My public Civ3 mod idea

[ZergMazter]

I'm still looking for colors and testing sample planets to get a feel for the over all look before I actually try and blend those 2.

Here are some pics of a small earth like planet, and a pic of the water, and sky.

You know I'm not quite happy with the dirt on what is supposed to be a forest planet. I'm considering adding a 2nd terrain set as LM terrain to split the planets with vegetation from dry, broken worlds.

I also don't know about that purple sky lol. It's not really a fair comparison since its just sitting there unmodified, but I'm just not feeling the purple. I'm thinking of blending the black into half the purple and the blue into half the purple to kinda make it look like an ozone layer. I'll be playing with that.

I also have to make perfectly spherical atmospheres, so I can then go and modify the water to be as spherical as possible when in combination with the sky and space.

I also need to fix some graphical errors on my hills /sigh

 

[ZergMazter]

Yeah I'll keep purple. It actually works for what I'm gonna do. I want that layer to look gassy. Like a mixture in between blue and purple, then fading into black.

See that blurred purple? That's the color I'm aiming for. I'm gonna blend from ocean to sky, from sky to space, but with the fainter bluish purple.

It will only work when the tiles are carefully placed. It will have to be 1 tile coast, 1 tile sea, 1 tile ocean for the perfect gassy blend I'm looking for.

Here comes the hard part. I'm gonna have to bust my butt making sure the angles are right so that it looks as spherical as possible for the size of the sphere I'm making. I dont know if it will look any good if I try making a different size sphere than the one I will paint it for though.

First things first. I have to clean that dirty and messy pcx file, probably even remake it but this time like it matters.

I also think I will need a 250x250 map. The planets are too close and I wanna add more planets. Once I fix their spherical shape they will take even more space.

 

[ZergMazter]

Please if you know of someone who made a sky like what I'm trying to do share plz. I rather just copy and paste. If I must do this I will, but it will take time :/

 

[ZergMazter]

I'm about to start working on the blending of the water, sky, and space, but I can't go any further because of bugs. I'm trying to use Civ3 multi tool image 2 map, but its broken. The terrain comes out wrong (Forest instead of ocean for example) and the dimensions change from 200x200 to 200x100.

Here is a pic of my planet earth test. I will be making the map bigger too (250x250), but I'm kinda stuck. I can't start on the graphics until I have my spheres ready, and the image 2 map on civ3 multi tool wont work for me. I realize Grampos has been gone for years.

What could I use instead to achieve what I got in the picture, then turn it into an actual map? I just hope I don't have to make these by hand 1 tile at a time. There goes my life...

UPDATE:

Thank you lord I can finally go and sleep in peace at 5.30am. It was a bit complicated to get it going but the maptweaker finally worked.

 

[ZergMazter]

Pics of the maybe final planet shape, and cleaned and trimmed atmosphere borders. Oval works better than round as I could never make earth for example without taking too much space planet. Add the north and south pole spherical sections, and well now you got less deep space, and more planets taking up space forcing me into a map bigger than 250x250, which I'm reluctant to use due to the game slowing.

I'm planning to have several planets, moons, asteroids, and maybe even stars (not sure about stars).

Now time to begin working on more advanced graphics, and specially my atmosphere. Lets see if this works. I'm planning on adding a LM sea (LM orbital space) terrain with different graphics for the blending of ozone layer into space. It's more than just graphics. It will serve the purpose of draining every ship's movements when entering/exiting a planet's atmosphere. This will be a planet's 'safe zone'. After all you cannot hyper travel yourself to land can you?

 

[ZergMazter]

Practicing my atmosphere making before making a pattern to shape it.

 

[ZergMazter]

Many hours, and 134 layers later, done mapping. I'm still making progress slowly, but steadily. Changed of plans! New not so cartoony atmosphere. Creating N-NW-W-SW-S-SE-E-NE files. Might change water.

Say has anyone ever tried photo-realistic terrains such as the ones on minecraft? Even if 256 colors it won't look as cartoony. I think Balthazar did something like that with his Mars volcano. If not then that's a heck of a graphic he made.

 

[ZergMazter]

Thank God I made a backup. My PC died with a lightning storm here in FL. Man this actually looks fun. I'm gonna get back to this, but my main focus would be the map not the rules. I'll leave it up to people to make whatever they want with the map art.