Prettying up the game little by little

[Vaximillian]

Hey, sometimes I do something. Redrew the diplomat to make him a bit fancier and give him a scroll full of outrageous demands:

Also for a kinda fun thing, here are the facial hair styles I considered for him

left to right: beard, goatee, shaven
(I decided on the goatee because it makes him look pretentious and also no other unit has this style of beard)

seriously though why do I like these guys so much

this might be the favourite unit I’ve done

@darkpanda oh by the way, you have probably noticed already (I only did so last night to my shame) that the desert graphic also draws over the irrigation. If you thought irrigated plains are hard to see, wait until you’ve got to irrigated deserts. You can see some irrigated deserts in the diplomat screenshot (or cannot, which is the exact point I’m making).
EDIT: …there are irrigated plains and deserts in this very screenshot, I’m blind. The point still stands, however.

Also, because I was bored last night, I designed civ icons for the Civ I civs:

There isn’t a real place to use these; just treat these as a bit of personal fun which it is.

 

[Lord_Hill]

I love that, very pompous It's a shame the game doesn't allow multiple icons per unit, he could switch to holding a sack of cash when the diplomacy fails and the bribery begins!

 

[Vaximillian]

I think I’m getting ready to release this thing. I’m running out of stuff to tweak (I like the ships and I’m fine with the nuke that pretty much stands in for an ICBM already), so these are the full composite images of all the units in the game for all eight players, in three styles:

Counters

Units overlaid on a square token of the civ’s colours, as in vanilla.

Ownership lines

No background, unit ownership shown by coloured lines under the units.

Team colours

No background, unit ownership shown by colouring parts of the units.

To use, just unpack to your CIV folder and overwrite when prompted. Darkpanda’s patches may be required, feedback welcomed.
I’m definitely not 100% happy with the team colouring because it’s too patchy but I’m running out of ideas at the moment.

 

[Blake00]

well done mate! well done.. these look so good! I'll definitely be showcasing your work in my next Civ1 video!

 

[Vaximillian]

Tweaked some units a bit:

Redrew the spearman and swordsman’s shields mostly to remove the cartoony thick outline and to make the shapes more pronounced: the spearman’s shield is more oval-shaped, while the swordsman now holds a kite shield.
Redrew the musket’s stock slightly to make it look different from the rifle; remove the bayonet from the latter (it was barely visible anyway) and made the stock longer because the barrel being single-pixel wide looked awkward.
Put shade on the horseman and knight’s horses to bring them more in line with my depiction of other animals in icons, such as the chariot and the caravan.
Tweaked the diplomat’s scroll slightly to fix the perspective.

 

[rhaul]

A magnificent job.

 

[Vaximillian]

Making some things for fun because I was bored again:

Landsknechte in fancy clothes with a zweihänder, a halberd, and an arquebus; and a king.
Again, nowhere to use these unless someone does a total conversion but hey, fun is fun.

Also trying to draw a new mine icon because a literal hole in the ground doesn’t look very convincing™ to me.
This looks a bit too small:

If I add an outline, it looks too cartoony:

I’ll keep coming back to it.

 

[dom111]

Oh, nice. I actually really like the potential other units too. I'd definitely see a use for these for other Civ projects, easily. If there's a replacement for all the graphics, it opens up its usage for open source games (CivOne for instance) but I don't know where it stands in terms of prior art (the underlying water/land for example)

Absolutely loving seeing this though. Definitely inspiring to see this game getting more love!

In terms of the mines, I kinda prefer the second (with the darker outline), but I guess it's slightly different to the other styles of art a little!

 

[Vaximillian]

And here is a compilation comparison between vanilla units and mine in the most recent revision:

 

[darkpanda]

Really really nice work !

First of all, I really like that you can propose your tileset in 3 variants (bottom like, back tile, or colored "skin").

I didn't re-read the whole thread, but is there a reason you switched to using full tiles for all units instead of keeping different shapes as in the original tiles ? (Rectangles for ships, circles for aircraft, etc)

 

[Vaximillian]

I didn't re-read the whole thread, but is there a reason you switched to using full tiles for all units instead of keeping different shapes as in the original tiles ? (Rectangles for ships, circles for aircraft, etc)

Consistency and the ability for me to use the whole tile for design.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Very nice! I'm partial to the coloured bars myself. Are any JCivEd patches required for this alongside copying the file? I know there was discussion earlier about some civ colours having special case logic. It appears to look fine for the green Babylonians just copying the file.

 

[Vaximillian]

It appears to look fine for the green Babylonians just copying the file.

Green civs don’t have a special case logic; only white and grey civs do. White civs replace white with cyan, and grey civs do the same with grey.
I think I have replaced the exact white and grey in my icons anyway but it wouldn’t hurt to take precautions and recheck again.

In any case, darkpanda has figured out which byte to change in civ.exe to disable the colour replacement behaviour. I don’t think you particularly need any patches otherwise.

 

[darkpanda]

Very nice! I'm partial to the coloured bars myself. Are any JCivEd patches required for this alongside copying the file? I know there was discussion earlier about some civ colours having special case logic. It appears to look fine for the green Babylonians just copying the file.
View attachment 626005

I did design a patch to disable special colours for white and gray civs, but not released yet in JCivED yet.

I attach the XML patch to this post (see attachment), and you can also see a screenshot of it in this post: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-little-by-little.676211/page-4#post-16258805

 

[Lord_Hill]

Thanks both, in that case I will continue playing and enjoying the new look

 

[tupi]

Very cute variations. Esp. "multicolored coats", as darkpanda said, very Dune-like style.

Interesting that there's some unused graphics for some units after the last unit (diplomat) in SPRITES.PIC, for EGA version. Alternative graphics for charriot (?), slightly different artillery, ironclad and knights, after that alternative graphics for knights (or cavalry?), then helicopter (!), some 2 planes and then probably alternative graphics for artillery. Sadly, unlike "dummy tech" there's no "dummy units" in the game, there's no free space in the exe for new units, we cannot squish them anywhere. We can change allowed production range in cities, but new units will use some garbage data from the next list after unit list (list containing civilizations names, leaders, and ai tempers). I think these units will at least correctly use next graphics data if such graphic data will be created (instead of just transparency) or if EGA mode will be used.

 

[Vaximillian]

Redrew the rifleman because I wasn’t truly satisfied with him to begin with; to me he looked like he was wearing an apron rather than a military tunic:

Also working on redrawing the spearman and the swordsman so that they actually hold their weapons in their main hand and shields in their off-hand:

Somewhat thinking of the HoMM2 swordsman with how he is holding his equipment.

 

[rhaul]

I am not convinced by the back of the shield, if you want to put the shield on the left arm I prefer the models of the game heroes 2

 

[Vaximillian]

I’m not 100% happy with it either but you still need to remember that I only have 15×15 pixels to work with while even the tiny map sprites from H2 are 32 pixels tall.
Still, I’ll give it a go, and another one, and another one, and again.

@rhaul kinda like this?

 

[rhaul]

Wowwwwww
I LOVE it