Icon art explanation? Using Gimp

[TheManFromMars]

Hi,

Whilst trying to add a civ, following Kael's guide etc, I got to the section on adding icons. Now his method is different from that of using Gimp, I've already found a couple of threads talking about this.

They give slightly different solutions which is fine. What I want to know is does it make a difference where in the grid you place an icon, if so why, and why are there dozens of blank icon slots per tempate, instead of just one like in Civ4? I don't see a point to it and it is bugging me unless I'm missing something obvious. Could I put a Civ icon at grid 3,4? Or must it be 1,1?

Secondly I have tried the fix of white washing the background, adding the layer mask as the foreground alpha channel and then removing layer 1, fine enough, but my files when I save them are about 25mb each. That is ridiculous, every other icon example I've seen from others is about 2mb in their art assests folder, are they just compressed by the mod or should I apply some sort of compression like DXT3 (in Civ4) or ignore Mipmaps, do I even need them?

I know it is a number of questions, but it is vexing me a little, Testing these things one by one takes forever, it is such a tedious process compared to modding Civ4 files. I know I could also just copy someone elses working icon templates and just place my image over theirs, but I don't want to do that, I want to understand WHY something is the way it is, not just trace over another persons work and get on with it.

Thanks in advance

EDIT: I forgot to mention, I've tried various compression variations and removing/keeping mipmaps but nothing can reduce it below about 7mb per file which is still too high by far and there seems no reason for it, I'm just doing exactly what others are doing I thought.

 

[Chazz_Play]

Hello Mr. Martian,

I fought for quite a while with GIMP at first doing icons for civ5. To answer your questions with what I know:

1. Icon Placement: It doesn't really matter where you place your icon in it. What matters is in the xml file for the civ/building/unit/whatever and the icon atlas definitions. You will need to reference the correct portrait slot in the civ/building/unit... xml file. I have only been putting mine in slot 0 (1,1) but you could put it in slot 8 (1,2) - just be sure you refer to that slot in the xml. In fact, when you define your icon atlases, you should be able to tell it that it is a 1x1 atlas. I have not tried this, but it seems doable.

2. Layering and size: After many failed attempts, I finally realized that GIMP is a little more sophisticated than the photoshop that Kael used. What I rediscovered (after remembering what I did in civ4), was that I only needed one layer, so I deleted the extra layer on bottom. Once that was done, I went to the layer menu drop down and added an alpha channel to the layer. From there, it was relatively easy. I just changed the whole black background to the alpha color (grey with boxes), which is invisible. That should leave you with the white circles so that you know the boundaries. Civ 5 will automatically put the nice silver rings around the icons. My largest one is still bigger than I think you want, but it loads great at 16Mb.

I know you don't want a file to work from, so I have uploaded screenshots of the final product and the save as dialog. Therefore, you can figure it out for yourself, but be able to see what it should look like.

Let me know if this helps, or if you have follow up questions.

Have happy Halloween!
Chazz_Play

 

[TheManFromMars]

Thanks for the help mate,
Funny thing is I've worked all this out already and didn't notice this was my own post! I looked at it to hlep the person asking the question

It was just a fuzzy couple of days. After looking through all of it and reading more it all started to make perfect sense, I think they provided those templates because they placed all the icons for various things (like leaderheads) in a single file - it just looks confusing when you are only adding one item per template. There are a number of ways to fix the alpha channel layer thing and I too remembered from Civ4 what could be done. Compression DXT3 seems to work great by the way but the file size is still a little large. You need the compression I think when making a DOM image funny enough since this was the only way I got mine to work.

Anyways all is well! I'm a rather experienced modder, especially with art files and tools like GIMP I was just having a really bad couple of off days and got frustrated, surprise surprise a little time off, patience and reading between the lines made it all clear, but thanks for your help nonetheless.

Cheers, happy halloween to you too.