Command & Conquer and Red Alert Civ2 & ToT scenarios development

[Blake00]

This has now become the tracking & development thread for Command & Conquer and Red Alert scenarios.

Blake's 2024 Civ2 MGE Command & Conquer Tiberian Africa Scenario Remaster Project - IN PROGRESS :
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...nario-mod-pack-for-civ2.646728/#post-15477124


Blake's 2024 Civ2 MGE Red Alert 2 Siege of New York Scenario Project - IN PROGRESS :
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...nario-mod-pack-for-civ2.646728/#post-15647111


Blake's Test of Time C&C Remaster and Red Alert 2 Siege of NY Scenario Projects - ON HOLD:
While Blake has done some preliminary work on ToT conversions of the above scenarios, they are on hold until the original MGE versions are completed & released.

Original post:

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Does anyone know of Command & Conquer or Red Alert scenarios/graphics pack for Civ2 MGE or ToT?

Been thinking about making a dark and moody one heavily based on C&C2 Tiberian Sun just for fun. But there's no point in me wasting my time if someone else has done it haha.

The only one I can find is this Command & Conquer multi scenario modpack by @wonx2150 :
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ-2-c-c-mod.9958/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ-2-c-c-mod.282368/


He converted in a number of units and buildings but didn't really do much with the terrain. I can't be stuffed making a whole scenario so I'm thinking I might do a C&C graphics update for his instead heh. I could release a separate graphics modpack too for those not interested in the scenario.

Would be easier making a ToT graphics conversion due to the increase colours however his scenario is MGE so I guess I'll be putting my pallet conversion hat on lol as I'm too scared to even bother touching the MGE to ToT scenario converter lol.

EDIT: Also found this C&C Red Alert 1 scenario by ?Unknown? that appears finished & playable but lacks custom graphics:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/command-conquer-2-red-alert-scenario-cic.28983/


EDIT2: Also found this C&C2 Brotherhood of NOD scenario project by @Joeb WK that has a similar dark apocalyptic authentic C&C2 vision to mine but sadly it was never finished & released:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/brotherhood-of-nod.114210/

 

[tootall_2012]

Hi Blake00,

I'm not aware of any specific graphics pack related to these two games but if you are looking for modern type graphics there are a number of places you can find them, including the following:

• Scenario League - Modern Units here
• CivFanatics - Modern Unit Graphics here
• CivFanatics - Raging Dragon scenario graphics here
• CivFanatics - Download Section - Modern Scenarios here

I hope this helps.

 

[Blake00]

Hi Blake00,

I'm not aware of any specific graphics pack related to these two games but if you are looking for modern type graphics there are a number of places you can find them, including the following:

• Scenario League - Modern Units here
• CivFanatics - Modern Unit Graphics here
• CivFanatics - Raging Dragon scenario graphics here
• CivFanatics - Download Section - Modern Scenarios here

I hope this helps.

Thank you Tootall. Those are great looking packs but yeah I'm after actual C&C graphics ripped from the games so I had to do it myself haha.

Here's some comparison pics of @wonx2150 's original graphics (mostly default Civ2 with a few changes here there including some rather funny looking tiberian lol) versus my new overhaul graphics either ripped out of C&C mix files or drawn by me.

Note: I have NOT touched any unit graphics yet. Just done terrain & cities. Will probably change most special resource icons too.

Wonx's ORIGINAL scenario graphics:

Blake's OVERHAUL graphics:

I've also given each faction custom command centers matching their faction colour and also custom walls (eg NOD bases get their laser fence, GDI bases get their firestorm walls, and Neutral bases get GDI base walls with little turrets)

 

[Blake00]

Time for a progress update!

I've been spending most of my free time working with @Metro Polis on the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Civ2 Scenario however I've done a bit more work here and there on my visual remaster of @wonx2150 's awesome C&C Civ2 scenario. I've also started preliminary work on a Red Alert 2 Siege of New York scenario for Civ2.

But as for Wonx's C&C scenario remaster most units have now been redone. Original C&C1 units are too small and 2D top down looking to really work well in Civ2 (we've got those lovely remasters coming but they'd still be too 2D top down looking) however like the command center building most defense buildings should come across okay. But for other units I'm going to need 2.5D isometric versions and thankfully there's actually multiple really good sources for C&C1 style units within the 2.5D isometric C&C2 engine. C&C2 Twisted Insurrection and OpenRA C&C2 Crystallized Doom are both awesome projects that involve C&C1 styled units in the C&C2 engine so I contacted the authors and asked their permission to use some units and they were happy to help.

These custom fan made high resolution voxel models are even more detailed than Red Alert 2 models (a game that came years AFTER C&C2) which makes then awesome to look at but also difficult to downsize to a Civ2 unit cell. Voxel models are also better when they're moving and aren't so good for sharp details when sitting still lol!

