Heroes of Might and Magic Civ2 & ToT scenarios development

[CurtSibling]

Excellent work! Hopefully it can work for ToT too.

 

[Blake00]

Looks all amazing .

Thanks mate.

Excellent work! Hopefully it can work for ToT too.

Thanks, yeah hopefully! @Metro Polis has retired so it'll be up to me to convert the mod over but I don't see why I can't do a basic 1:1 conversion to ToT after the MGE release at the very least. However as some of you have seen from my recent posts in the ToTPP thread and my experiments in the Animating ToT units thread the temptation of making an enhancing fully animating ToT version of the HoMM2 mod is a big one, as my experiments have shown that thanks to Mercator's SpriteGen2Beta tool it's now much easier to make animating units and terrain thanks to efficient image grouping and familiarly designed txt config files. I was also able to get my hands on all the HoMM2 creature animation frames so I've got nearly everything I need for it. ToTPP and SpriteGen2Beta have of course given us extra terrain slots too so it would also allow me to add in more HoMM terrains and map decoration that Metro & I couldn't fit into MGE which would be super cool too. ToT would also allow for more creatures and more custom city graphics too. Not to mention the possibility of a linked second world map for underground cave stuff or elemental planes like later HoMM games have.

My recent ToT animating HoMM2 unit test which was a success!


Looks like all our custom DLL stuff can be brought over to ToT without too much trouble too and @TheNamelessOne 's brilliant recent edition of dedicated mod folder loading in ToTPP means people wouldn't have to replace core ToT files with our stuff. However all the amazing custom videos Metro made are another matter. ToT suffers the same problem as MGE in that Wonder Movies are auto disabled in scenario/mod mode, and ToTPP has sadly not brought back the High Council video advisors or the Diplomacy Herald video characters so a LOT of our hard work, biggest & best changes to Civ2 that make this mod stand out from others will be lost in a ToT conversion. I can hopefully do the 'provide 7 faction savegame files instead of a scenario file with cheat mode hacked to off' trick to allow people to get wonder videos, but there's nothing I can do about the missing High Council or Diplomacy Heralds unless TheNamelessOne can bring them back which I get the feeling he won't, as I'm the only one asking for them and he's made it pretty clear in his thread that he understandably won't invest large amounts of time in things that the majority aren't asking for. Oh and I also pestered him about the possibility of having 'high res' unit portraits in the Civilopedia like Buildings already have as it would be cool to import all the HoMM2 unit portraits into ToT, but I'm not holding my breath on that one happening either haha! But at least I'll still be able to import larger HoMM2 castle building images into the ToT Civilopedia which would be cool.

HoMM has lovely unit portraits that would look great in the Civilopedia!
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So yeah.. there's a few losses and drawbacks to doing a ToT conversion however the idea/dream of seeing our Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod with fully animating units and world map is an exciting one so while I can't make any promises I can certainly tell you guys that the interest is there. I just need to finish up all this final MGE stuff and hopefully I'll still have plenty of drive when the time comes that I'm doing my ToT preservation and mod making work with no burn out!

Now.. speaking of animation and getting the original MGE version finished people will be pleased to know now that I'm finally done with all the MGE preservation work that's taken years and I'm now back working on this mod again in-between a few other things! My last comment in this thread on the previous page teased the possibility of me doing what I believe no one else has done before and replacing the High Council Video advisors with custom graphics that animate over the top of them matching up to all the existing audio cues! NOT an easy job!

For starters I needed to select a 'motley crew' of suitable HoMM2 heroes to replace our existing advisors! Naturally I couldn't resist a big angry Orc dude for our grumpy military advisor, I found a nice nerdy library wizard kind of hero for our Science guy, I found a Barbarian hero with posh clothes and earrings to make a good rich Trade guy, naturally I couldn't resist using one of the dark cloaked female heroes for our Spy chick, and lastly the hardest of all was trying to replace the Elvis Entertainment guy so I went with a crazy deranged forest hero with leaves & sticks in his hair as I'm sure he's highly entertaining when he walks into town lol, and there's just nothing else in the HoMM2 hero lineup that even remotely fits Elvis sadly. I also did my best to make sure each had different backgrounds so the colour contrasts would make each hero stand out and look cool & unique! Have resized (no stretching) their original near square shaped portraits by cutting out some side stuff and extending the vertical stuff (eg drawing extra sky at top & a bit of extra clothing on bottom or in one case cleavage lol) as much as I could without it looking too bad. Extending each one even further to fill it's entire window would have been cool but beyond my limited pixel drawing abilities sadly lol.

