Hi, 2d6 Kobolds, and welcome to our corner of the Internet!
I just downloaded the ace-file, and it looks to be working on my computer. I used ZipGenius to unpack it. Attached is Zenobia's files re-compressed as a .zip file. You probably work out which folders the various files should be in - I didn't rebuild the folder-structure in the zip. Hope this helps.
Regards, Sigurd
Great job! Where did you find Zenobia, by the way? I did some searching, but haven't been able to find the relevant thread/downloads database entry. De-ace-ifying the downloads is one of my goals, and it would be great to replace the existing .ace link with a .zip link - just have to know where it is!
Maybe we need a better database. Not only are there a lot of things in old hard drives or backups of hard drives (I still keep some stuff from a Windows 98 computer, for example), but also because a lot of scenarios and modpacks include them but are not necessarily known to.
"Improving the database" could be an umbrella term for what Blake00 and I hope to achieve. The path to getting there, and what that end destination means, is still being figured out. As you say, some of the missing leaderheads/graphics can be found in scenarios/modpacks. But how can they be identified in an efficient fashion? Maybe someone just happens to know it was used in a particular mod, but where that doesn't happen, it could be quite challenging. Maybe the credits of the scenario/mod can be used to link them up, but the person looking for the graphics likely doesn't know that scenario/mod uses those graphics. Maybe that old Windows 98 computer can be searched for "zenobia" and find that leaderhead, but especially for units the files might have been renamed to fit a scenario. (Also, if there's anything rare on that old computer, it should probably be backed up while things still work!)
Civ3 in particular (and to a lesser extent Civ4) also has the pre-and-post-Downloads-Database split. So if you want to check if e.g. a leaderhead exists, you have to search two places. Although the threads are more likely to have it since more items have a thread but not a Downloads Database entry than vice versa. After 2016, it was possible to link these with XenForo tools, but not many resources are thus linked at this point in time.
It's also a different skill set than what has traditionally been in demand - more librarian than designer or artist - and thus one that hasn't been in high demand when new creations were much more common. And it requires support from both moderators (to update the "card catalog") and regular members (who have "the books" checked out locally, and might not know that the library doesn't have a copy anymore).
So welcome aboard! If you want to help cataloging, I have a
thread for that. But potentially the single most important thing I could ask would be backing up that old Windows 98 computer's Civ files, and ideally getting them somewhere online from which items that are missing can be restored. It's of the age where there's a decent chance it has something that is otherwise lost.
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