SNES Graphics mod for Civilization for Windows (WIP)

[Lord_Hill]

Having done all I could with porting DOS tilesets to Windows, I decided it was time for a new graphical challenge. This is an attempt to port the SNES unit and terrain graphics to Civilization for Windows!

After several iterations, the latest version has the following features:
-all terrain converted (mountains, hills and rivers are sometimes not connected because SNES only has graphics for a subset of connection types)
-all units converted
-most bonuses converted (just missing pollution I think)
-most improvements converted (irrigation, mines and fortress, road and railroad)
-civ colours roughly match SNES colours (with some compromises, because on the SNES, units can be coloured differently to cities!)
-SNES ocean animation when running in 256 colour mode (but no shoreline flashing)

And as a bonus, I converted the SNES prologue music to WAV for the complete experience. As usual, to install backup your civdata4.rsc file and replace with the new one (same with Opening.wav if you want the alternative title music).

Credits to @honza.havlicek for the tools and docs, @riderr3 for the ripped tileset and @Blake00 for the SNES save
Additionally, the music was ripped by "004040" and converted to wav using John Regan's spc2wav (https://github.com/jprjr/spc2wav)

Have fun!

Spoiler original post :

Having done all I could with DOS tilesets, I decided it was time for a new graphical challenge. This is an attempt to port the SNES unit and terrain graphics to Civilization for Windows. Working on the terrain at the moment, it's coming along. It all looks very square without the shore tiles!

 

[Lord_Hill]

Pretty happy with this morning's progress. I've done all the easy terrain except the mountains. Still got the dreaded rivers and shorelines. I did all the units, the city grid, goody hut and recoloured the city screen. It's quite surreal playing in this incomplete phase! Still need to recolour the civs themselves to SNES colour. They're much softer compared to the background, unlike the stock CivWin city colours which blend in quite badly.

 

[Lord_Hill]

One more, here are all the units and the recoloured Civs. I'm not entirely satisfied with those colours. The SNES version is sneaky and colours city and units different shades to make them both stand out. Normal Civ can't do that, so I've made some choices but I'm sure I'll end up playing with them.

 

[Blake00]

OMG this is awesome!!! Well done!! You legend! Am so happy someone is doing this!!!

 

[Lord_Hill]

Dumb question but does SNES Civ actually have barbarians? I haven't come across any yet (but then I am using a bunch of action replay codes to cheat, so always possible that I've just brokent something).

 

[Blake00]

Oh wow.. jeez.. I haven't played a serious game of the snes version in decades but surely surely surely it does.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Did the fiddly coastlines today, not perfect but close enough I think. Just the rivers remain as far as standard terrain goes. After that it's the overlay stuff like roads, luxuries, etc.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Done most of the river stuff now, so time for a WIP release!

Stuff that is done
-All standard terrain including rivers and shores
-All units
-Goody huts, city grid.
-Civs recoloured to roughly match SNES colours. City screen recoloured as well.
-Bonus for Win 95/3.1 players. The ocean will animate in the same way as the SNES. Sadly the shores don't. Because CivWin can only do one colour cycle, I decided to use it to do the gentle ocean movement rather than the shore flashing (which never looked that great anyway).

Stuff still not done
-The SNES algorithm for mountains/hills is simpler than the DOS algorithm. You never get hills/mountains joining in multiple directions so there are some anomalies. It would require some custom terrain to make this look good
-River mouths are still using the CivWin graphics
-All resources and improvements are still using CivWin graphics. City screen is as well.

As ever, a big thanks to @honza.havlicek for the tools, @riderr3 for the ripped tileset and @Blake00 for still having a SNES save for me to mess around with. Have fun!

 

[Blake00]

Amazing!! Well done mate, I doubted this would ever happen but you've made it a reality!

 

[rhaul]

Una más, aquí están todas las unidades y las Civs recoloreadas. No estoy del todo satisfecho con esos colores. La versión SNES es astuta y colorea la ciudad y tiene diferentes tonos para que ambos se destaquen. Civ normal no puede hacer eso, así que he tomado algunas decisiones, pero estoy seguro de que terminaré jugando con ellas.
View attachment 669872

Me encantan estos mosaicos, ¿los tienes también para la versión MSDOS?

 

[Lord_Hill]

DOS would be possible, I think. I might give it a go after Windows is finished.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Made a bit more progress with this one, added the bonus graphics and some of the improvements. Still missing road/rail and a few little bits like pollution. I'm not sure how much of the city screen I'm going to do.

One thing that makes DOS awkward is that the SNES graphics is in a lot of cases, a few pixels larger than the DOS graphics. I've been able to work around this by doubling up the number of pixels (which I have to do anyway because Windows uses double the number of pixels) then using that extra wiggle room to make decisions about what to drop to make it fit.

For example, the DOS units are 13x13 pixels (excluding the border). The SNES units are 14x14 (also excluding the border). To work around this in the windows version, I've taken the 14x14 units, doubled them to 28x28 then centred them around a single pixel border. The border is half the thickness but at least you don't lose any of the unit detail either by chopping a bit off or having to deal with terrible scaling artifacts. I've done similar with the bonuses/improvements. Fortunately the terrain doesn't suffer from this, it all fits nicely (except for the missing mountain/hill/river graphics where you join in multiple directions I mentioned before).

 

[Blake00]

Oh wow.. that is looking so frigging good now! Well done!

EDIT: BTW I've added your project to the main links list thread.

 

[Lord_Hill]

I sort of burnt out on this one, so time for another release. I think it's in a pretty good spot, but the roads and railways were just a step too far.

What you get
-all terrain converted (mountains, hills and rivers are sometimes not connected because SNES only has graphics for a subset of connection types)
-all units converted
-most bonuses converted (just missing pollution I think)
-some improvements converted (irrigation, mines and fortress, not road and railroad)
-civ colours roughly match SNES colours (with some compromises, because on the SNES, units can be coloured differently to cities!)
-SNES ocean animation when running in 256 colour mode (but no shoreline flashing)

And as a bonus, I converted the SNES prologue music to WAV for the complete experience. As usual, to install backup your civdata4.rsc file and replace with the new one (same with Opening.wav if you want the alternative title music).

Credits are as above, @honza.havlicek for the tools and docs, @riderr3 for the ripped tileset and @Blake00 for the SNES save
Additionally, the music was ripped by "004040" and converted to wav using John Regan's spc2wav (https://github.com/jprjr/spc2wav)

Have fun!

EDIT - SEE UPDATED FIRST POST FOR LATEST RELEASE

 

[Blake00]

This is amazing work mate, I look forward to giving it a try, well done!

 

[Lord_Hill]

As I was messing around with all this again for the PC98 tileset, I decided to revisit SNES and improve it a bit as well.

Presenting WIP3 with the following new features!
-SNES roads and railroads at last! (see the big screenshot in the first post)
-irrigation and swamp graphics were accidentally flashing in 256 colour mode, this has now been fixed.

EDIT - quickly swapped it out for WIP3A which also includes
-redone river tiles. Previously I attempted to keep to the SNES algorithm where rivers drawn next to each other sometimes join and sometimes don't but there were too many places where it looked rubbish.
so I've redone them, including a few extra custom tiles so rivers should flow properly in all cases now.

 

[Blake00]

omg that looks so good!