Suggestions for editing units on an Android tablet

[Cassius Critzer]

It was formerly a simple matter of cutting and pasting from a unit.gif from here or the Scenario league and into the orignal.gif file. But I have not had any luck whatsoever finding an Android ap from Google Play that can accomplish this. Nuts. Most of their aps are made for photo editing or vector graphics. Some can't even open a gif or bmp file! How crazy is that?

While they do have a crippled version of Gimp, it is so buggy as to be nearly impossible to utilize. Ordinarily in a laptop version of Gimp I could do this in minutes.

Does anyone have any ideas who uses a tablet regularly? I only want to replace four units. At most this should 15 minutes as it means cutting and pasting two units from two other scenario files into the main one. But I have no access to a desktop or laptop at the moment, only this tablet.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

I have yet to find a stable graphics design program that will edit the unit.gif without causing problems under linux on the Android. The best way, and simplest methodology is finding existing units you like from other scenarios and substituting into the base units.gif file from within the units editor. It works fine but is very limited. You can easily replace the units but the scaling and direction and true color picking doesn't exist without Gimp or similar programs. Ideally all units would be properly scaled based upon some semblance of their actual nature, and not bleed over into other map coodinate points. And ideally all units would face the same direction instead of being all over the place.

Some great units exist as png files but converting these to gif files doesn't work well. For example a great Predator drone and Patriot missile battery couldn't be used because MGE didn't recognize the converted png file even though it was a gif.

You can avoid cutting and pasting from other units.gif files by doing the above instead and it is ten times faster too. Trying to do this with layers failed but should technically work.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

For months I have tried to find either an old Paint Shop Pro file that would work on the Android (Linux OS) using Exagear. Nope. You can easily find archived versions for Windows but they won't work on Exagear.

You can find the old paint program too but it won't work on Exagear.

Exagear is the quasi emulator that allows some old Windows games like Civ2 to work.

So far, no Android paint program will properly import either units or terrain and then export it so they can be used in Civ2. Obviously one can use the built in unit editor and terrain editor and by zooming in create new units plus edit terrain without layers. I editted several successfully.

Layers in the terrain irrigation and farm (irrigation plus mining) has driven me batty as ideally a fully developed "farm" does NOT obscure the underlying terrain. Less is more for a commander as a simple dot would be vastly superior so movement could properly be calculated with many hundred units over vast terrain versus a useless farm graphic.

The same is true for mines and resource icons. I don't need large icons that obscure the terrain. They look great but other than aesthetics, have little military value.

If a simple dot in various corners indicated irrigation, mining, farm, road versus rail, that would be SUPERB as then any commander would see how rapidly military units would traverse the terrain. Resource icons should be tiny or even just a letter.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

If someone would create new terrain files by "blanking out" the existing irrigation, farm, mine and even just create a resources images just of small letters, I would be hugely grateful.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Having tried maybe 20 different paint and photo programs that are available on the Android, only one called Photosuite allows you the tools to do adequate editing. However it won't save to gif only its own project files and png and jpg. So far I have found no luck converting that jpg to a gif with the proper attributes so that Civ 2 can parse it.