Civilization 1 Modpack for Civilization 2

[Blake00]

(Apologies for English)

As part of my ongoing scenario hunt for cool Civilization scenarios and mods relating to some of my favourite fantasy/scifi franchises I've been finding and testing all sorts of cool stuff lately.. things probably not seen for like 20 years in some cases haha.

One of the more interesting finds was a Civ1 mod for Civ2! Now I've seen everything lol.

John Valdez's Civilization 1 Graphics Modpack (which can be found 2/3 down on the CivFinatics Modpacks page) is a pretty cool & fun idea! Although the OCD and modder part of me is finding all sorts of flaws in his work so I'm tempted to have a play around with this and make it better. Cause you know it's not like I don't have enough Civ2 mod projects to finish up already!  :lol:

A lot of his unit and city shield/size boxes are badly located and chopped off, even the city square itself is misshaped and misaligned resulting in clipping. There's also weird mix of high res assets where he sort of upscaled/redrew something from Civ1 and simple blown up (sometimes not evenly resulting in a stretched look) low res Civ1 assets resulting in some areas looking blocky and others not. Upscaling all assets is too much work and wouldn't look as much like classic Civ1 anymore, but maybe making the high res stuff blockier would make it all match up better. His forests and jungles look weird too with lots of white stuff in them (I think it's because he accidentally used the transparent green your not supposed to use). I don't like the water either haha.. jeez I sound like I'm sh*tting all over John which I'm not, as I have HUGE respect for his talent. His name is all over the history of all the Civ sites due to his incredible total conversion mods, so friggin many of them too. So maybe this was one of his earlier projects before he became the guru everyone knew him to be, and I can see from his readme that he had a lot of troubles and nightmares with the conversion (eg palette differences and a dead copy of Civ1). However there's so much good stuff here, eg I LOVE his city screen background, I love how he's put in all the old resource icons and building pics, and the slightly retro GUI changes. It just needs some polishing which perhaps I'll have a go at (as it would be good practice for my Master of Magic ToT scenario remaster retro graphics 2D to 2.5D conversion plans). Also John even did some custom DLLs that presumably make Civ2 look even more like Civ1 however sadly they're not MGE compatible so maybe I can transfer his work over into MGE's DLLs.

[Blake00]

Sure enough I couldn't resist taking John's Civ1 graphics mod for Civ2 and 'demastering/demaking' it for a more authentic looking Civ1 graphics mod haha

For a hybrid mod Johns work is pretty cool as on closer inspection his upscaled Civ1 terrains are quite nice (eg he painstakingly drew grass and flowers etc). It's just the forests, hills and mountains that don't look good as I suspect John did some sort of 45 degree rotation with vertical squishing to convert the 2D Civ1 assets into the 2.5D Civ2 assets with those 3 terrain types and so they look completely squashed flat like a Super Nintendo Mode 7 world lol.



Yes I could just fix them and leave everything else however I thought it would be fun to something different to a upscaled hybrid and instead go 'full authentic retro' or at least as much as possible. So using JCivEd (a popular and modern Civ1 map editor) I created a custom Civ1 map to create lots of terrain formations, took screenshots and then cut those bits out of the screenshots, doubled their pixel size and then used a Civ2 terrain diamond cell 'cutout' to take what I wanted. Then I'd do a few touch ups to make it fit and look better.



Just as John talks about in his readme I had a LOT of colour issues as all those greens and yellows in Civ1 are not in the Civ2 palette so I had to try and pick the nearest Civ2 equivalents which are probably a bit too strong but its either that or too bland lol. Going double size on everything means the terrain matches the resolution of the special resource icons now plus it gives a nice retro oldschool Civ1 DOS look.

Not many have done double sized assets in Civ2 before so I had no guides to go by and had to experiment endlessly as obviously diamond edges are not blocky double sized and neither is the raster making the terrain not join together very well. In the end even a 2x blocky raster didn't go well so I removed the raster all together as thankfully all Civ1 terrain is very green and has green edges that blend together quite well mostly removing the need for a raster (although deserts could use more work). I made sure the imported forests and jungles were nice and 'fluffy' with branches coming out over the top of the diamond to make them more 3D and get rid of the squashed flat look. As for rivers, hills, mountains and shorelines, to avoid the problems John had I simply grabbed Civ2's equivalents that looked most like Civ1's versions, I then downsized them to 50% and the put them back up to 100% again to deliberately make them more blockier to match the Civ1 assets. I then recoloured them to match Civ1 assets even more (eg green hills). As always shorelines were a bloody nightmare.. especially when you make them blockier haha. I reimported all special resources at 2x (as John's were unevenly stretched too) and then changed all the remaining Civ2 ones (Civ2 has twice as many as Civ1) to either use modified versions of Civ1 special resources (eg Ore & silk variants of gold & gems) or I created low colour blocky retro versions of Civ2 special resources (eg Whales, Wheat & Fur). I've also imported 2x sized city square sprites which look better then the weird unevenly stretched ones in Johns original. This was all quite a bit of work but as you can see below the results speak for themselves!