[Col] Colonization picture viewer

Thanks, AyCe! It seems like there should be some way to mine the savegame files for that kind of data, and while drawing a map and plotting villages on it might be a bit much to ask, we could at least get a text file showing that kind of information for (e.g.): Camp at (23, 101): no skills / wants tobacco,coats,trade goods / sells furs,ore,cotton. (No skills, of course, meaning the place has already taught someone and won't any more.) Maybe you'd have to save the game and rerun the utility to refresh the info, but it would be available.

If I knew what I was doing, I'd create one myself.
 
I've crawled through the save files a bit and such a thing should not be too difficult. There even is some documentation:

http://www.colonization.biz/hack.htm

Skills don't seem to be hardcoded and rather seem to come randomly from the terrain around the village. I suspect that, because with the RNG-fixed EXE the skill offered can vary each time you enter a village and even depend on the location you are entering from.
 
Of course! I should've thought to check colonization.biz. A lot of that seems to make sense, but it seems clear as mud once I open a save file with a hex editor. Of course I see the colony & ruler names, but gaa! The rest of it! And there doesn't seem to be anything in there about the Indian villages...that I could identify.
 
A nice modern viewer tweeker program exists for Master of Magic that gives you info on almost everything (it runs in a seperate window while you play MoM in dosbox) so I've always thought it would have been cool if something like that existed for Colonization too.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/momrtgt/
 
I was just reading this old thread as I was curious about editing tools for DOS colonization and was surprised to see the discussion turning to the windows version.

Just as an fyi in case anyone isn't regularly refreshing, you guys basically had it figured out. It does indeed use 16 bit dlls so no 32 bit dll tool will work with them, I used ExeScope to browse and extract data. And it is indeed the images themselves that have custom compression, not the dll file. They use the same custom GIF format as CivWin, which was reversed by Honza Havlicek in the Civ 1 forum.

See here https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/colonization-for-windows-graphics-editing.683750/
 
Ahh yes I forgot about this old discussion when we were having a our recent discussions in the thread you link to, as at the time when I was posting in this thread I was thinking about making a classic Colonlization graphics mod for FreeCol but changed my mind so the need for the ColWIN assets diminished. Oh well still great to see we can now get in there and extract them out!
 
I realise FreeCol is more your thing, but what would you say is the best tool for graphics extraction and editing for the DOS version in 2023? Looks like there's a few different programs kicking around?

EDIT @AyCe 's batch version of @Zharramadar 's extractor seems to do the job nicely :)
 
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Yup I was just about to recommend the 2 from earlier in this thread as they appear to do the job well. Although I played with them a bit but not heaps.
 
I did take a quick peek at @m4D 's unpacker. Looks like they hadn't cracked the gif image stuff which Honza's tools can handle but they did manage to figure out a different sprite format which covers stuff like the handwriting and the leader graphics. Between the two it's pretty comprehensive!
 
Hello guys, I am trying to localize DOS Colonization fonts for my language and after digging everywhere I am found this forum.
I am tried mpskit for extracting fonts, but there are some issues and unfortunately pictures palette is wrong.
However, I could be able to work somehow even with wrong palette on the most of the font files, but unfortunately extracted PNGs from FONTKING.FF are too bad for editing.
I want to try DrawFontMADS mentioned here as well, but I cant find it for download anywhere, all links are dead already.
So, is somebody here who could be able provide it to me or give me another hint how to properly unpack and then pack again Colonization fonts? Thx.
 
AyCe said:
Somebody seems to be working on proper font exporting at the moment, this was still missing from the version I uploaded:
github.com

GitHub - igadmg/MADSPackViewer: Viewer/Extractor by Zharramadar for Sid Meier's Colonization

Viewer/Extractor by Zharramadar for Sid Meier's Colonization - igadmg/MADSPackViewer
github.com github.com
Click to expand...
Thx @AyCe , I hope that something will appear soon. Anyway mpskit which I am mentioned before could be quite good as well, if its author will update it and fix little bit.
 
Hello guys, it looks like I was able to fix my problem with mpskit. I was expecting that color palette is somehow detected from FF file, but after digging in the source code I am found that palette colors are manually set, so I am adjusted colors and I am able modify fonts now. So, it looks like a lot of work is waiting for me 😉
 
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