Are you coding it so that each tribe will use different city graphics for each era? So for example, Asian groups will use a new city graphic in the anicent age, then a new one in medieval, then a new one in industrial, and these will all differ from the graphics that European tribes will use for each of those eras?
That sounds quite good. I would like to learn how to do that too if possible.
The key thing to remember is that CitiesPerTribe works through the tribe's assigned colour, and only recognizes culture groups as they apply to the Ancient sprites. So if you want to keep consistent graphics in a vanilla game or scenario with respawning players, you'll need to ensure all the tribes of a colour suit the set (i.e. all Green civs are East Asian, all Yellow civs are Mediterranean, &c.).
I had a similar problem with MGE and bitmapsSorry to ask such a basic question when it feels obvious that the search function should give the answer, but however I'm searching, I'm not finding it:
if I edit the BMPs in the Original folder, the game crashes (even just opening it in GIMP and "overwriting" the BMP causes it), presumably because it fails to read the BMP. So stands to reason there's further requirements to the file beyond being a BMP (palette, color depth, who knows). Can anyone specifically spell out what exactly they are?
Search brings up a lot of rather vague allusions but nothing specifically-specific that I can find. Or super old results that don't seem applicable. Or about the Terrain1.GIF of original Civ2 (editing of which works fine).
Heck, maybe those "Original" BMPs cannot be edited in the first place, or something.
Anyway, any help appreciated, and again sorry that apparently I'm blind because that information surely must be somewhere
I use GIMP too; I think it has something to do with colour profile metadata but so far I haven't determined the right settings. I just open and save the final file in MS Paint and it works.Anyway, any help appreciated, and again sorry that apparently I'm blind because that information surely must be somewhere
MS Paint (Win10) didn't work for me, the game complains about "Incompatible Bit Count" after saving (or something like it - different from crashing though), but paint.net does perfectly.
Try selecting "Do not write color space information" under Compatibility Options when you export the image
Yeah having to use special paint programs (I use good old 90s Paint Shop Pro 7) to preserve palette colour positions has always been a Civ2 MGE problem (its use of a limited <256 colour palette in it's files with precise calls to different colour slots) so if it's happening to you with ToT then I've got no idea as ToT removed all those limitations and went full colour. Weird!
Yes go to main Game menu while playing a game and select Graphic Options and you'll find tickboxes to turn off animations.
I know about that but it's annoying if a scenario disables those options and animations are still showing up. I was thinking maybe I could just add some lua stuff to the scenario to automate it.
This reliably does the trick.
Incompatible bit count means the file isn't saving as 24-bit. It's cropped up on me when I've saved straight from GIMP and forgotten to flatten the alpha channel (32-bit). "Save as" lets you specify type, though I'm on Win10 and I thought it was the default.
Aye, it's an oversight on MicroProse's part: if animations are enabled and you load into a scenario that isn't using discrete sprites, active units will default to the base game animations regardless of .SPR lockout settings. Auto-disabling animations if the scenario disables the check-boxes would be a major convenience boon.