For those who've never played HoMM2 I should point out that Heroes faces do NOT animate so it's going to be up to me to make it happen! However before I could even start on animating them I realised that a lot of their faces were not suitable for neutral closed mouth resting faces when they're not talking, as half these guys have open mouths, gritted teeth, and grumpy frowns heh. However at least some of these open mouths would save me work later when trying to make them talk. So here's my revised neutral closed mouth hero advisor lineup! I also fixed up some of my extensions a bit more too.

So then I had to make their mouths, chins/beards, eyes & eyebrows animate which was quite the challenge as I'd never done that before! I've got a bunch of Sierra point & click adventure games (eg King's Quest and Quest for Glory) that have animating portraits so I studied them and extracted their mouth & eye frames to learn some tricks.

My first animation test/proof of concept was the Trade guy as he originally already had a slightly open mouth and teeth that I felt would be the easiest starting point...

I think it worked out okay and isn't too bad a work from someone who's literally never done this before lol! Creating an open mouth on a face that barely had one is bloody hard, so I wasn't looking forward to doing this 4 more times lol! I also had to make him look friendlier since you can see from his original portrait earlier that he's kinda angry looking with gritted teeth. Although I kept his frown for one frame as the Civ2 trade guy does made a lot of snarky comments so it fits heh. Basically the whole thing is just five frames - one with mouth half open, one with mouth fully open, one with a blink, another one mouth half open repeated, and one with an eye brow movement. Hopefully this plus the regular closed mouth 'resting face' 6th frame will be all I need for replacing the video segments.

Confident from my first success I then took on these 2 who were quite difficult as they both had tiny closed mouths meaning I had to open them from scratch myself! I relied heavily on my Sierra point & click examples for these ones! Took many passes and changes before I was happy enough with them! Science guy got a Spock like single eyebrow raise and at least with the girl I didn't have to worry about eyebrows at all! I have a beard these days and noticed that my moustache moves a bit as I talk, so I gave the guy a bit of that too.

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So then came the last 2 who I knew would be quite the challenge too! It's hard to see at this small scale and surrounded by the bright CivFanatics forum background but if you use either browser zoom or download the image to look closer at our crazy forest entertainer you'll notice that most of the leaves and sticks animate since that cool purple menacing background makes it look like he's in a bit of a storm. As for our Orc I knew I shouldn't really make his helmet move so I needed to convey his (usually grumpy) emotions in a very limited space. Fortunately the original picture had an open mouth so I was able to make some more open and more closed variants. His bloodshot eyes already convey rage but with his eyebrows blocked by the helmet I knew I needed to do more to convey his emotion, so I did a slightly showing eyebrow frown and made his nostrils flair at the same moment which will hopefully go nicely when he screams "GIVE ME MORE SOLDIERS NOBLE LEADER SO THAT THEY MAY SHEATH THEIR SWORDS IN THE BEATING HEARTS OF OUR ENEMIES!!!" haha.

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So that's it.. all done! Now comes the next messy part.. getting these guys into the High Council advisor video files! As I mentioned in my previous post I've worked out how to make Civ2 indeo video codec movies without Metro's help using freely available video editors and I was able to do a successful video advisor replacement test. So now comes the very time consuming part of creating the finished product and mounting these animations over the top of all the advisor videos, which are 3x roughly 6.5min files making nearly 20mins of stuff that I gotta replace every second of with the neutral static faces or the animating faces each time I hear them speak lol! I wish I only had to do the ancient era but Metro & I needed to make one faction industrial and another modern to access their city graphic slots so that means they'll get the other advisors so I gotta replace them too (yes a Redneck General Patton style Orc tooootally makes perfect sense, not haha). This is going to take a while but at least it's relatively simple & repetitive work compared to making those animating faces from scratch!