Eg I have to get something like this:

Into this little thing:

So naturally after this downsizing some re-painting of details is required. Civ2 MGE also has a very very limited colour palette so the models require a lot re-colouring too (yeah I know I probably should have converted Wonx2150's scenario to Civ2 Test of Time lol). Takes hours to get each unit done but I think the effort pays off as they don't look too bad haha! Here's a shot of my latest work which includes a whole bunch of imported units:

.

 

[Patine]

Time for a progress update!

I've been spending most of my free time working with @Metro Polis on the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Civ2 Scenario however I've done a bit more work here and there on my visual remaster of @wonx2150 's awesome C&C scenario. I've also started preliminary work on a Red Alert 2 Siege of New York scenario for Civ2.

But as for Wonx's C&C scenario remaster most units have now been redone. I've been using high resolution models from various C&C fan remake projects and downsizing and re-colouring them. Takes hours to get each unit done but I think the effort pays off as they look pretty cool! Here's a shot of my latest work:
View attachment 535941

That redone map almost looks like Africa with SMAC terrain.

It does look quite intriguing, though.

 

[Blake00]

That redone map almost looks like Africa with SMAC terrain.

It does look quite intriguing, though.

Yeah Wonx's original scenario is based on NOD's invasion of Africa.

Haha yeah I guess my screenshot above does have a bit of a SMAC look to it due to the colours however all terrain assets I extracted from C&C2 Tiberian Sun. Eg in the below image you can see the desert and dirt patterns I extracted although I darkened the desert a bit to better match the dirt. The grassland & ocean is from C&C2 as well however I had to re-colour them significantly due to MGE's limited colour palette.

.

 

[Blake00]

Hmmm to cloak or not to cloak...

The NOD Stealth Tank spends most of its time cloaked in C&C until it attacks. Civ2 doesn't support any sort of unit transparency so all I can think of is a chequered effect. However with so few pixels in the model you lose a lot of identify and detail. But when on standard zoom your eyes do seem to 'connect the dots' and create a not too bad cloaking effect. Which one I should go with folks? @Metro Polis @Knighttime @Civinator

Units File:

In-Game (Standard 1:1 pixel zoom):

In-Game (Max zoom):

 

[Konig15]

Where's the option to download? I want to try this scenario.

 

[Blake00]

Well I didn't hear back from anyone here but I got feedback/votes elsewhere for Cloaked! So I've gone with that. However I've stuck the uncloaked version in a unused area of the units file should anyone prefer that one and want to swap it in when playing.

Where's the option to download? I want to try this scenario.

Thank you for your interest!

No download yet as my remaster of Wonx's scenario is not finished yet. I'm balancing about 4 different projects so progress has been slow haha. However I am very close to finishing this.

All unit and terrain graphics have been finished now which was the hardest part, I just need to sort out the city buildings, extra bonus graphical changes and re-balancing all the units A&Ds as some of Wonx's original units are pretty unbalanced.

I've got 4 weeks off work starting Christmas so I intend to make a big dent in my 4 projects (including this one) then!

In the meantime here's a shot of all my finished unit graphics! Those with a keen eye will also notice that I've now replaced all special resources with C&C2 decorations too.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I seem to remember back in he day, i think it was Pablostuka who was working on a Red Alert scenario. Can't remember if it was ever finished.

 

[Blake00]

I seem to remember back in he day, i think it was Pablostuka who was working on a Red Alert scenario. Can't remember if it was ever finished.

Cheers! I went through his history and saw lots of WW2 mod work but had no luck finding anything Red Alert related. He hasn't visited in a long time but maybe if I PM him it'll bring him back.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Look what i found. Vintage 2004. From a scen that was never finished as far as i know.

The development thread may have been on CDG/evo-games forum back in the day.

 

[Blake00]

Those units look cool! Shame that never got finished!

Speaking of Red Alert scenarios.. I guess I should 'formally' announce that using the many skills and tricks I've learned making the Heroes of Might & Magic Civ2 Scenario with @Metro Polis, my old Star Wars Civ2 Scenario, my ToT Graphics for Civ2MGE mod, and my Remaster of Wonx's C&C Civ2 Scenario above that I'm also currently working on a Red Alert 2 Siege of New York Civ2 Scenario as well. Before someone says "what?? you haven't even finished most of the other ones yet" yes i know.. I suck lol. The others are either finished or very nearly finished, I'm just holding off on them as I want to get this final project to a good enough state that I can take a screenshot and 'advertise it' in the other projects readme files and tour videos etc. I promise not to add anymore new projects to the list unless someone helps me convert Civ2's Master of Magic Jnr scenario to Test of Time format so I can make an upgraded multi world version of it haha!

