Heh I said soon but then forgot to post this next & last update lol.. but by now everyone should know what my "soon" means anyway lol. Have finished playtesting and am pretty happy where things are at! All that's left is finishing writing up the documentation, making a tour video and this one will be ready to go! Here's some of the final things I've done..
I've finished working on all the sound effects for not just units but also GUI/event stuff, which are now all finished and I'm very proud of. Similar to my other scenarios I've spliced together lots of original SMAC speech and weapon sound effects. I tried to allocate SMAC weapon sounds to the right units but in the end I had to make some 'creative' decisions especially due to MGE's sound slot limits. I really love my event sounds as we've got strange scary alien noises, the same beep SMAC gives you when you load a savegame, and the original SMAC computer voice saying things like "Turn complete", "Base site complete", "Production complete", "Project complete", "Drone riots", "Improvement destroyed" and spliced a few new lines together like "Indigenous lifeforms detected", "Energy resources linked" (trade) & "Are you sure you want to do this?... BOOOM" (nuke).
Similar to my other big scenarios I've created an intro video from SMACs original one (although I cut it down to the 2nd half when the Unity leaves Earth otherwise it’s a bit too long) that flows into the custom main menu screen (shown in prev post), Spaceship launch & victory videos using SMAC wonder/event videos that involved spaceships, and a death video clipping together several of SMAC's torture death sequences.
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Of course if I'm going to do a custom GUI and replace the intro DLL images then I'm obviously going to replace all the advisor DLL images too. SMAC has a pretty good amount of high resolution event images, so I was mostly able to make backgrounds that suited the theme of the advisor. Those with a keen eye will also notice I’ve renamed many of the advisor titles and resources too (eg bases, psych, energy, labs, special projects, spy satelites etc) and that in the science advisor I've made custom tech icons using recoloured Social Engineering icons from SMAC too.
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Lastly for those wondering if I plan to do a
Test of Time conversion then fear not, while my priority at the moment is to finish and release the last of my planned MGE mods and videos first, I do indeed plan to do a ToT version of this scenario and have done some preliminary work. No GUI work yet but I made sure all SMAC terrain, resources and improvements were converted and downsized in full colour before I applied MGE colours ensuring they're ready for ToT too. I also recently converted the city buildings across, which was quite a bit of work and took weeks longer than expected, as I decided to use the authentic icons from SMAC for every single building and wonder which then meant I had to make 3 different sizes of them and make each size them pixel perfect with a unaffected background layer (grey & black lines) otherwise the downsizing distortions would be too obvious. It was a lot of work but the hand painted pixel by pixel results hopefully speak for themselves. Thankfully due to Bryan Reynolds design similarities with Civ2 and SMAC I was able to find SMAC equivalents for almost every building in Civ2, and for the few I couldn't I took unused building/wonder icons and modified them to suit my new ideas. I left the spaceships as is but replaced their icons with ToT versions and slightly recoloured the planet to look more SMAC like. Oh and like with my Dune 2 scenario I've also gifted some of the wonders to each faction to grant them different starting abilities.
MGE building icons:
ToT building icons:
And some of the big ToT Civilopedia building images:
Well I think that's everything for now. Like I said earlier this baby is nearly ready to go out so am very happy to finally be at this stage!
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