 

[Blake00]

Hey guys! In the end it took me over a week but I got it done and am pretty happy with the results. I forgot about the 3 anarchy files so in the end there were 6 files I need to change and mount these animations over the top of! The only annoying issue I encountered in the end was that some of the original default advisor thumbnails were actually taken from moments where they were talking which means some of my replacements have open mouths instead of closed resting faces, but oh well other then that it worked out perfectly! You can check out the results of all this work below in this video, enjoy!

 

[Civinator]

 

[Blake00]

Well after many weeks of working on the Civ2 episode of my big Civ video series and feeding in all the best scenarios and mods I've found or rescued over the last couple of years it's finally in a near finished position ready to have the final stuff inserted about my own scenarios...



So of course for that I actually need to friggin actually finish my scenarios lol.. so yes the time has finally come that I'm back working on my scenario projects and intend to get them all finished and released over the coming months if all goes well! The first one I want to finish is the biggest of them all, this Heroes of Might & Magic 2 scenario @Metro Polis and I started all the way back in 2019! Like I said in my previous posts here one of the advantages of the 3 year delay is that I've learned a lot allowing me to do some of the crazy stuff I posted above and also look at better ways of redoing some of our old stuff. Starting with GUI and all the backgrounds! All the backgrounds I did were painstakingly edited down in quality to fit in the tiny original dll files using GifX, and while we were aware of ResourceHacker we decided to keep things compatible with pre-MGE versions of Civ2. However the dragon breeding spaceship replacer I posted previously ss.dll file will not work with pre-MGE and almost no one plays those older versions now anyway, as over the last 3 years I've seen like 2 or 3 guys here and on the GoG forums posting about stubbornly sticking with Fantastic Worlds and the usual reason given was the AI bug which @FoxAhead has fixed in MGE with his brilliant Civ2UIA Program. Now I put a huge amount of work into carefully downsizing and colour reducing all those background images but let's be honest, they don't look good and number of 'wonderful' people on the internet didn't hesitate to tell me what I already knew a few years back when I first shared them around social media. So I've thought for years about redoing them however I'd then ask myself should I really be wasting time redoing large amounts of work instead of just finishing the darn thing lol! Well after making my recent discoveries about how to do custom font colours in Civ2 (and its accompanying catch that you have to apply a new colour palette with those colour slots locked out in nearly every image file the game uses to avoid weird glitches) and doing some tests and seeing just how much darn better the results are I decided that OKAY, I'm doing this!

For starters I applied new custom fonts giving the primary and secondary headings a bright slightly golden yellow (similar to many HoMM2 GUI titles) ensuring they don't get as lost in our leafy marble HoMM2 GUI as much as the old grey ones did, I was going to make the regular info text bright but that had some unwanted side effects in that the game is hardcoded to show unit stacks depth using that same colour slot so putting a bright colour there did NOT look good, so I instead made it darker.
Secondly I wasn't originally able to use the true brown HoMM2 GUI background texture due to it being too dark and Civ2's default fonts disappearing into it so we used a light cream version of the regular Civ2 background. However thanks to these new custom font colours, I was able to finally import the true HoMM2 brown one. For those who may wish to stick with the old cream one I've left it in the safe spot in the Icons file though.
Thirdly I decided to take on the city backgrounds as while they didn't suffer the dll limitation issue I still used rather simple conversion techniques resulting a huge amounts of colour and detail loss. So all city backgrounds have been redone!

To demonstrate all these changes here's an old marketing shot I made up for the video that shows some of the map, the GUI, a custom wonder video, the title and the city screen. You can see the cream GUI window background, our headings getting lost in the marble leaves, and the lack of colour in the city background.

And here's a brand new shot where you can see the true brown HoMM2 GUI window background, bright coloured headings for the city and map windows, and the city background has much more colour in it. As a fun side effect the custom yellow font colour has also changed the city building list and the flashing end of turn message!

