Non-spell icons

[Civitar]

Yeah, my server is down, it seems I can neither send nor receive atm. I'll get to work on those, thanks!

 

[Civitar]

Here are the SV icons, they are all formatted and converted to .dds so just import them into VFS and modify the appropriate units art defines.
Most of them are just Doopliss's icons reformatted, but I added several others.

• Wolf - Doopliss included one but I liked this one much more, it's from Faerun.
• Drake - ditto.
• Bombard - not sure where this came from, maybe FramedArchitect's Civil War Scenario or Revolutionary War? It's a modification of his naval cannon icon.
• Druid - taken from Faerun.
• Lion - modified from a Stormwind civ icon.
• Mage - taken from Faerun.
• Paladin - see Mage.
• Sorcerer - I like Faerun's icons...
• Warg - modified from Wodhann's Witcher civ icon.
• Witch - Faerun has really good unit flags.
• Necromancer - Faerun again.
• Priest - guess...
• Fallen Priest - Faerun just keeps on giving...
• Eidolon - Faerun
• Wizard - Faerun, shockingly enough.

That's 40 icons, it should be enough for every GP class, if you use the Missionary flags for Devouts, Great General flags for Warriors, and the Inquisitor flags for Thaumaturges.
Maybe I should mention I slightly modified Doopliss's icons for the Demons and Angel... I gave both minor demons eyes like the Archdemon and put a tiny halo over the Angel's wing.
I'll work on the World View flags next.

EDIT: I forgot about this for a bit with the whole SV icon thing... what do you think? It's an icon for the Örvar GP...

 

[Pazyryk]

Excellent! Thanks!

These will be in v8.

 

[Civitar]

Sure! How about the GP icon: do you want me to make more for the other GPs? (And, eventually, unique models for each of them?)

 

[Pazyryk]

Absolutely! Anything you contribute will go in.

v8 may take a week or so more. Any icon atlases or new units will go in unless it's the very last day or two before release.

 

[Civitar]

Here is an atlas with all the unit flags, using the same icons as the SV icons above. The spoiler contains a list of the PortraitIndexes (no, I didn't do the code to make this an IconTextureAtlas - have fun).

Spoiler :

• 0 - Abyssal Creatures
• 1 - Angel
• 2 - Apocalypse Horseman
• 3 - Archangel
• Archdemon (you get the idea, I hope, for the numbering)
• Bombard
• Demon Type I
• Demon Type II
• Dragon
• Drake
• Druid
• Eidolon
• Ent
• Fallen Priest
• Giant Spider
• Great Bombarde
• Griffon
• Heaven's Guard
• Hobgoblin
• Kraken
• Leviathan
• Lion
• Mage
• Major Spirit
• Necromancer
• Ogre
• Paladin
• Priest
• Scorpion
• Skeleton
• Slave
• Sorcerer
• Storm Giant
• Vampire
• Warg
• Werewolf
• Witch
• Wizard
• Wolf
• Zombie

All other units should be compatible with base Civ5 icons, I can give recommendations if needed.

Grazie mille Doopliss! These wouldn't exist without you.
^^(Thanks a thousand in Italian, in case you don't speak)

And to celebrate, here's another GP icon! Presenting Fand, the Fay Queen! I'm no Janboruta, but I did my best with the effects I know how to make:

This is the last preview I'm likely to give of the icons I'm working on - takes too many posts.

 

[Pazyryk]

@Civtar, the two GP icons are really cool, but I'm having second thoughts about GP icons. There's like 100 GPs and I'm wondering if this is a worthwhile avenue to pursue. It would be nice to have, for example in Unit Panel, but it would be much easier to make the 10 or so icons needed for the "unit type" (which happens to match up with GP class or subclass) and use that in Unit Panel.

There are perhaps a few places where an individual leader icon would be nice, but I think individual civ icons would be better in most places. For example, the "leader list" that many players always have open on the right-hand side of the screen is going to change to a "civ list" as soon as I get around to it.

There are ~70 individual civs now so individual icons for those is not an easy task either. But I don't expect that list to grow by more than 10 or so (ever), while GPs will be added to a lot, most likely.

 

[Civitar]

Huh. Well, if you don't want the GPs, better to tell me now when I've only done about 4 instead of later when I've done 36... I can do quite good civ icons though, so when you're ready for those let me know.
If you want civ icons, you'll want to fix civ colors though - the player is always America's colors when Man and Hiawatha's when Sídhe, and they don't change once you get a name...

 

[Pazyryk]

Player colors are a major headache due to the mod's civ swapping and at least some of this being controlled in graphic engine. I'm not sure if it is even possible to change player colors once a player is in the game.

