5 art assets for years so I'm not sure what is going on.

I know it is possible to edit the art of the terrain as I've seen a mod out there on Steam that does just this, it's the Visually Distinctive Terrains series by Cousken. I've looked in their mod but can only find a bunch of modified dds files, no xml/sql nothing..? How does this work? I'd love to mod the terrain assets myself for ease of seeing/creativity.

Also I can't find anything on how to change to colour/intensity etc of Miasma.

If anyone could provide any help on this I'd be grateful.
Thanks, TMFM

 

[Nutty]

See this thread.

The trick with texture replacements is simply setting them VFS=true. Unfortunately, it's not possible to do this with some textures, in which case you'd need to use the method described in the thread above.

 

[TheManFromMars]

Thanks Nutty,
I knew about the VFS=True, remember all that hullabaloo from Civ 5
The problem is getting GIMP to even open the terrain textures, urgh. Anyway if you or someone else could try opening those files in GIMP and seeing if it works that'd be great, if not I'll just keep looking it over.

-mars

 

[Nutty]

I can open many (but not all) with Nvidia's Photoshop plugin. Try another free editor. Paint.NET has built-in dds support.