Next I started look at the Intro.dll file to get things looking better in the main menu. Our original background was not good as the default Civ2 background lady statue with the scales etc was all brown making the file size so small frocing me to spend hours gradually taking so much detail and colour variety out of our custom background to fit in the dll that it just looked terrible! Plus its lack of quality was made even more obvious by the fact that Metropolis crafted a beautiful custom intro video using this castle on the lake sequence and the transition between the two was quite jarring due to the huge quality difference!



I also didn't know until I discovered Matt Dempsey's Game of Thrones scenario that you could put giant images on the Civ2 title screen and they would still nicely stay centered even if you're viewing resolution is smaller than the picture. So knowing that I not only created a better version of the HoMM2 castle title image (that looks similar to how it looks in Metro's intro video) but I also mounted it on a giant 1080P background image using the HoMM2 addon title screen image of the dark moody sunset battlefield. Naturally I've also gone through all the extra window image backgrounds that appear as you start a new game and redone them in much higher quality so you'll also notice the cobblestone street village image on the top left is also much better too! And of course the custom fonts and new GUI background are in play here now too!

I've run out of weekend to finish the job but I'm pretty much half way through and will get all the advisor backgrounds and diplomacy images sorted out next weekend. Once this overhaul is done I can then move on to making the custom dragon (spaceship replacer) video sequences and altering the tech tree to put the spaceship back in the game (we'd locked all that out originally). Then start working on a nice map, write up the documentation, and do some final testing (which Metro has kindly said he'll pop back out of retirement to test with me), and then that'll be it! This thing will be good to go.. so stay tuned!

EDIT: Being sneaky and avoiding 10 pic attachment limit on my next post by using this one.

 

[Metro Polis]

2019! Wow, that is a freaking long run!

 

[Blake00]

Have almost completed upgrading all the advisor backgrounds and diplomacy images, however I've discovered that the diplomacy and view city sky view screens mess with the custom fonts colours after all, which will require much more work to convert all the assets in the dlls. As previously discussed though I've taken advantage of the opportunity to significantly upgrade all background images now that I'm free of the gifx pre-MGE leash on dll image sizes. Previously we used fading and blurring whereas this time I simply used darkening on all images just enough to make the text in front of them still readable (yes I know I probably should have gone even darker but they're sooooo pretty lol).

As you can see things are looking much nicer now!

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I also decided that since we're already using HoMM2 Castle screen pictures for our city background images that we didn't really need to use them again in all those advisor backgrounds so I decided to boot up Heroes of Might & Magic 2 and take brand new screenshots of it's good old cutscenes to make new background images for many of the advisor screens! I also noticed that we never replaced the old Civ2 credits screen either so I changed the background and text for that too.



EDIT: Oh and I forgot to mention that I also found where Civ2 keeps that little miniature icon version of its main menu title image that appears on the start a new game and quitting windows. It's very small so I couldn't think of anything good from HoMM to put there, so for now I just stuck a Black Dragon & Crusader from our units file in there squaring off heh.

 

[Blake00]

As previously discussed in this thread I came to the unfortunately realization that our custom wonder videos would not play in the scenario. It didn't seem like the end of the world at the time as it was me pushing for a scenario and Metro mostly just wanted it as a mod for new sandbox games, however we forgot that even when used as a mod for starting a new game the custom events will not load in MGE unless you save the new game as a scenario and load that up, thus turning on scenario mode and disabling wonder videos for that too. Also realised that the throne room is disabled in scenario mode too, so it was looking like a whole lot of hard work and promised features were all for nothing.

SO! The time came where I had no choice but to try hex editing the scenario and cheat mode flags in the savegame file, so using the advice and guide Garfield kindly posted earlier in this thread for me I had a go at it...

Here's a hex editing document. Page three has this:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/attachments/hex-editing-doc.620101/

I grabbed a save game from a scenario where I could see on the score screen that both cheat mode and scenario mode were activated, the throne room was not working and I could not play wonder videos either (even from the secret wonder menu TheNamelessOne showed me). I loaded the savegame in a hex editor (I used HxD Editor) and could barely bloody understand what was going on haha but managed to find offset position 20 where the cheat & scenario mode flags were stored, and changed them to zero and saved.