Actually, there was a time before III's release (before I had gotten far into dll modding) when civ naming was a giant Lua hack that actually changed the active player from 0 to the next open ID, then "deconstructed" all cities and units for player 0 and "resonctructed" them for the new player. That did change player color. But it also reduced the number of possible full civs by 1/2.

So, I guess hold off just a bit until I can figure out if color swapping in-game is even theoretically possible (without player swap hack above). If not, maybe I can invent some kind of dynamic coloration using icons with alpha channel, or somesuch thing. (Note: even if changing color in-game is impossible, I'm reasonably confident that a can set it during Game Setup. So I could let the human player choose color.)

Actually, TPangolin did some of these for us way back in December. I asked him to move away from Civ5's "shiny/sparkly" aesthetic, and I really liked what he did (see all 7 here):

 

[Civitar]

I won't lie, I like that stuff of TPangolin's! You can set all icons to use the alpha version of an icon I believe (that's how you can change Rome's playercolor from purple to red and have the icon in the diplomacy window update, for example). But if you do that you'd lose both the shininess of Civ5 icons and the... rockiness of TPangolins icons. You'd just have IconColor on BackgroundColor.

 

[Pazyryk]

that's how you can change Rome's playercolor from purple to red and have the icon in the diplomacy window update, for example

But wait, I'm confused now. Are base civ icons pre-made with color? Or are they generated from alpha image with civ colors obtained from database? Or to put it another way, if I put two Rome players in a game (in which case only one gets the purple civ color), what will the two in-game icons look like?

Edit: OK, I really should know the answers to my questions because this happens in Éa. All civs are sharing just two placeholder civ icons right now, and from screenshots these are clearly displaying player primary and secondary colors already. Hmmm... can't make a "marbley" texture on these like above?

 

[Civitar]

The answer to your Rome question is: BOTH are true. On some occasions you see the icon in color as it was included with the game (yellow on purple, shiny), but on other occasions - like in the leaderscreen and city banner - you see the colors generated from an alpha icon, without shininess.
Ingame, however, it is true that all the icons are from alpha (I think). The only places I can remember seeing the shiny premade icon are in the civ selection and in a few windows like Demographics, Diplomacy, Espionage, etc...
So really it seems like you need alpha icons for all the Éa civilizations, but only two premade icons for the races? In which case colors don't really matter.

 

[Pazyryk]

Yeah, just the "alpha image" then. We don't have a civ-selection screen and I can mod/swap any other usages of the non-alpha image.

I don't have it to look at right now, but is the "alpha image" really truly a single-channel image? Yes, I know that's what the name implies and how it is currently used. But that's not my question.

 

[Civitar]

I'm not sure about the technical aspect of image files - all I know is that the "alpha" icons are white versions of the symbol in the middle of the color icon, with transparency all around.
I'm not actually sure where the "alpha" name comes from - the Civ5 files are named civsymbolscolor and civsymbolswhite, not civsymbolscolor and civsymbolsalpha.

 

[Pazyryk]

Sorry, I couldn't remember what these were called. The thumbnail below is what they look like opened up in Gimp. The reason I keep referring to "alpha" is because I think that is how Civ5 uses the bottom set (the "white" ones) to dynamically generate civ icons with the correct primary and secondary civ colors (which are not always from the table if you have duplicate civs in a game). The white part appears to be filed with the civ's secondary color, while the transparent part is filled with the civ's primary color. There's no outlining circle in these, so that must be automatically added by whatever code is adding primary/secondary colors.

However, even though the bottom set is all white or transparent, it's actually a full 4-channel color image. That just leaves me wondering if there is more possibility with these dynamically colored icons.

 

[Civitar]

I use GIMP too - and being pretty ignorant of how the whole alpha thing works, I just try to duplicate Firaxis' atlases. So far I have had 100% success with that, so...
I do know, however, what the alphas look like ingame. The white part is filled with the civ's primary color, while the transparent part is filled with the secondary color. In case of duplicate civs a random color scheme is chosen, usually identical to that of one civ that is not in the game. The lack of a circle around the alpha icons is because they're used in the city banners of AI civs.

 

[Pazyryk]

OK, I'll stop speculating on what we might be able to do.

The bottom line is that we need the "civsymbolwhite128" style icons (and NOT the "civsymbolcolor128" icons) for the mod.

Technically speaking, we have about 70 civs, all listed in manual with prereq and enough information to understand each civ's focus. I don't know if any one person is interested in doing all of these. But if anyone can make a few that would be very much appreciated!

 

[Civitar]

Sure - but I want to get back into units, so...

 

[Doopliss]

If I could find some good images, would you be interested in replacing the Roman-style "civ founded" splash screen with civ-appropriate city pictures? It might be a nice dash of flavour when things can get so abstracted.

 

[Pazyryk]

Believe it or not, I've already gathered together enough 2D images for that. Not quite 70 but enough to replace that old placeholder image. I just keep getting distracted by other things.