So what is Red Alert 2 Siege of New York? Probably something too ambitious for my own good but I'm going to give it a bloody good try anyway. The aim is to try and make a similar map to the first Allied mission of Red Alert 2 in the Civ2 engine and have both sides battling across the map trying to breakthrough garrisoned sky scrapers with tanks and bombers etc (using imported RA2 unit graphics similar to what I did with Won'x C&C scenario above).

Visually there's no way in hell I can make it look anywhere near as good as the original but the aim to is try and get is as close as I can using lots of different Civ2 editing tricks.
Eg here's a shot of the original game in all it's beauty:
(Click to expand)

Using 3x3 super cell areas made out of River, Forrest, Hills & Mountain formations I can create 4 big sky scrapers, I'll also have leftover cells for 2 square diagonal buildings and of course I'll have lots of cells free for smaller 1 cell buildings.
Eg here's a shot of my first test super building, the surrounding cells inside the 3x3 will be MUCH more packed with buildings in the final version. You can also see I've made some test 1 cell burning buildings. I've also mapped out the shoreline border lines to later insert the cool seaside cement brick wall docks of the original map.

Now the real fun trick with these buildings is to downsize and convert not just the damaged version but also the healthy garrisoned version too! This will then allow me to break up certain areas of the super buildings into Civ2 unit images. These units will act as the garrisons and once they are killed it will reveal the damaged burning building underneath. This creates a similar fun effect to the original Red alert game where clearing out a building garrisons would leave a damaged burning building behind. I plan to use a similar trick (units over damaged terrain) to simulate the soviets destroying the statue of liberty!
Example of me converting healthy/damaged/garrisoned versions of a small building:

And a garrisoned/damaged super building for another 3x3 I'm working on right now:

Another tough thing I've managed to successfully implement is something that many Civ2 modders have experienced the 'joys' of and that's Land Bridges! I thought to myself.. how the hell do I create a bridge just like Red Alert 2's bridges that land units can cross but does NOT have the Civ2 shoreline textures. Then I remembered there is 1 texture in the game that overrides shoreline textures, river mouths! Metro used the 4 different river mouth textures to implement extra decoration in our HoMM2 scenario and I realised I could do the same and put bridge side textures on them. Of course to get river mouths I need a river going across the bridge which created another problem, as rivers override all land terrain types. However then I remember roads and railroads override rivers so I just needed to replace Civ2's roads with red alert 2's big fat highways and the sneaky subterfuge was complete haha.
Finished land bridge that tanks can cross:

The deception revealed. What it looks like with default Civ2 graphics:

 

[Metro Polis]

I don't know if this is of any help, as I wasn't into real-time strategy games, but if you don't have any rivers on your mainland and turn the desert tiles (which form the coastline) non-irrigatable, your settlers won't waste time and turns on that. And you could use the graphics for irrigation for sth. completely different if isolated by desert tiles. Alas, the river tiles wouldn't be available any more (or have to be isolated as well through desert or placed on an 3x3 island). I think you could even copy that little isle in the original picture graphically 1:1 simply by using the 3x3 river tiles' shape.

And you will need a lot of units to hide such buildings underneath units. 7 per super-huge building, that's a complete line for each building, and therefore 4 lines for 4 such buildings. So I think it will be a ToT scenario, right?

 

[JPetroski]

This is absolutely gorgeous work!

 

[Blake00]

This is absolutely gorgeous work!

Thanks! Hopefully the final product will be waaaaay better than these test shots.

I don't know if this is of any help, as I wasn't into real-time strategy games, but if you don't have any rivers on your mainland and turn the desert tiles (which form the coastline) non-irrigatable, your settlers won't waste time and turns on that. And you could use the graphics for irrigation for sth. completely different if isolated by desert tiles. Alas, the river tiles wouldn't be available any more (or have to be isolated as well through desert or placed on an 3x3 island). I think you could even copy that little isle in the original picture graphically 1:1 simply by using the 3x3 river tiles' shape.

And you will need a lot of units to hide such buildings underneath units. 7 per super-huge building, that's a complete line for each building, and therefore 4 lines for 4 such buildings. So I think it will be a ToT scenario, right?

Yeah because I'm using rivers for the 4th super building and will probably use left over river slots for other buildings I'm not going to have rivers in this scenario (there wasn't really any rivers in the original RA2 NY mission so I can get away with that haha). Also unlike my other scenarios I've decided this one will not have any settlers/engineers and will just be a pure war/battle scenario. That allows me to do more special tricks with terrain and improvements to push more decoration into the map.

Nah the current plan is to stick with MGE and only have 2 garrison units in the 3x3 super buildings on the top and bottom cells, if I have spare unit slots after adding all the military units I'll add a 3rd garrison unit in the center cell of the super building. The other left over cells just have tiny little side bits of the super buildings that aren't worth garrisoning (Although I might garrison some of the smaller buildings I'm going to squeeze into the 3x3 around the super building). I'm doing my best to get all the damaged burning bits into the top and bottom cell areas but in some cases I may just leave exposed damaged bits even when the building is garrisoned. Will see how I go!

