DOS tileset for CivWin

[Blake00]

So I had a look on Win 3.1 in DOSBox and it does seem that the animated wave palettes are messed up by this. I think what's going on is that at least some of the civ city colour palettes are being shared by the animated waves, which might explain why the CivWin devs and Honza changed a bunch of the colours around. This might just have to be a 16 bit colour or higher mod unless I can find some way of juggling the colours to keep everything happy.

I think when I last ran CivWin in WineVDM on my main OS I was able to get animations working by using that little tickbox on the windows file properties compatibility screen (for civ.exe) that forces the game to run in 256 colour mode. Give that shot as it might make your testing easier.

 

[Lord_Hill]

I'm not gonna hijack the thread with this, but just to make a quick point here's a crude conversion of the SNES settler, using approximate colours from the DOS tileset palette. I think I'd come unstuck looking at all the colourful dithering the SNES uses on the terrain pieces and luxuries/resources. Not forgetting the same palette has to handle all the city screen graphics as well!

 

[Blake00]

I'm not gonna hijack the thread with this, but just to make a quick point here's a crude conversion of the SNES settler, using approximate colours from the DOS tileset palette. I think I'd come unstuck looking at all the colourful dithering the SNES uses on the terrain pieces and luxuries/resources. Not forgetting the same palette has to handle all the city screen graphics as well!
View attachment 635322

Hah yeah getting the colourful SNES stuff in would be such a challenge... but thank you for the proof of concept experiment.. super cool haha!

I wish I understood Honza's tools better as I'm quite good with retro palette conversion stuff, I'm just useless with the modding part lol!
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[Lord_Hill]

I made a small change to this mod to fix the missing green border for the yellow Civ units. v4 is now attatched to the original post here

DOS tileset for CivWin

DOS Tileset for Civilization I for Windows After an incredibly long time (3 weeks), I have finished the DOS version tileset for CivWin. It required quite a lot of time, effort and patience. However, IT IS DONE! Although I do realize, that CivWin is not as popular as DOS version due to...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[Lord_Hill]

Another aside, the broken 256 colour wave animations is definitely caused by image editors struggling to save 8 bit TGAs properly. If I use IrfanView to make changes (which is what Honza tested with) and don't use any advanced editing features, it's fine and the waves work ok. If I use IrfanView and copy and paste something, this appears to be done 'under the hood' with bit depth of 32 bit, then when you save back to 8 bit, the waves get screwed up. GIMP (which is what I use) seems to do this regardless of what editing features I use.

Trouble is, doing these mods without being able to drag or copy and paste parts of the image would take forever, so not going to happen. 256 colour fans will just have to get used to waves that pulse white instead of gently lapping against the shore. I also noticed that the waves are moving away from the shore with this mod, whereas in the DOS version they move towards the shore.

 

[VetLegion]

Hi guys! I am trying to get this tileset as .jpeg or .png or .gif files... but I can only see the binary RSC file. Am I looking at the wrong place? Where could I get the images in a web-ready format please?

 

[Lord_Hill]

You would need to extract the tileset out of the rsc file and convert to a tga using Honza's tools which are in the first post.

There's no online guide, but his readme is quite easy to follow. It's all in the 'civwin file format demonstrator source.zip' file.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Another aside, the broken 256 colour wave animations is definitely caused by image editors struggling to save 8 bit TGAs properly. If I use IrfanView to make changes (which is what Honza tested with) and don't use any advanced editing features, it's fine and the waves work ok. If I use IrfanView and copy and paste something, this appears to be done 'under the hood' with bit depth of 32 bit, then when you save back to 8 bit, the waves get screwed up. GIMP (which is what I use) seems to do this regardless of what editing features I use.

Trouble is, doing these mods without being able to drag or copy and paste parts of the image would take forever, so not going to happen. 256 colour fans will just have to get used to waves that pulse white instead of gently lapping against the shore. I also noticed that the waves are moving away from the shore with this mod, whereas in the DOS version they move towards the shore.