I then loaded this new edited savegame up in Civ2 and sure enough the score screen said no scenario and no cheat modes activated! I then bought a wonder and ended the turn and sure enough our lovely custom wonder video played, and it also asked me about upgrading the throne room for the first time in that game too! IT WORKED!!!

So now I'll be able to distribute savegames with the mod that use our custom events, wonders and throne room! Been worrying about that nasty final technical hurdle for like a year now so that's a big relief!! What's funny is that the old hex editing guide says changing the scenario mode flag has "no effect really", but for this problem it has EVERY effect and solves it lol!

Oh and for those wondering if Test of Time is different, well starting a new game in 'mod mode' preloads events thankfully however since that still counts as starting a scenario it means ToT also has the same problem hence why wonder videos would not play when I tried the Empire Earth Civ4 for ToT mod, so this hex editing solution should solve the problem with that too! While I've put requests to both @FoxAhead and @TheNamelessOne to add a 'allow wonder videos in mod/scenario mode' tickbox into their respective programs for MGE & ToT there's no guarantee they'll ever have the time to do that since they logically focus on the needs of the many rather than the few for obvious reasons and no one else has asked them for it, so I'll make sure I put a small guide in our HoMM2 mod readme file for our fans on how to to setup new games and hex edit them etc. I'm not a programmer, I haven't hex edited anything in over 20 years and had no idea what I was doing, so if I can do it then anyone can lol.

EDIT: Sadly I've since discovered HERE that using this trick to change your game from scenario mode to regular sandbox 'non-scenario' mode causes a new problem where all events are disabled. Meaning players have to chose between getting our events or getting our throne room and wonder videos. This 'one way or the other' system is hardcoded into Civ2 MGE and ToT so I don't think there's anything we can do about it sadly.
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[Blake00]

This weekend I successfully converted all the city sky view screen image files in the CV.dll file to support the custom fonts palette which stopped it cancelling out the custom fonts everywhere else whenever you looked at your cities. The city sky view itself doesn't look any different to what you've seen us post before though other than the city name being golden and more obvious now.



While I discovered through testing that I did not need to convert the palette for the SS.dll space ship images to work with the new custom font colours, playing around with Matt Dempsey's Game of Thrones Dragon breeding spaceship replacement still got me thinking about things. In that while yes I've credited him in our readme and yes many Civ scenarios contain elements & graphics from what has come before it still kind of annoyed me that I couldn't get his actual permission (as he's disappeared) and there was this big chunk of the mod that Metro & I had not made ourselves other than change the background image. Also in a game where there are buildable black dragon units you can take into combat it seemed kind of weird that you could just build this other black dragon and win the game. So I started thinking about how I could make it my own plus also make it more lore friendly, and then the idea came. HoMM2 doesn't have any super dragons but in HoMM3 there is the mighty Azure Dragon, a huge blue super dragon that is far more powerful than any other dragon and that even just a mere handful of them can demolish entire armies of other units in the game. So I went hunting and found some pictures of them from HoMM3 to insert over the top of Matt's GoT black dragon. When I started testing my replacements I very quickly started coming up with more ideas (& more work lol) to improve things further. For example Matt's dragon only uses 5 frames (an egg, a tiny dragon, a small size dragon, a large dragon, & a full size dragon) repeated across the 24 growing SS Structural frames, and due to his dragon's wings being fully outstretched he also didn't really use the maximum area size available resulting in the his dragon looking a bit small even at full size.

So I decided to make all 24 frames look different despite only having a few source frames myself! I kept Matt's egg and made it slowly increase in size for the first 6 frames, then I created a egg hatching frame with broken pieces and a little blue head popping out, then I created 5 frames using a slowly growing version of the Azure dragon from the HoMM3 battle screen (the original image is small so it gives the dragon a nice adolescent hasn't taken flight yet look), and then to finish off I created 12 frames using a slowly growing version of a much bigger & cooler picture of a flying roaring Azure dragon which I think was from a HoMM3 addon or chronicles promotional shot. Sadly there is a limited amount of blue colours in the Civ2 Space Ship palette & I couldn't be bothered building a new palette for it so it's a bit faded compared to the HoMM3 original but it's still a pretty nice blue! I also worked out the maximum pixel area size available that you can use for each stage and put a pink border around it (that's indivisible in-game) should people wish to look at the images in dll file and use them as a template for their own work. Matt had also broken the OK and Launch buttons by putting some things out of order so I fixed them too.

