The Person
Deity +2
At least it will give us something to continue working on.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC) Civ2 & ToT scenarios development
- Thread starter CivPartisan
- Start date
CivPartisan
King
Hey Guys,
I am gathering all of the files together to see where we stand. I am going to list what I think is finished:
Terrain1.gif
Terrain2.gif
Units.gif
Rules.txt
Title.gif
Issues to resolve:
Game.txt needs to be reworked and has "high priority"
Menu.txt needs to be reworked but has "low priority"
Events.txt needs to be rewritten
Icons.gif unfinished "insufficient graphics available at this time"
People.gif unfinished "insufficient graphics available at this time"
lables.txt needs to be reworked but has "low priority"
I will reiterate that this project is still alive. It has undergone numerous changes but will continue.
I am gathering all of the files together to see where we stand. I am going to list what I think is finished:
Terrain1.gif
Terrain2.gif
Units.gif
Rules.txt
Title.gif
Issues to resolve:
Game.txt needs to be reworked and has "high priority"
Menu.txt needs to be reworked but has "low priority"
Events.txt needs to be rewritten
Icons.gif unfinished "insufficient graphics available at this time"
People.gif unfinished "insufficient graphics available at this time"
lables.txt needs to be reworked but has "low priority"
I will reiterate that this project is still alive. It has undergone numerous changes but will continue.
Thanks for the info Andrew, i dint know help was right under my nose 
Could someone reply to my Thread "Pardus based Scenario". Thanks
Could someone reply to my Thread "Pardus based Scenario". Thanks
CivPartisan
King
Andrew,
If you are able to send me an email this week, let's get some more things rolling. Just need to know what your schedule is...
By the way, finished writing the Master's Thesis...
Cheers,
CivPartisan
If you are able to send me an email this week, let's get some more things rolling. Just need to know what your schedule is...
By the way, finished writing the Master's Thesis...
Cheers,
CivPartisan
![[civ2]](/images/smilies/civ2.gif "Civ2 [civ2]")
Catfish
Emperor
Any reason why this thread is a sticky?
1. It's just another mod, amongst many.
2. It's been dead for half a decade.
1. It's just another mod, amongst many.
2. It's been dead for half a decade.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
A decade later and still....nothing...
Who's the moderator around here?
Ahh man what a friggin tragedy! I literally just posted elsewhere yesterday about how I'd rescued John Mavin's Alpha C scenario which had 'some' SMAC graphics but that I would have loved to have found and played a full Alpha Centauri scenario for Civ2 MGE or ToT using imported SMAC graphics and now I find this.. it did exist!!! but.. it.. did.. not.. get.. finished.. urgh.. lol
Download in the OP still works and as you can see below my testing shows that what was there was already pretty good.. just no units, buildings, techs and rule changes sadly.
Can see from Andrew's picture earlier in this thread that he did some cool city screen work, more icon work and had the units & buildings implemented...
And I can see from John Valez @CivPartisan 's final post that he at least had a copy of the finished unit and rules file and maybe a more complete icons file too.
Andrew is long gone but John V was only here a few months ago so I hope he comes back as maybe we can twist his arm into releasing those final unfinished files as their dream of a perfect simulated SMAC experience in Civ2 is dead but what they got done was more than enough for a fun SMAC themed Civ2 scenario. I've already Pm'd him about some other stuff so I'll message him about this too lol!
If all else fails then.. sigh.. well I've already polished up and released (or am about to release) a few other old long lost unfinished projects on here that I cared about enough to finish for them so maybe I could do something quick and dirty with this one too. Eg I take this projects terrain, map and icons and combine it with John Mavin's rescued Alpha Centauri scenario (which has techs, buildings and units). Replace his unit graphics with smac equivalents (thankfully there's a SMAC in Civ2 cells units collection file still attached to one of Andrews posts). Then we'd have something that's better than nothing.. I'm not going to promise anything as I'm buried in so much other unfinished stuff but I'll have a think about it!
Download in the OP still works and as you can see below my testing shows that what was there was already pretty good.. just no units, buildings, techs and rule changes sadly.
