Prettying up the game little by little

[Vaximillian]

I’ve horsed around for three and some change hours straight and come up with these:





I’m kinda leaning towards the left-to-right lance for both because I can’t feasibly fit it for the knight just as well as for the horseman.

My impression is that the trotting horse fits best with the lance pointing up because the scene feels more dynamic overall, while the standing horse fits best with the lance pointing down because the scene feels more static as if the rider stopped to survey to surroundings. Or something.

EDIT: maybe I should reverse the knight’s pennant because with red on top it mixes with the red borders of the red and pink players.

 

[Vaximillian]

Continuing the topic of horsefoolery, I tweaked the chariot a little, making the guy actually pull the string on his bow rather than vaguely holding it in place:


Considering to give all three horse units different horses for ease of distinction: brown horse for the horseman, white horse for the chariot, and black horse for the knight
(or black horse for the chariot and white horse for the knight? black horse doesn’t look too well with the chariot because of all the clashing and the overlap and whatever)

Absolute horsefoolery:

 

[Vaximillian]

Going from horses to ICBMs, tried to redraw the nuke.


#1 is tweaked vanilla that I’m using currently.
#2 is my first attempt to rotate vanilla missile 45° but the colouring is too patchy.
#3 is an attempt to represent the Fat Man with an attempt to depict the radiation sign which obviously failed.

Others are refinements on #2 with thin / thick missiles, with or without the exhaust flames, and facing up / down. Any of these that looks “convincing” enough to keep?

 

[dom111]

Definitely agree that the bottom left to top right looks good on the horseman and knight. Personally prefer the white horse, but there's not much in it!

For me it's the brown horse chariot too. Looks good!

I know you're not a fan of the vanilla colours one, but I think it'd actually quite good! I'm torn on the pointing up vs. pointing down tbh... Both make sense logically to me... I think aesthetically, pointing up looks best to my eyes?

Amazing work as ever!

 

[Vaximillian]

I like to give the white horse to the knight because white is the least common horse colour and knights are supposed to be elite; I want to keep the brown horse for the horseman alone because brown is the most common horse colour and horsemen are kinda your everyday horse soldier; so I gave the chariot a kinda grey horse because it’s slightly less common than brown in real horses but also doesn’t force me to bend over backwards the same way black horse would, so there we go:


Also, nukes:


Basically every single unit has been redrawn or tweaked by now finally.

 

[Vaximillian]

Also I’ve been experimenting with the mine icon again. I have it with three colours of outline, red, black, and grey; is any of these any good or should I go back to the drawing board again?




(had to do the coal mine separately because there was no coal in this iteration of Europe oof)

 

[Lord_Hill]

A little proof of concept I just whipped up, a Roman settler in CivWin (also using the DOS tileset rather than modified, terrain is a much harder piece of work). Any objections to me doing a CivWin conversion at some point?

 

[Blake00]

For some reason I stopped getting notifications about this thread. Guess it's because I haven't posted in it in ages lol.

Also I’ve been experimenting with the mine icon again. I have it with three colours of outline, red, black, and grey; is any of these any good or should I go back to the drawing board again?




(had to do the coal mine separately because there was no coal in this iteration of Europe oof)

I like the 2nd and 3rd ones.

A little proof of concept I just whipped up, a Roman settler in CivWin (also using the DOS tileset rather than modified, terrain is a much harder piece of work). Any objections to me doing a CivWin conversion at some point?
View attachment 635317

Oh man I was hoping you'd say that! I think I even posted earlier in this thread that it would be awesome if someone did a CivWin conversion of Tomekum & Vaximillian's awesome work but never thought anyone would attempt it. Much like I doubt anyone will ever attempt to import the colourful SNES Civ graphics into CivWin either but it's nice to dream haha.
.

 

[Lord_Hill]

I like how the city is done, take the city grid graphic and make it cover the whole square, then leave a transparent hole to get the flag colour for your civ. CivWin does weird stuff with city borders, quite why some peek through and others don't I don't know! Looks like it's all possible to port over, including the proper units with transparent background, so if the OP gives me the go ahead, I'll give it a try.

EDIT - of course, the undefended city has a thinner box, so the border peeks through. I'll leave it as is. Most cities won't be undefended for long.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Oh man I was hoping you'd say that! I think I even posted earlier in this thread that it would be awesome if someone did a CivWin conversion of Tomekum & Vaximillian's awesome work but never thought anyone would attempt it. Much like I doubt anyone will ever attempt to import the colourful SNES Civ graphics into CivWin either but it's nice to dream haha.
.

Yeah the fact that Tomekum/Vaximillian reuses the DOS palette is what makes this easy(er), I just need to copy over the unit graphics, double the size, check the transparency/palette choices have converted over correctly (which most of the time they will because GIMP is clever and Honza already did the hard bit of making most of the DOS palette available to use), then make sure they're positioned correctly in the file. Of course I'm saying that after doing 1 unit and city graphic, so we'll see! SNES has a completely different palette, so would be starting from scratch. So probably not I'm afraid!