I decided to keep the same background image I'd used with Matt's dragon which is a HoMM2 campaign shot where evil Archibald had captured a dragon king. However like with the previously posted background changes above I've switched it from the old faded look to a darker background instead and I also changed the green dragon king into a blue one! Here's some in-game shots of the egg hatching and the final fully grown Azure dragon!

I've also successfully reintroduced the SS space ship parts back into the tech tree & city build list, renamed them to dragon ones, and given them custom icons. I've also replaced the spaceship construction sound with a dragon roaring heh.

All that's left to do now is the spaceship launch and victory video replacements! I've found some good dragon scenes from HoMM2's campaign videos that should do nicely. Although they're all green dragons in them too but I'll see if I can use some video editing tricks to make them blueish. Once this is done, that will be all changes, overhauls and final additions completed! All that will be left to do is creating a nice map, testing it and writing up the documentation. Feels good to finally be in the home stretch on this one!
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[Blake00]

Have successfully created the Azure Dragon launch and victory video sequences meaning every single video in the game has now been replaced!

These dragon videos ended up being quite the challenge to make as...

• Some of the source HoMM2 videos Metro & I used in 2019 that we obtained from the internet had nasty glitches in the parts I needed so I had to boot up HoMM2 in dosbox and record some fresh new videos myself (thankfully I still had my old savegames from the 90s!).
• For these HoMM2 recordings I was unable to turn off the campaign video commentary voice track without turning off the video sound effects too (dragons flying & roaring etc) so I was forced to redo all sound effects myself. So I used in-game battle screen dragon flying and roaring sounds which worked out okay albeit a bit repetitive, so I've done my best to cover that with cool HoMM2 music!
• Then I had the problem of trying to make the green dragons in all the videos blue to match the Azure super dragon theme which I really struggled to sort out. However eventually I found some answers on the Shotcut video editor help forums where a girl was asking how to make her yellow dress red without ruining the surrounding stuff in the video. People's answers showed me some tricks with using multiple layers of the same video combined with cropping and chroma key colour hue replacement tricks. Which as you can see below successfully turned the green dragon blue! Although not quite perfectly, as the really light green bits on the wings wouldn't go blue and if I tried to put a lighter green into the chroma key it started messing up all the surrounding brown wall stuff, so that's about as good as it gets using this software.
• And lastly I had to go find all the Alpha Centauri spaceship text and change it to talk about your Azure Dragons destroying all who oppose them. I didn't think it was possible to change that but I recently noticed the old Atlantis scenario managed to do it for it's submarine spaceship replacement and sure enough all the text can be found in Game.txt.

(Click to expand)

 

[Dadais]

Quite the huge work there Blake !

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

You will receive the Order of Lenin for this, Captain!

 

[Civinator]

Very nice!

 

[Volsang]

My goodness! There are still holy people in this world.

 

[Blake00]

Thanks everyone!

This weekend I worked on adding a 7th faction city graphic into the cities file. Metro & I talked about doing this years ago but because the 7th city graphic slot is not usable in Civ2 MGE we didn't bother. However there's a chance that @FoxAhead may grant my Civ2UIA wish list request to allow the use of it in MGE in the future, and if not then it's not a waste of time as I'll be able to use it in the ToT conversion later! Heroes of Might & Magic 2 only has 6 factions however the awesome guys behind the amazing HoMM2 style Succession Wars mod for HoMM3 (which I've been playing quite a bit of lately) have kindly given me permission to use their custom graphics for their special addon 7th desert Dervish race that uses many of HoMM2's existing neutral units similar to what we've already done in our mod so it was a perfect fit! The Dervish castle has been in their mod for years but their town graphic is not even released yet and will be in their next version (which is hopefully coming soon) so it was super kind of them to give me an early copy of it for use! They've also created a cool 8th swamp Witch faction (similar to HoMM3's swamp faction but with HoMM2 style graphics!) that I'd love to possibly use in the future ToT conversion too (maybe in the 8th CivBarb slot or as another creature spawner map object similar to the ones Metro has already created) so just for fun I converted that too however they've not granted permission to use that at this stage so this is just an experiment and it won't be used in our mod (and even if permission is given we're aaaaallll out of unit slots in MGE lol so it would have to be the ToT version later).

