Quintillus... Setting the Terrain tiles where specific tiles can be placed where wanted would be great.
I would like to be able to place animated "units" on the terrain without having them owned by any Civ and especially Barbarians. If a Unit is Not recognized by the AI, they would leave it alone and that would prevent having to set the animations on Impassable Terrain.
Thinking "out of the box", is there any way to pre-place a unit animation on the map that does not belong to anyone? Some way to fool the AI into "seeing" it as part of the Terrain.
Perhaps there is a way to specify Terrain Tiles then make one or more tiles separate animations or added as an animated Overlay?
... worth thinking about
Well... the problem is going to be in the animated part. Aside from leaderheads, which won't be on the map, I can think of three things that are animated:
- Units
- Volcanoes (one for active, one for exploding)
- Fireworks for We Love the King Day
The disadvantages of units have already been mentioned. Fireworks won't really work because they could come and go unpredictably.
That leaves volcanoes.
I have one idea for them that might work, although "might" is the operative word. It's inspired by a Chinese scenario, which had a completely different background than I'd ever seen before in Civ3, and did that by having a destroy.pcx file that was far, far larger than anything I'd ever seen used in Civ (there's a Manhattan scenario here that does a similar thing, though on a smaller scale, with the Empire State Building). Although it's difficult to get to load locally without a Chinese copy of Civ3 and Windows, and my editor seems to have lost the ability to open it at some point over the years, I thought ahead enough to save a link to it in 2014. And the link still works. Thus, you can see screenshots of it,
here via Baidu, and download it
here (apologies for the button labels being in Chinese; and I should note that you shouldn't expect to be able to view in in-game/editor without undue effort; you can copy the Art\Cities files to a folder name that uses the Roman alphabet and open them via IrfanView to connect them to the screenshots). There was a CFC post announcing it
here, but due to the language barrier, it didn't get much attention. EDIT: I've restored the screenshots of the files being open in my editor
here, so it's once more visible at CFC... although Baidu has a greater variety of screenshots.
So the idea is to similarly use very oversize volcano files. I think you may also have to put the (one, so as not to have overlapping graphics) volcano file at the bottom of the map, since isometrically you want it to overlap the things higher up on the map. There's also the matter of how to try to keep the volcano always active. A sufficiently short eruption period, combined with the same animation for explosion/active may work, although I don't know if even the shortest eruption period would guarantee it always being active/erupting.
I believe that would all be purely graphics-based editing, and thus doable with current tools (the real test, of course, will be in-game). Although I can't recall which file contains those volcano graphics and am not having much luck finding it.
Setting specific tiles to be graphics within wSSS.pcx et. al. is currently only possible via hex editing, but I'm more confident that I can add that than that the volcano trick above will work.
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Edit 2: I figured out how to get it to load in my editor. First, you must change the name to be in the Roman Alphabet (just the .biq file though, the search folder can be in Chinese). Then, switch the editor language to Chinese in the Preferences and restart (this will also change the font to one that supports Chinese characters). Then you can open the Age of Titans (进击的巨人) scenario. The tile at 15, 21 has the ruins (destroy.pcx) graphic, and you can see the effect by de-toggling it.
Keep us posted...
