Porting Units

[Joel Von Hall]

I know jimmyh made some awesome conversions from AoE to Civ3, and in one post he said it wasn't a hard job, and in another that he had some sort of program he used for doing it. I have a game called Total Annihilation Kingdoms with its Iron Plague expansion pack. It has some awesome units that would be really cool in civ3. One of the races, Creon, has tons of units that would be really great for an atlantis or lost civilizations mod--stuff like steam-powered tanks and mechanical dragons....
I would love to work at turning them into Civ3 units, or take snapshots for anyone interested in making them into civ3 units, but like all beginners, I have NO idea where to start.....any experienced creators want to help me out?

 

[Fëanor]

the only program to extract units (that i know) is stephs storyboard builder , you can extract units from cossacks , i dont know if it works for AoE or other games

btw , welcome to Civfanatics Forums

 

[Neomega]

I have those too, and they are awesome fantasy units..... but I looked around in the Cavedog folders and I couldn't figure out what files the units are compressed in.

 

[Steph]

SBB does not extract Cossacks unit. I'm using gpview for that. What SBB does is cleaning the screenshot to keep only what is necessary

 

[Fëanor]

Originally posted by Steph
SBB does not extract Cossacks unit. I'm using gpview for that. What SBB does is cleaning the screenshot to keep only what is necessary

oops , i never used it , the utility in ur program its called Cossack Converter so i thoug that it extracted units from the original files and converted them to Flics :O guess i was wrong

 

[Joel Von Hall]

Originally posted by Neomega
I have those too, and they are awesome fantasy units..... but I looked around in the Cavedog folders and I couldn't figure out what files the units are compressed in.

Some of them are in the downloadable .ufo files, but like I said, I don't have a clue how to extract them. If I were to just take snapshots in each orientation and use an animation program to make frames and edit them with Flicster and SBB, is that a workable method? Sounds like a lot of work, but like I said, it would be worth it.....

 

[Steph]

That's what I do with Cossacks.
I have a viewer than can display each frame of each animation.
Then I take as many screenshots.
Then with SBB, the "Cossacks converter" button is used to clean automatically these screenshots, keeping only the part with the actual unit (thus removong the buttons, etc).
Then, I use SBB single figure feature to assemble all these images into a storyboard.
Then, I use PEdit (check Kinboat's thread) to edit the palette, apply it to my storyboard, and use Flicster to create the FLC.
Time needed for a "standard units (5 animations, 10-15 frames per animation).
Making the screenshots : 1 hour.
Cleaning them with SBB : 5 minutes
Making the storyboard : 1 minute
Making the palette : 5 minutes (can be a lot more if the unit use some civ color where I don't like it).
Making the FLC : 1 minute

 

[Joel Von Hall]

Steph--thanks man for the info...that was what I was looking for....now I have to update my animation shop....my 30 days is up...

Just for a sample of some units:

The ships from the top down: Iron clad, Sternwheeler gunboat, and submersible.

The Units left to right: Dino rider, tortise steam tank, and fire wagon

The last one is a mechanical dragon.