I converted all the original HoMM2 towns and castles into our mod waaaaaay back in 2019 so I was super rusty and it took many revisions before I was happy with the new conversions as the original castle graphics are more than 2x wider and 3x taller than a Civ2 city slot and of course don't fit in the useable diamond shape either so a lot of work was required to get them done and to ensure they were in a similar style as my 2019 cities but I think the result has turned out pretty good!

Of course after putting in all that work to get 'back in the zone' with city conversions I started thinking about taking advantage of the situation and doing some more conversions. Years ago I talked with Metro about doing a special Heroes of Might & Magic 1 addon for our HoMM2 mod that converts most of the graphics to HoMM1 style. We sort of laughed it off as something I'll probably never get to lol, and maybe I still won't! However the greatest hurdle with that addon mod would be having to sit there converting all the HoMM1 castles and towns over so I figured why not give it a shot while I'm in the zone otherwise it would have probably never happened. Sure enough I kinda flew through it and got them all done within a day! HoMM1 castles are thankfully not quite as tall as HoMM2 ones which made the downsizing a bit easier, although their front gates are off to the right hand side which was not so easy due to the Civ2 diamond issue but I was able to move them over a bit! There was only 4 factions in HoMM1 so that also made the job quicker too haha! Don't worry though guys, I'm probably not going to do any more work on the addon until after the main mod is released so no more time will be wasted.

So that's pretty much it for graphics now, everything I planned to do (and more lol) is done! All that's left now is looking at the unit balancing again (as I'm not happy with some of my 2020 special ability choices), then design a cool map for the scenario and then play a test game while writing up the documentation. These final things are going to take while so the weekly updates will probably be coming to an end lol. But once these jobs are done, this whole thing will be finished and ready for public release finally after all these years!
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[Blake00]

The map and scenario are almost ready for testing and it's looking pretty cool however I'm encountering an annoying bug that I can't seem to figure out the solution to.

Basically the problem revolves around 'how other factions see your city style'...

We all know that the savegame file contains a style setting for each Civ slot and this can be changed either in the MGE tribes editor, the rules.txt file, and via a 3rd party editor like civtweak or a hex editor. However a few times now over the years I've encountered an interesting problem where when I switch the human player between different Civs the city styles of some Civs seems to change despite their style setting in the save file and rules remaining unchanged.

In the past I've solved the issue by switching the human player to every civ and then going into the tribes editor and reapplying the city style I want for every civ (so like 7x7 style changes urgh lol). This seems to solve the issue and then no matter which Civ is the human player all the other Civs stick with their correct style.

However this time around it's happened with one of the Civs that I've used the modern city style slot 6 for via a tech. When I set the player to that Civ it shows the correct modern city style, however when I switch the player to other Civs and then look at the the modern Civ it's cities appearance reverts back to a bronze age style.

My past solution doesn't work for this problem because its a style that comes from a tech so I can't just switch between all the Civs and hop into the tribes editor each time reapplying the style I want... and editing in other programs (I've tried in civtweak and in a hex editor) just shows the starting city style of that civ and trying to force a modern style has no effect on what other Civs see it as.

Removing the modern city style tech has no effect in changing the style either, yet this trick worked on other save games with modern Civs (they reverted back to industrial and then back to starting style if I took that too).

It seems like there's a whole other hidden cache area storing how Civ city styles appear when viewed by other players and while I could solve the issue in past situations I can't when it involves a city style that comes from a tech.