Using irrigation for something else entirely is a GREAT idea! Irrigation could be Soviet Tesla reactors, Farmland could be Allied Power Plants, mines could be Ore Processing plants. Similar to my C&C Tiberian scenario above I plan to use Construction site graphics for city graphics so it will look very cool and Red alert 2 looking to have little power plants and ore plants around the construction sites just like in a real C&C base haha.

Also gives me an extra idea.. if you look at the original Red alert 2 image I posted above you can see a cool blue hew light affect over the entire allied base, on other maps there's a red light over Soviet bases. That's not really something I can replicate in Civ2 (without sacrificing more terrain cells that I'd rather use on city buildings) however if I put these power plants on concrete slabs (similar to my existing white concrete slab graphics) and give these concrete slabs beneath the buildings either a slightly blue or red tinge/glow this would then create a bit of a red or blue glow illusion around the city bases! Simulating coloured lighting in a Civ2 level would be another big wow factor feature I can't resist trying haha. I'll have to do some experiments!!!!

.

 

[Blake00]

Early liberty island with a multi cell destructible statue of liberty has been made. In the finished scenario I'll stick in an event that triggers if the soviets destroy it where it plays a WAV file of Premier Romanov giving his morale crushing "See your liberty, how she lies broken before you..." speech haha.

Intact statue of liberty (built from 2 extra tall units cells):

Destroyed burning statue of liberty terrain decoration (hidden underneath units):

 

[Metro Polis]

Looks good, champ.

 

[Blake00]

Some more WIP shots where I'm testing a number of things. Once again I must stress that city buildings are not even near finished or properly imported yet, the broken up repetitive half finished buildings here are just placeholders so I can work out positioning of things.

Here's where things are at:

• All 4 3x3 super building templates have been successfully tested and placed (but not graphically finished)
• Roads now have street lights
• Dirt terrain replaced with RA2 style dirt with gold/minerals spread around them
• Mines and diggers added to dirt areas too
• Soviets and USA construction center city graphics imported and downsized to fit
• Base locations worked out & named (sometimes abbreviated or spelt wrong due to annoying Civ2 city name character limit)
• New NYPD 3rd faction added with police style building city graphic. The original RA2 level had police cars driving around so I thought it would be fun to have a NYPD faction that pumps out weak police car units to annoy the Soviet invaders lol.
• Farmland replaced with glowing blue cement (will later have thermal power building put on it) to primitively replicate the cool colour glowing base effects of RA2 (grassland bushes overlapping base cement will be removed).
• Irrigation replaced with glowing red cement (will later have tesla power building put on it) to primitively replicate the cool colour glowing base effects of RA2 (grassland bushes overlapping base cement will be removed).
• The strange yellow and red lines in the base radius's are me mapping out 4 separate cells to place special railroad formations that I'm replacing 4 unique base building decoration for each faction (Radar, Barracks, Factory, Refinery) to really give that C&C/RA base feel. With 8 free railroad cells I was able to get the 4 decoration cells per faction I wanted (meaning each faction will have its own variation of those 4 buildings)!
• The equally weird red & yellow dots and crosses you may notice around the place are me mapping out special resource locations to eventually insert more decoration into.
• I've made the coastline guidelines even taller/wider apart so that once I put in a sea wall it's gonna be even bigger and looking real cool!

Next I'm going to look at using left over river/forest/hills/mountains not used in the super 3x3 building formations to create 1x3 diagonal buildings or other decoration (eg carparks, resorts, burger joints, hositals, warehouses, slums etc). After that I'll look at replacing special resources to create even more building types. Then I'll finish working out what building designs and formations go where and try to pack in as much detail and variety as I can.

 

[Knighttime]

This is impressive; it's always cool to see ways people can stretch the boundaries of Civ2 graphics, and you've clearly put a lot of thought and time into figuring out how to achieve the look you want. The unit overlays seem to be working very well, and I think the sea walls are going to look pretty neat once you get them done -- the framework looks perfect.

My only comment is that I know you are working on this in MGE but I really feel that the limited palette there is serving as an unfortunate constraint on your artistic skills, and holding you back from producing something even better. Test of Time, with true-color bitmaps, would really be nice for something as graphic-intensive as this. I know you're a big MGE fan but I'd really encourage you to try this out in ToT if possible -- I think you'd impress yourself with the end result. I believe you could actually make it look exactly like the "original game in all it's beauty" that you posted on Jan 20, without any of the pixelation or artifacting that you get from downscaling the 470,740 colors in your original image to the 256 that MGE can support.

Just my two cents though. As long as you're having fun, don't let me get in your way! Keep up the good work.