Hey guys, I've successfully converted the AVI (it was quite easy, since the original animation frames only used 221 unique colors, and PSP automatically shuffles the unused colors to the end of the palette), but I've been having one hell of a time uploading the files (they're 2.75 MB for each ZIP file). I'm going out to get some dinner, and if I still can't upload the files when I get back, I'll be more than happy to burn them to CD and mail it to you.
Edit: I've successfuly uploaded the Forward flic, but still haven't had much luck with the reverse flic. Since it's really late, and I've got a bunch of stuff I want to do tomorrow, I'll give the reverse flic another shot tomorrow morning.
Oh, and as for HOW I do this, I create the FLCs with Jasc Animation Shop 3 (Japanese edition), which came with PsP 7. I either (a) start with a properly sized AVI file and export one of the frames to PsP or (b) start with a series of 121 BMP files rendered and open one of them in PsP. Once I've got a frame from the animation in PsP, I run a color count to determine the best way to reduce the number of colors. If it already has 254 or less colors, I just use the reduce to 256 colors to the nearest color using either octree or median cut (all that does really is determine what order the used colors are in the palette and whether the unused colors will be white or black), change the last two colors to green and magenta and save the resulting palette file. If the original image has more than 254 individual colors, I'll reduce the image to 254 colors by using the reduce color menu and setting it to "x/8 bit" and specifying 254 colors, median cut and reduce to either nearest color or, if the image has several thousand unique colors, dithering, change the two unused colors (PsP will still generate a 256 color palette, but the last two colors will be black and not used by any of the pixels in the image) to magenta and green, and save the palette. I then close PsP (without saving the image), and go back to Animation Shop 3. I check the animation properties to make sure that the "background color" is set to magenta, then save the animation I with the quality bar on the highest setting. Before clicking on the continue button, I click on the "customize" button, which allows you to set the number of colors you want the animation reduced to (16-255), and which methods to use for color reduction. I chose "specify palette" and select the palette I generated in the previous step with PsP, and in the section below, I either select "to the nearest color" or "dithering" based on the same criteria as with the single frame color reduction test. Once I'm set all this up, I click "Ok" which closes the customization window and returns you to the save window. Once there, I just click on "continue" until it's finished converting and saving. To get the Reverse animation, all I do is go to the "edit" menu and click "select all frames." Then I go to the "animation" window and select "reverse frames" and save it as the reverse file using the same settings and palette (although, since it's already been reduced to 256 color I just set it to reduce to the nearest color rather than dithering if dithering was chosen in the initial conversion), and presto, the reverse flic is now done. Piece of cake, right? :crazyeyes:
One final note: The reason I prefer to start with the raw bitmap files rather than convert an AVI is twofold and results from prior knowledge with various animation formats. You see, I created my first Autodesk animations when I was in High School using a shareware program called Animagician (which I still have on one of my backup disks somewhere) that could create autodesk FLI (a slightly older format, but basically the same as a FLC file) animations from PCX files that were up to 320x200 pixels in size. I also used another program called Movconv that could convert between the various formats, and here's what I learned: AVI format, like JPEG image files, is COMPRESSED video, which results in a slight grainyness. FLI and FLC animations, on the other hand, are uncompressed, but manage to keep their overall size down using a uniquely radical (but effective) method: They start with the first frame, and only save the DIFFERENCES in individual pixels between the first frame and each following frame. Thus, converting AVI files, where each frame is quite different on a pixel by pixel scale due to compression, results in larger files than what are created by creating a raw animation from a series of uncompressed BMP or TIF files, resulting in less total frame differences and thus smaller files. I hope that made some kind of sense :crazyeyes:
Forward flic:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/KhorneFW.zip
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Either that, or maybe it has something to do with the Japanese charchter set? 
I don't know why, but it worked just fine when I loaded it up on my comp. Yet another possibility could lie in the fact that because my computer was made in Japan, but is running software from about a half dozen countries, with multiple video codecs for multiple DVD region and video coding support (NTSC, PAL, etc) and thus is used to dealing with dodgy video. 