I'll be pretty stunned if anyone knows how to solve this one as it's so weird lol... especially if it's just an MGE issue that never happens in ToT. Any ideas Civ2 gurus @Knighttime @Prof. Garfield @Civinator @JPetroski @Dadais ?
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[Civinator]

Blake00, I am definitely no Civ 2 guru - and especially not with MGE - but may be the posts in this thread can be helpful.

 

[Blake00]

Blake00, I am definitely no Civ 2 guru - and especially not with MGE - but may be the posts in this thread can be helpful.

Out of curiosity I started up a few games and checked the city style bytes. I found that only the byte for the human player is reset - both for normal games and scenarios. In normal games the byte values for other tribes are 0, meaning they get the first city style in cities.bmp. What's more, when starting normal games, I found that tribes data were not being properly cleared from memory; some of the data from earlier games appeared in subsequent saved game files. That can make it appear that bytes for more than just the one tribe are being set. Quitting Civ2 altogether before starting a new game provides a fresh slate. Anyway, at least CivTweak got you sorted.

Cheers, yeah that thread and Catfishes experiment confirms that it's a known issue and what's causing it. Sadly in Wouter's case using CivTweak was enough to fix it but it's not helping in mine as no matter what I set the City style to in CivTweak it still only affects things when the modern Civ is set as the player and it seemingly has no affect on when set to other players. I don't want to have to start over from scratch as I've spent ages building up the scenario file.

I wonder if @FoxAhead has any insight into this bug. Fixing it would be cool or at least finding a way to somehow wipe clean/reset this '2nd/extra city styles' stuff the game is saving god knows where when MGE has this memory issue. Civ2 should only pull Civ city styles from 1 place in the save file for all things as this mystery buggy extra is just silly (and was presumably fixed in ToT).

What's even more annoying is that while messing around and switching between city styles in the tribe editor somehow the modern faction suddenly started displaying the modern city style no matter what Civ I selected as the human player. I celebrated, saved the game and quit Civ2. Started Civ2 up again and loaded the save and the modern Civ was back to how it was (broken again)... what a tease... and now I can't seem to replicate what I did despite doing the same thing. So frustrating...
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[Civinator]

What's even more annoying is that while messing around and switching between city styles in the tribe editor somehow the modern faction suddently started displaying the modern city style no matter what civ I selected as the player.

When looking into Blackclove´s tutorial from 1999 (pre-Civ 2 ToT), the tech Automobile together with tech Electronics in these old versions of Civ 2 change city pictures to the modern style. The tech Industrialization changes city pictures to the industrial style.

Can it be, that you have run additionally in one of these settings?

 

[Blake00]

When looking into Blackclove´s tutorial from 1999 (pre-Civ 2 ToT), the tech Automobile together with tech Electronics in these old versions of Civ 2 change city pictures to the modern style. The tech Industrialization changes city pictures to the industrial style.

Can it be, that you have run additionally in one of these settings?

That's it!!! You got it.. it worked!!! Oh man that is so weird!!!! Thank you so much mate!!!

So basically if the modern Civ is controlled by the player then you only need Electronics to display the modern graphics city slot 6.. but if the modern Civ is not controlled by the player then it must have both Electronics and Automobile to display the modern graphics city slot 6. Crazy lol!!!!

The mystery second city slots memory issue when changing human players & switching between different games issue is still real and remains something that maybe Fox might want to look into as it's happened to me a few times, but thankfully it turns out that was not the actual issue I was dealing with this time after all lol!

As for this double tech requirement issue I can easily fix it in my prebuild scenario I'm making but for people to use this as a mod too then I'm going to have to make some changes to @Metro Polis 's events system to gift both techs (instead of just Electronics) to the faction that needs that city slot. Although then again Metro has cleverly (or luckily lol) used the Automobile slot for one of our earliest techs (Called 'Buildings level 1' - which can be researched from turn 1 and gives the granary) so in theory the issue should sort itself out pretty quickly as the AI will go for for that tech early probably. Plus gifting 2 techs to 1 Civ will mess with tech progress balancing.. so maybe I'll leave it and just make a note of it in the readme!
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