 

[Lord_Hill]

Vaximillian's Unit Graphics Mod - CivWin Version
I've finished version 1 of this which uses the 'counter' version of the units (the easiest to line up properly), I've also included the redrawn resources, cities + walls and the hammer icons but not the pretty redrawn terrain in brighter colours. I'm not convinced the tiny CivWin palette can handle it, which is crazy really. Double the number of pixels to play with, but only 64 colours that has to be shared with all the city screen graphics as well.

Credit for this version goes to @Vaximillian of course, @tomekun who drew some of the resources even if I didn't use his terrain, and @honza.havlicek for creating the tools which make CivWin graphics mods possible, and for creating the DOS titleset mod which this is based on. Once again the 256 colour only animated waves look a bit weird. Other than 'something to do with manipulating 8 bit TGAs with modern image editing software', I cannot work out why this happens. This is now fixed in version 3!

Also @Vaximillian, I fully appreciate that you haven't finished this yet and you're continuing to tinker away. If you'd prefer me to take this down then just ping me and I'll get rid of it. I just thought it would be fun to give CivWin players a taste of these cool units! Any problems (besides the wave animations thing) let me know and I'll see what I can do. Hope you enjoy!

EDIT - ugh, I've already noticed a bug with the little hammers that replace the shields, they're using the 'wrong' black so don't look right in-game.
EDIT 2 - updated with new version including latest units, mine icon and fixed the little hammers on the city screen
EDIT 3 - 27/06/23 - updated with fixed river/shoreline animations.

 

[Blake00]

Oh man!!! Yeah hopefully Vaximillian is cool with you porting his stuff to CivWin as this is super cool and now everyone can enjoy his awesome work and yours! Well this is definitely going in the new video haha!

 

[Vaximillian]

@Lord_Hill, please go ahead with this conversion of yours. It looks cool!

Also I realised that I never uploaded the most recent version with the updated cavalry and nuke and the mine, there we go:

 

[GPR]

I can see some people don't understand what is the strength of civ1 over newer versions.
(In addition to, of course to using less system resources)
Well, its ... TRANSPARENCY
Thanks to the simple "Tiled" graphics, it is very clear, transparent without unnecessary graphic fountains. I remember meybe in civwin there are wave animations added which are ok but not essential. Because gameplay matters.
I remember that was the lack of transparency (tiles) and blending (poorly distinguishable) graphics discouraged me from playing Colonization1 and that's why I play again in civ1 instead of civ 4, 5, 6.

Creating tileless icons that blend with the background is pointless because it only strains your eyesight unnecessarily.
It is similar with the graphics themselves in icons.
The units are very easily distinguishable from each other You will not confuse:
cavalry with knights or militia with musketers, phalanx
Legion are exemplary graphics in this respect (its unlike anything - you will not confuse them with anything).
At first sight, you will also distinguish between a tank and artillery
However, the mech inf did not make any effort and it is too similar to the icon of a tank.

This should be the first goal (go to) and only then the nicer graphics in the icon.
Your suggestions of icons of units are interesting, some are very pretty.
Some are graphically much better than the original, but often too little distinguishable from each other.

 

[Lord_Hill]

The view I take is that the 99% of the people still playing Civ 1 regularly today are people that know the game very very well. So it doesn't really matter if the units are a little bit harder to distinguish because we all know what all the units are anyway. It's just a fun novelty to try different graphics styles and give our old favourite a little bit of a new twist.

 

[GPR]

I really like basic game graphics.
And of course I understand why you like this fun with icons. I just pointed out one aspect.
However, it would be nice to see a mod add a larger generated map, more nations at once, and possibly a more extensive tech tree.
Bigger map and 13 AI opponents at once will be gooood.

 

[rhaul]

@Vaximillian
The project is finished?
What program do you use to edit the graphics? I am trying to modify the leaders to include the civilization of Spain and I have problems with the background when I edit the gif.

I am currently using the GIMP

 

[Vaximillian]

The project is finished?

Kinda, yeah. I guess I need to make a pretty OP for the thread and put the links there but effort. I’ll get to it one day.
I don’t know what else to improve on after I’d redrawn all the units; maybe I could try again to make a good battleship or I dunno.

I’m using old Photoshop CS3.

 

[rhaul]

The truth is that you have been very well, in fact, thanks to your modifications gave me an idea for my translation patch, which is to include a modified mod using your work with the units, of course, if you give me your permission, although I do not know if people would be interested in including that mod to the translation (of course I would put you in the credits as the author).

 

[Lord_Hill]

I have updated my release post with a new version of the CivWin port of the 'Counters' units. This one includes @Vaximillian 's latest changes including the mine icon and fixes the colours of the little hammers on the city screen. It can be found here

Prettying up the game little by little

I’ve horsed around for three and some change hours straight and come up with these: I’m kinda leaning towards the left-to-right lance for both because I can’t feasibly fit it for the knight just as well as for the horseman. My impression is that the trotting horse fits best with the...

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