Boogie's Moding Class #1: Race Animations
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// HOW TO REPLACE RACE ANIMTIONS IN THE TRADE SCREEN
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Hey gang! Today I'll be talking about how to create your own race animations to play Gal Civ's trade screen, as well as the tools needed to get them running.
The first step is to make an animation for your character. We use 3d max, but any program is fine, as long as the end result is a series of consecutive bitmaps that can be loaded for encoding. Movies will have to be 430 x 280 animate properly, though smaller movies -will- play (they'll just be shifted to the upper left corner of the window).
GalCiv uses Bink to compress and play movie files within the game. If interested, you can download the tools required to encode bink animations at http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm I won't go into details here, but will be happy to answer any questions that arise.
Race trade animations are located in your galciv/game/movies folder, and are named RACENUMBER_tradeEMOTION.bik where:
RACENUMBER = game ID of the race
EMOTION = 00 (neutral) 01 (angry) 02 (happy) | determined by the players' relations with the race
If no movies are present, the game will look for PCX images of the same naming format....so if you want to make your own images but don't want to spend time animating them, remove the BINKS from the directory and replace the current PCX's with your own custom ones.
Well, that should be enough to get you guys started. Please, don't hesitate to ask any questions about the encoding process. It can be hard at first, but once you get your animated character into the game, it's well worth the struggle
ScottT
GC Development Team
// HOW TO REPLACE RACE ANIMTIONS IN THE TRADE SCREEN
// ****************************************************
Hey gang! Today I'll be talking about how to create your own race animations to play Gal Civ's trade screen, as well as the tools needed to get them running.
The first step is to make an animation for your character. We use 3d max, but any program is fine, as long as the end result is a series of consecutive bitmaps that can be loaded for encoding. Movies will have to be 430 x 280 animate properly, though smaller movies -will- play (they'll just be shifted to the upper left corner of the window).
GalCiv uses Bink to compress and play movie files within the game. If interested, you can download the tools required to encode bink animations at http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm I won't go into details here, but will be happy to answer any questions that arise.
Race trade animations are located in your galciv/game/movies folder, and are named RACENUMBER_tradeEMOTION.bik where:
RACENUMBER = game ID of the race
EMOTION = 00 (neutral) 01 (angry) 02 (happy) | determined by the players' relations with the race
If no movies are present, the game will look for PCX images of the same naming format....so if you want to make your own images but don't want to spend time animating them, remove the BINKS from the directory and replace the current PCX's with your own custom ones.
Well, that should be enough to get you guys started. Please, don't hesitate to ask any questions about the encoding process. It can be hard at first, but once you get your animated character into the game, it's well worth the struggle
ScottT
GC Development Team