lindsay40k
Emperor
I’ve been playing a lot of Battle for Wesnoth and Advance Wars.
In these 2D games, weather and daylight conditions change during play.
In Wesnoth, map tiles go from blue shift to suggest moonlight, to desaturated to suggest morning mist, to bold saturation to suggest daytime sun, to yellow shift to suggest sunset.
In Advance Wars, the map tules change to a white palette when it snows, a darkened and desaturated palette when it rains, and sprites of sandy flurries fly across it when it’s windy.
In Wesnoth, the transition has a noticeable lag, and in Advance Wars it is accompanied by a quick fade out and in that emphasises the change in conditions and perhaps conceals a lag.
In both games, the changing conditions affects the way different units behave. In Advance Wars, there are ways to control the weather to your advantage.
Is there any way to incorporate elements like this into a Civ 4 mod?
Potential solutions that come to mind:
- live palette cycling on textures (very 16-bit solution);
- switching textures (may require an effective save and reload; possibly a very clumsy solution)
- switching terrain features, for instance replacing the leafy green forests with the snowy tundra ones (code exists to do something similar when global warming happens; in fact, it also changes land types, without a noticeable lag)
- overlaid textures that cover land tiles with scattered pixels; white for winter, pink and light green for spring, deep green for summer, brown for winter (could add a lot of assets). Also potentially overlaid translucent filters that change - dark blue for night, white for morning, clear for day, orange for sunset (could look weird when units aren’t affected).
- overlaid sprites that do a similar function; piles of snow in winter, little flowers in spring, green grass in summer, leaf piles in winter (could add a lot of stuff for graphics processor to render)
- changing light colour, like Civ 6’s day-night cycle
In these 2D games, weather and daylight conditions change during play.
In Wesnoth, map tiles go from blue shift to suggest moonlight, to desaturated to suggest morning mist, to bold saturation to suggest daytime sun, to yellow shift to suggest sunset.
In Advance Wars, the map tules change to a white palette when it snows, a darkened and desaturated palette when it rains, and sprites of sandy flurries fly across it when it’s windy.
In Wesnoth, the transition has a noticeable lag, and in Advance Wars it is accompanied by a quick fade out and in that emphasises the change in conditions and perhaps conceals a lag.
In both games, the changing conditions affects the way different units behave. In Advance Wars, there are ways to control the weather to your advantage.
Is there any way to incorporate elements like this into a Civ 4 mod?
Potential solutions that come to mind:
- live palette cycling on textures (very 16-bit solution);
- switching textures (may require an effective save and reload; possibly a very clumsy solution)
- switching terrain features, for instance replacing the leafy green forests with the snowy tundra ones (code exists to do something similar when global warming happens; in fact, it also changes land types, without a noticeable lag)
- overlaid textures that cover land tiles with scattered pixels; white for winter, pink and light green for spring, deep green for summer, brown for winter (could add a lot of assets). Also potentially overlaid translucent filters that change - dark blue for night, white for morning, clear for day, orange for sunset (could look weird when units aren’t affected).
- overlaid sprites that do a similar function; piles of snow in winter, little flowers in spring, green grass in summer, leaf piles in winter (could add a lot of stuff for graphics processor to render)
- changing light colour, like Civ 6’s day-night cycle