I ultimately did make a version of the DOS colours mod which works in 256 colour mode with animated waves. As mentioned, I sacrificed the fix for the right hand unit border being cut off, because it's too much work to shift all the unit tiles over by a pixel without copy/paste or any other advanced editing features (which always seems to ruin the animations no matter which graphics editing software I use). Still, I tested it with DOSBox Windows 3.1 and PCEm running a Windows 95 PC and the waves animate nicely.

The release post is here

DOS tileset for CivWin

DOS Tileset for Civilization I for Windows After an incredibly long time (3 weeks), I have finished the DOS version tileset for CivWin. It required quite a lot of time, effort and patience. However, IT IS DONE! Although I do realize, that CivWin is not as popular as DOS version due to...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[darkpanda]

Any idea whether the animation works by cycling colors in indexed-colour images ? That's the way it is done in CivDOS, any clearly it's a challenge to mod CivDOS PIC files and keep colour animation integrity.

In JCivEd there is embryonic functionality to manipulate images (PIC/PAL) and attempt to keep Palette integrity in various ways, I am wondering whether this could help you somehow.

 

[livinginaz]

Does anyone know if it's possible to install this in CivNet? I would assume not, but I don't have a copy to check the way the texture files are stored compared to CivWin.

 

[Blake00]

Does anyone know if it's possible to install this in CivNet? I would assume not, but I don't have a copy to check the way the texture files are stored compared to CivWin.

I think @Lord_Hill was experimenting with getting the dos graphics into CivNET in another thread but I can't find it so maybe I'm imagining things lol!

 

[Lord_Hill]

Sadly not. CivNet appears to use a similar structure to CivWin, graphics are packed into multiple separate archive files. But CivNet replaces the RSC files (which Honza's tools can extract) with DLL files which no one has ever provided a tool to work with as far as I'm aware. So unfortunately there are no graphics mods for CivNet at this time.

Blake might be remembering that I ported the DOS tileset over to the Mac version a short while ago. A considerably easier task given that it's 99% identical to the windows version, including using the same RSC files and storing the graphics in the same format. They almost certainly share the same source code given how similar they are.

 

[Blake00]

Blake might be remembering that I ported the DOS tileset over to the Mac version a short while ago.

ahh yup, that's what I'm remembering sorry.

CivNet replaces the RSC files (which Honza's tools can extract) with DLL files which no one has ever provided a tool to work with as far as I'm aware. So unfortunately there are no graphics mods for CivNet at this time.

Hmm that's interesting as Civ2 uses dll files to store its graphics too so maybe CivNet employs an early version of that system since they were being worked on in a similar period. There are multiple editors that open Civ2's DLL files and allow you to extract and import back in the graphics files in them. Might be worth a shot trying them on CivNet. GifXtractor is a popular one although it forces limits in that you can't import something back in that's bigger that what you're replacing as original Civ2 could crash if the DLL sizes change (hopefully CivNet doesn't have that problem), later versions of Civ2 such as MGE and ToT didn't have this issue so people switched to using Resource Hacker as that has no limits. You can see some of the Civ2 DLL work I did with these programs in my Civ2 HoMM2 mod project thread.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Interesting, I'd forgotten about generic resource editors. Resource Hacker is 32 bit only but eXeScope can open them. Don't have time to see if the output actually makes any sense, but it's on the todo list now!

 

[Lord_Hill]

I finally figured out how GIMP was breaking the colour cycling animations in 256 colour mode, it was forcing every layer that shared a colour but had a different index to all use the same index every time you saved. This is probably desirable if you're looking to minimize duplicate colour usage in your image but not if you want to implement colour cycling in 1991! I worked around this by tweaking the palette entries for the colour cycling bit to use imperceptibly different shades of blue rather than an identical shade so the information isn't lost when saving. Hooray!