Faction logo colouring

[Lord Shadow]

Let's see if any Europeans, Kavithans, PACs or Polystralians can take a look at the files and answer this, since a good chunk of us can't play yet...

It's about the relationship between faction colours and their logos: in Civ5, the primary and secondary colours are defined in XMLs and the game automatically colours things like city names and unit icons, yet the civ logo itself isn't generated and has to be hand-crafted, so to speak. Would that still be the case in CivBE?

Given CivBE unit icons are coloured in gradients rather than plain values, following the exact same style of faction logos, I figured maybe the latter were coloured in a different way than Civ5 (i.e. grabbing XML values and painting over a base image whose original colours might only be aimed at marking something like "this is colour A and this B" and 'outsource' the actual colouring), for uniformity's sake and labour-saving.

Any insight would be appreciated!


PS: It may only take looking at the files of the default logos to realize whether they're manually or automatically painted. They might be in .FPKs. Could Civ5 tools be used to unpack those and rummage through their innards?

 

[Lord Shadow]

So I did some rummaging of my own.

Dragon UnPACKer 5 and DDS Unpacker work fine with Beyond Earth, and the secret to faction logos lies in Resource\dx11\UITextures.fpk and no less than four icon atlases which provide varied effects to each:

• CivSymbolAtlas (various sizes): Grayscale gradient of each logo.
• CivSymbolsColor (various sizes): Full colour version of each logo.
• CivSymbolsGlow (two sizes): Glow effect for each logo. Only includes the 8 main factions.
• CivSymbolsGradient (two sizes): Grayscale gradient for each glow effect? Only includes the 8 main factions.

What puzzles me at this point is, why's there a full colour icon atlas if the others provide a way to, as I speculated, colour logos dynamically according to values on the XMLs?

Due to a fluke in the faction selection screen playing my first game (I picked a certain opponent and then changed them back to Random), I have two Barres in it. The second one has a pinker version of the PAU icon, but interestingly enough, a variant which isn't one of those presented in the full colour atlas. So where exactly are the manually coloured versions used? Only in the Civilopedia? And where exactly do they give way to the dynamically generated ones?

 

[Nutty]

It's actually similar to Civ5, which also had a mix of manually colored and dynamically colored atlases depending on the context. I'd guess that the dynamic coloring doesn't look as good, especially with the icons with larger dimensions.

In BE, you can have multiple players using the same sponsor, so it looks like there are 2 extra colors provided for each sponsor.