Can see from Andrew's picture earlier in this thread that he did some cool city screen work, more icon work and had the units & buildings implemented...
And I can see from John Valez @CivPartisan 's final post that he at least had a copy of the finished unit and rules file and maybe a more complete icons file too.
Andrew is long gone but John V was only here a few months ago so I hope he comes back as maybe we can twist his arm into releasing those final unfinished files as their dream of a perfect simulated SMAC experience in Civ2 is dead but what they got done was more than enough for a fun SMAC themed Civ2 scenario. I've already Pm'd him about some other stuff so I'll message him about this too lol!
If all else fails then.. sigh.. well I've already polished up and released (or am about to release) a few other old long lost unfinished projects on here that I cared about enough to finish for them so maybe I could do something quick and dirty with this one too. Eg I take this projects terrain, map and icons and combine it with John Mavin's rescued Alpha Centauri scenario (which has techs, buildings and units). Replace his unit graphics with smac equivalents (thankfully there's a SMAC in Civ2 cells units collection file still attached to one of Andrews posts). Then we'd have something that's better than nothing.. I'm not going to promise anything as I'm buried in so much other unfinished stuff but I'll have a think about it!
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The last one retired I think so we didn't have one lol.. until now.
I've unpinned it. As much as I love this project and share the enthusiasm whoever originally pinned it had, it's been dormant for a long time and even if it wasn't it certainly holds no more importance over any of the countless other amazing projects on this forum.
Got some good news though, I'm in semi regular communication with @CivPartisan these days and he's assured me that he is actually activity working on this project again along with about 15 others haha (I know the feeling), so there is hope yet!
I also may still do my above idea of a graphics overhaul of John Mavin's SMAC scenario using some of CivPartisan's stuff and my own. But I'm not going to do that until I've finished and released my other bigger projects over the years to come!.
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Well the bad news is a few more years have gone by and sadly CivPartisan has disappeared again & hasn't responded to msgs, so it's looking like this project isn't going to be finished any time soon or maybe ever sadly considering the amount of time that's passed. So I think I'll go ahead with my aforementioned plan to do that merger SMAC scenario project since I'm finally finishing up all my other scenarios and will be releasing them all soon. I also found Dracon's (SMAC) Ripoff Pack II for Civ2 in the Apolyton Civ2 backups which contain some useful SMAC graphics converted to Civ2 which in some cases rival or better CivPartisan & Andrews work in this thread.
I've changed the previously posted plans slightly in that instead of just doing a quick & dirty SMAC graphics overhaul of John Mavin’s Alpha Centauri Civ2 scenario I'm now thinking I'll build a new scenario using CivPartisan & Andrews authentic SMAC planet/chiron map with John Mavin's tech tree, buildings, units & sounds and then overhaul all the graphics using assets from CivPartisan & Andrews project files (released throughout this thread), Dracon's SMAC ripoff files, and a bunch of my own SMAC extractions with touchups on things when required. It won't be the big super authentic SMAC mod project CivPartisan & Andrew were going to do but at least it'll give us something and possible closure on this. Should CivPartisan return to finish his old project he can certainly pilfer anything he wants from my spinoff project as I'm probably going to clean up/redo a lot of the graphics and add lots of new stuff that might save him some work heh.
I've changed the previously posted plans slightly in that instead of just doing a quick & dirty SMAC graphics overhaul of John Mavin’s Alpha Centauri Civ2 scenario I'm now thinking I'll build a new scenario using CivPartisan & Andrews authentic SMAC planet/chiron map with John Mavin's tech tree, buildings, units & sounds and then overhaul all the graphics using assets from CivPartisan & Andrews project files (released throughout this thread), Dracon's SMAC ripoff files, and a bunch of my own SMAC extractions with touchups on things when required. It won't be the big super authentic SMAC mod project CivPartisan & Andrew were going to do but at least it'll give us something and possible closure on this. Should CivPartisan return to finish his old project he can certainly pilfer anything he wants from my spinoff project as I'm probably going to clean up/redo a lot of the graphics and add lots of new stuff that might save him some work heh.
