Developer Screenshots

[Quintillus]

This is a thread to share screenshots from development-in-progress builds, with the goal of being able to show visible progress more frequently, without the overhead of a formal release or other long-form post.

It may also occasionally included bloopers. Just like the old Civ3 Screenshots of the Day.

First up, work on tile visibility for humans has started!

It's a bit rectangular for now, but before too long we'll have the "eXplore" part of 4X as a part of the game.

 

[Quintillus]

Fog of war being worked on:

The alpha blending is not working yet, but you can see that it's mostly calculating how to draw the fog of war, with one obvious problem.

You can also see that our starting location generator doesn't care how difficult of a start you may have... but you've got a fish and a forest, it could be worse!

 

[Quintillus]

Here's a good example of a blooper:

That definitely wasn't the alpha blend I was going for!

 

[Quintillus]

More correct fog of war:

This doesn't exactly match the Civ3 in-game fog of war, despite using its assets. This is because the screenshot/C7 is using FogOfWar.pcx, but Civ3 PTW/Conquests use their own in-game procedures for fog, to prevent cheating via modifying the PCX file to make it less opaque.

Why does FogOfWar.pcx look different than in-game? Did something change between Vanilla and Conquests in how fog is displayed? Not that I remember, but maybe...

Now I think I'll go see if I can find the Americans or the Dutch somewhere out there in the fog!

 

[Kyriakos]

Nice fog of war, but maybe blur it out a bit more (not sure what original Civ3 uses to create that effect)

 

[Ozymandias]

Looking very fine!

 

[Hans Lemurson]

That looks like a dither map like what was used for tile borders in Civ2. My guess is that Civ3 doesn't actually use that graphic at all.

 

[Quintillus]

Interesting... that could indeed be a carry-over from Civ2. And I'm 99% sure Civ3 didn't use it either, both because there are threads circa 2002 at CFC mentioning that it now used internal methods to generate the edge fog, and because my Civ3 Vanilla box shows fog as it is today. Although I have the Game of the Year Edition rather than the initial version, hence the 1% uncertainty.

 

[Quintillus]

I've just added the first community unit to the game:

Thanks to Plotinus for volunteering his units!

 

[Uncle Paul]

Is it possible to have the leaderheads be bigger? I know Firaxis originally rendered them at a higher resolution, maybe someone could email and ask for them?

 

[Quintillus]

Is it possible to have the leaderheads be bigger? I know Firaxis originally rendered them at a higher resolution, maybe someone could email and ask for them?

First of all, welcome to the sub-forum!

Long-term, higher-resolution art is a goal, although we won't be shipping any Firaxis-created art; everything you see that was made by Firaxis is due to C7 being able to point to and reuse local Civ3 graphics.

My guess is map graphics (terrain and cities, and perhaps units) would arrive in higher resolution before leaderheads, but it really depends on what the community creates. I am not an artist, so I wouldn't be the one creating them. If you created higher-res leaderheads, I think the only thing preventing them being included would be that we haven't got around to diplomacy of any sort yet, so there aren't any leaderheads displayed yet. Diplomacy, beyond perhaps some very rudimentary random war/peace mechanics, and thus leaderheads, are probably 1-3 years away. Items such as technology and buildings are likely to arrive first.

 

[Uncle Paul]

First of all, welcome to the sub-forum!

Long-term, higher-resolution art is a goal, although we won't be shipping any Firaxis-created art; everything you see that was made by Firaxis is due to C7 being able to point to and reuse local Civ3 graphics.

My guess is map graphics (terrain and cities, and perhaps units) would arrive in higher resolution before leaderheads, but it really depends on what the community creates. I am not an artist, so I wouldn't be the one creating them. If you created higher-res leaderheads, I think the only thing preventing them being included would be that we haven't got around to diplomacy of any sort yet, so there aren't any leaderheads displayed yet. Diplomacy, beyond perhaps some very rudimentary random war/peace mechanics, and thus leaderheads, are probably 1-3 years away. Items such as technology and buildings are likely to arrive first.

Thank you! I've always liked the Civ 3 leaderheads, if I could email Firaxis and get them in higher resolution, would you be able to use them?

 

[Quintillus]

Thank you! I've always liked the Civ 3 leaderheads, if I could email Firaxis and get them in higher resolution, would you be able to use them?

We wouldn't. This is a 100% community-made game, which aims to be compatible with Civ3 scenarios (and very long term, maybe other games), but not incorporating any Firaxis content. A medium-term goal (1-2 years) is to have C7 include enough community-created art that you wouldn't have to use any Civ3 art, although the option would remain to do so as long as there's a locally-installed copy.

Many years ago, the community tried the easier route of seeing if Firaxis would be interested in a community-built patch for Civ3 that addressed some of the remaining bugs and limitations, among other options. Despite one of the community members having good contacts at Firaxis, that didn't result in anything. I think Firaxis's priority is on selling more copies of the newer versions of Civilization.

 

[Uncle Paul]

We wouldn't. This is a 100% community-made game, which aims to be compatible with Civ3 scenarios (and very long term, maybe other games), but not incorporating any Firaxis content. A medium-term goal (1-2 years) is to have C7 include enough community-created art that you wouldn't have to use any Civ3 art, although the option would remain to do so as long as there's a locally-installed copy.

Many years ago, the community tried the easier route of seeing if Firaxis would be interested in a community-built patch for Civ3 that addressed some of the remaining bugs and limitations, among other options. Despite one of the community members having good contacts at Firaxis, that didn't result in anything. I think Firaxis's priority is on selling more copies of the newer versions of Civilization.

I like the way Nintendo remastered old Super Mario games in higher resolution, I wish Firaxis would do the same. At least Civ III is still being sold, unlike other games from 20+ years ago, such as Oregon Trial II (which is now abandonware that can be played for free online)

 

[Quintillus]

I like the way Nintendo remastered old Super Mario games in higher resolution, I wish Firaxis would do the same. At least Civ III is still being sold, unlike other games from 20+ years ago, such as Oregon Trial II (which is now abandonware that can be played for free online)

Oregon Trail II! A classic. I still have my CD version for Windows 95 and 3.1, and Mac OS 8. The QuickTime 1.0 videos don't play great on modern systems, it could indeed use an update.

It is fortunate that Civ3 is still sold, but Civ2 and Civ1 aren't. There are GOG petitions to add them to GOG; you can read up on the latest there. https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...i-mge-test-of-time-to-be-added-to-gog.675300/ I don't know why they aren't sold; you'd think there are enough Civ players who want to round out there collection that it would pretty easily pay for whatever effort is required to package them up in a playable-on-modern-machines format.