I just had a thought. It would be trivial to have a function to import movies like avi, mpeg, divx etc into gal civ sprites. That way you could easily make new anomalies and sun animations. Just render them in lightwave or max voila, you're done!
My website, has a section with a tool for modding galciv and file formats : http://visualta.tauniverse.com/HTML/index.html Another website I use to post screenshots of a editor in the work for galciv graphics, like ships, suns etc : http://godevaccoder.greatnow.com/Shots/Screen.html
Thrull started of with the ship builder and then switched to Mutil IIRC. Honestly, unless you have good knowledge of 2d graphic theory, using mutil makes no sense at all. That and it's buggy as hell. The ship builder is well done but it can be used only to create new ships. This would allow you to mod all the aspects of the game, from menus to stars.
Ok, here's a screenshot with a short desciption : http://godevaccoder.greatnow.com/Shots/Screen.html Be careful, sometimes the pop-up on that free host can be agressive but nothing improper aka pr0n.
Well I've got the mtd packer/unpacker done but it's not much use since you can't do anything with the resulting files. Everything stored in those archives seems to be some damned custom file format. Palettes, sprites, tiles etc everything will need an editor :\. The sprite editor is coming along fairly well. I'm supporting only 8bit sprites for now but I think that most galciv data is in 8 bit anyway. I'll try to find some webspace to post a screenshot ^_^.
I've been working on it for a couple of days. It's going fairly well and I'm writting the file format along as I go. For those who remember about me back then when Galciv came out I released the file format for a lot of Gal Civ binary files, I never completed the sprite format even if I had hacked it completly. The only hitch I see is that I don't really have any webspace to post the completed utilities, so I was wondering if there's any Gal Civ modding site willing to offer the space?
In theory you don't need AP to play scenarios. I've played around quite a bit with GC file formats and it would be fairly easy to write a map editor + scenario that work with vanilla Gal Civ. The toughest part really, would be writting the interface. They'll just appear as saved games instead of "campaigns" or what not. [Message Edited]
With some time you can try to use mutil. I believe the link to it is a sticky called "New stuff for you". I'll look into making it work but don't hold your breath :P
On and on another note, what really irritated me was making the interface. That's basicly why I didn't make the tool. I've got decoding routines written already and they work, encoding wouldn't be too hard.
Yes, MDL files are all built the same way. So are 90% of all binary files in your galciv directory. I reverse engineered a lot of the binary file formats when galciv came out and modding was actualy very active : http://visualta.tauniverse.com/HTML/GalCivFormats.html I've found out quite a bit more about the sprite format and the other formats but I never bothered to update the doc because of general lack of interest :\ I suppose that such an util would be neat but would there
Mmmm I can't believe so much knowledge has been lost in the three months I was away from galciv modding O_o. There is an editor for mdl files, it's called mutil. It's the tool they used to make the game graphics. IMHO, using it should be classified as a form of medieval torture. If you don't have much knowledge of graphic programming using it is a pain since most concepts in it will be alien to you. I completed file format for 8bit encoded images for what it's worth, I just nev
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Of course, it's useful only to programmers.
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You could always run a program that move around the graphic names according to the race you've picked. I've made available more than enough of the galciv concerned file format to do that. I haven't released my latest finding on image decoding mostly because someone at my host think it's funny to change the passwords 4 times a month without any warning and then getting it back takes frigging forever. ANYWAY, I'm rambling.
Creating the alpha mask with my ship rotator : Settings->Save Settings It's in the mask section. Check the box saying "Output a .bmp mask using fill color". About mutil : If you use mutil directly to create your animations, you must make sure to toggle "alpha" on before importing the .bmp. Also, the file with the alpha mask must be called myFile-a.pcx and the one with the image itself myFile-c.pcx. Also, when you import, you must import the file called myFile-a.
Btw, you don't have to use a alpha channel in your image at all cost when making ships. You can create a separate file with the alpha channel. Black is invisible and white is solid. The rest is in between. Carielf tut on ship encoding is more detailed. On a side note, my ship rotator can produce alpha mask (what I mentionned above) of rotated ships.
I see what's the problem is, used the image from your first post with screenshots and it was larger. It seem the image library I was using doesn't handle small images rotation very well. I'll have to rewrite all the rotation code when I have time I guess.
Tell me, are you using XP? Because I've just tried running my program at school again instead of home to do some testing and see how you could've gotten those results and I got some pretty bad ones, like yours. I'm wondering if it's a XP related problem. I'll have to do some more testing.
I looked at your screenshot and tried rotating your ship with my ship rotator. I don't understand why you got these results but I got much, much better results. It's comparable to the one you got by hand, if a wee bit less good. Maybe there's some problems with jpg compression artifacts that make it look worse. On another note, a well applied gaussian blur, around 0.75 and 0.5 gave me pretty much the same final results as you. [Message Edited]
yeah, you can edit them. They're simply GalCiv archive files. Mutil can edit them.
Did you use mutil or the ship encoder util cari elf provided? Mutil is much more hard to use but it's easier to get something done once you understand it. I encoded a ship with mutil and it went pretty well IIRC.
I'm working on my own game project right now but mostly I'm waiting for the expansion, I'm afraid some format might change.
Ah yes I'm sorry that's because my host had 3 url changes for it's sub site in the past month. Quite annoying I must say. Here's the updated link : http://visualta.tauniverse.com/HTML/index.html Haven't done much GalCiv stuff lately, mostly working on my game project. I've found quite a couple more details about the SPR1 format, I'll have to get around to writting it down.
Yeah you can, here's a copy paste of the planets.galaxy file format. I'd give a link to the whole thing but the server hosting my website is down (AGAIN). v0.0.1 ====== Introduction to planets.galaxy files ==================================== Planets.galaxy files contain infos on all the planets in the saved game galaxy. This file is part of the save game file system. See the file gc-save.game.system-fmt.txt for more details on it's ot
Well I understand most of the missing stuff but I'm working on other stuff I had neglected to do the ship rotator and all the other file hacking.
Yeah you're right, I guess I wasn't really paying attention. Hex Editing : 1-Download a hex editor, I use Hex Workshop myself. 2-Open Player.civ0 . Your main window should be filled with funny characters and separated into two spaces. 3-In the right hand window, click on it till the label at the bottom right says Offset 00000044. 4-As in a copy paste, select 4 characters from left to right. Now, in the bottom left sub window you should have a place that says : Sign