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Well as always with my projects this one massively blew out as I quickly learned that nearly all of the existing graphics from CivPartisan & Andrews project files, Dracon's SMAC ripoff files, and John Mavin’s files were not quite what I was hoping for and that it would be best if I just redid the graphics myself extracting everything I needed from screens of SMAC or it's source files. Hills and mountains were very unplesant since they are 3D representations in original SMAC so in the end I had to build Civ2 style versions using pieces of some of SMACs rocky mountainous landmarks like Sunny Messa, not perfect but I'm pretty happy with it. I used terrain2 forests slots to create nice Xenofungas formations and have converted nearly every cool thing on a SMAC map into Civ2 special resources. I also made sure to do all my downsizing and coversions in full colour so that I've got source files for a future ToT conversion too. The only thing I decided not to overhaul was Andrews unit conversions as he did a pretty darn good job with them so I just added a few extra ones. I then used remaining unit slots to create map labels and land mark decorations to really up the immersion. Some of the land marks are interactive eg you can see below in before and after shots that just like in SMACX you can visit the crashed UNS Unity site and strip it of it's parts. I've even got some ocean decoration (no I didn't sacrifice railroad slots for it this time lol) and interactive Survey Pods floating in there too. I wasn't happy with Andrews maps either so I took them and did a massive overhaul using screenshots of the actual SMACX map as a reference. It's taken weeks to get to where I'm at but things are starting to come together and look pretty good.
The custom tech tree has just been AWFUL to work on sucking up so much time. People who know me and my work will know that I'm more of an artist who just hates messing with that stuff hence why most of my scenarios are non-research 'battle scenarios' or use someone else's tech tree lol. I tried to take the easy way out by using John Mavin’s 'SMAC like' tech tree and changing all the names to authentic SMAC tech names using SMAC wiki sites as a guide, but in the end it still blew out in a massive amount of work as I needed to lock out a number of techs to ensure minimal Barbarians and also custom city graphics, so there was lots of swapping and moving things around leading to tech loop crashes that took ages to narrow down and even now it feels wired up like Christmas tree lights and no doubt play testing will reveal more issues but I think it's nearly there. Now I can get back to graphics and start getting all the GUI stuff sorted. I'll post a bigger update about all the work I've been doing soon! But for now I just wanted to give you guys something real that shows true progress in this old dead project thread that has been stagnating for 22 years. It might not be the SMAC scenario originally planned by Andrew and CivPartisan but it should be something pretty cool and if @CivPartisan returns again I think he'll get a kick out of this and like I said before he's welcome to take my work and use it to finish his SMAC scenario too.
EDIT: Also here's a test showing irrigation and farmland improvements. In SMAC you have Soil Enrichers, Solar Collectors, and Farms that change size based on the terrain and moisture levels so I merged the different types and sizes together to make some nice Civ2 equivalents.
Roads, Mag tubes, mines and forts have imported nicely too after some downsizing.
The custom tech tree has just been AWFUL to work on sucking up so much time. People who know me and my work will know that I'm more of an artist who just hates messing with that stuff hence why most of my scenarios are non-research 'battle scenarios' or use someone else's tech tree lol. I tried to take the easy way out by using John Mavin’s 'SMAC like' tech tree and changing all the names to authentic SMAC tech names using SMAC wiki sites as a guide, but in the end it still blew out in a massive amount of work as I needed to lock out a number of techs to ensure minimal Barbarians and also custom city graphics, so there was lots of swapping and moving things around leading to tech loop crashes that took ages to narrow down and even now it feels wired up like Christmas tree lights and no doubt play testing will reveal more issues but I think it's nearly there. Now I can get back to graphics and start getting all the GUI stuff sorted. I'll post a bigger update about all the work I've been doing soon! But for now I just wanted to give you guys something real that shows true progress in this old dead project thread that has been stagnating for 22 years. It might not be the SMAC scenario originally planned by Andrew and CivPartisan but it should be something pretty cool and if @CivPartisan returns again I think he'll get a kick out of this and like I said before he's welcome to take my work and use it to finish his SMAC scenario too.
EDIT: Also here's a test showing irrigation and farmland improvements. In SMAC you have Soil Enrichers, Solar Collectors, and Farms that change size based on the terrain and moisture levels so I merged the different types and sizes together to make some nice Civ2 equivalents.
Roads, Mag tubes, mines and forts have imported nicely too after some downsizing.
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More news and a much bigger post coming soon but I just posted this teaser elsewhere so may as well stick it here for you guys too. Here's the famous ruins spot from SMAC replicated in my scenario (as best as I can in the limitations of the Civ2 engine)..
Here's the famous ruins spot from SMAC replicated in my scenario (as best as I can in the limitations of the Civ2 engine)..
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Have started playtesting the scenario and am having an absolute ball playing it sometimes even forgetting that I'm playing Civ2 lol. So I figured it's time to reveal more of all the work I've been doing over the last few months..
As previously mentioned I've taken bits from the 3 previous Civ2 SMAC mod projects and then pretty much overhauled & replaced everything they had to make my own SMAC total conversion scenario. For a full breakdown of all my changes expand the spoiler area below:
I've already talked in previous posts above about all my terrain changes and overhauling Andrew & John's SMAC/Chiron map with a lot more detail and variety. However now it's time to truly show the difference with a direct comparison.
Firstly below is a OLD screenshot of their original SMAC map and graphics mod pack applied...
(Click to expand)
And here's is my NEW promotional shot showing the same part of the map with all the new graphics, landmarks, custom GUI, and other cool stuff.
(Click to expand)
As usual I couldn't resist designing a nice big and colourful 1080P SMAC themed Civ2 main menu replacement similar to what I did for my other mods too.
(Click to expand)
I also decided to take the glowing transparent scifi holographic style diplomacy screen template from my Dune 2 scenario to the next level for the SMAC scenario as in original SMAC when you spoke to someone you got a picture of their face as usual but you also had a cool picture of their capital city. So decided to try and breakup the central Civ2 leader face window into 2 separate windows for the face and capital city. Well the experiments took several days and sadly MGE didn't allow a larger leader face image area (max image appears to be 227x277) and the original SMAC images are scan-lined making downsizing difficult.. so I had to use some trickery, cropping and transparency to squeeze both SMAC images into the one file and then create appropriate 'holo emitter'/display screen borders through the middle of the center area around the 2 separated images creating the illusion of 2 separate screens displaying the leader face and their capital city.. and well.. it WORKED!!!!
I'll leave it there for now.. more coming soon!
.
As previously mentioned I've taken bits from the 3 previous Civ2 SMAC mod projects and then pretty much overhauled & replaced everything they had to make my own SMAC total conversion scenario. For a full breakdown of all my changes expand the spoiler area below:
Spoiler :
I've already talked in previous posts above about all my terrain changes and overhauling Andrew & John's SMAC/Chiron map with a lot more detail and variety. However now it's time to truly show the difference with a direct comparison.
Firstly below is a OLD screenshot of their original SMAC map and graphics mod pack applied...
(Click to expand)
And here's is my NEW promotional shot showing the same part of the map with all the new graphics, landmarks, custom GUI, and other cool stuff.
(Click to expand)
As usual I couldn't resist designing a nice big and colourful 1080P SMAC themed Civ2 main menu replacement similar to what I did for my other mods too.
(Click to expand)
I also decided to take the glowing transparent scifi holographic style diplomacy screen template from my Dune 2 scenario to the next level for the SMAC scenario as in original SMAC when you spoke to someone you got a picture of their face as usual but you also had a cool picture of their capital city. So decided to try and breakup the central Civ2 leader face window into 2 separate windows for the face and capital city. Well the experiments took several days and sadly MGE didn't allow a larger leader face image area (max image appears to be 227x277) and the original SMAC images are scan-lined making downsizing difficult.. so I had to use some trickery, cropping and transparency to squeeze both SMAC images into the one file and then create appropriate 'holo emitter'/display screen borders through the middle of the center area around the 2 separated images creating the illusion of 2 separate screens displaying the leader face and their capital city.. and well.. it WORKED!!!!
I'll leave it there for now.. more coming soon!
.
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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.
(Click to expand)
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.
(Click to expand)
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!
.
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.
(Click to expand)
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.
(Click to expand)
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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