Command & Conquer or Red Alert scenario/graphics pack for Civ2?

[Blake00]

Does anyone know of Command & Conquer or Red Alert scenarios/graphics pack for Civ2 MGE or ToT?

Been thinking about making a dark and moody one heavily based on C&C2 Tiberian Sun just for fun. But there's no point in me wasting my time if someone else has done it haha.

The only Civ2 C&C scenario I can find is this one by wonx2150:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources...-mod.9958/

He converted in a number of units and buildings but didn't really do much with the terrain. I can't be stuffed making a whole scenario so I'm thinking I might do a C&C graphics update for his instead heh. I could release a separate graphics modpack too for those not interested in the scenario.

Would be easier making a ToT graphics conversion due to the increase colours however his scenario is MGE so I guess I'll be putting my pallet conversion hat on lol as I'm too scared to even bother touching the MGE to ToT scenario converter lol.

[Blake00]

Been working away on it..

Here's some comparison pics of wonx2150's original graphics (mostly default Civ2 with a few changes here there including some rather funny looking tiberian lol) versus my new overhaul graphics either ripped out of C&C mix files or drawn by me.

Note: I have NOT touched any unit graphics yet. Just done terrain & cities. Will probably change most special resource icons too.

Wonx's ORIGINAL scenario graphics:



Blake's OVERHAUL graphics:



I've also given each faction custom command centers matching their faction colour and also custom walls (eg NOD bases get their laser fence, GDI bases get their firestorm walls, and Neutral bases get GDI base walls with little turrets)


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[Blake00]

Time for a progress update!

I've been spending most of my free time working with Metro on the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Civ2 Scenario however I've done a bit more work here and there on my visual remaster of wonx's awesome C&C Civ2 scenario. I've also started preliminary work on a Red Alert 2 Siege of New York scenario for Civ2.

But as for Wonx's C&C scenario remaster most units have now been redone. Original C&C1 units are too small and 2D top down looking to really work well in Civ2 (we've got those lovely remasters coming but they'd still be too 2D top down looking) however like the command center building most defense buildings should come across okay. But for other units I'm going to need 2.5D isometric versions and thankfully there's actually multiple really good sources for C&C1 style units within the 2.5D isometric C&C2 engine. C&C2 Twisted Insurrection and OpenRA C&C2 Crystallized Doom are both awesome projects that involve C&C1 styled units in the C&C2 engine so I contacted the authors and asked their permission to use some units and they were happy to help.

These custom fan made high resolution voxel models are even more detailed than Red Alert 2 models (a game that came years AFTER C&C2) which makes then awesome to look at but also difficult to downsize to a Civ2 unit cell. Voxel models are also better when they're moving and aren't so good for sharp details when sitting still lol!

Eg I have to get something like this:


Into this little thing:


So naturally after this downsizing some re-painting of details is required. Civ2 MGE also has a very very limited colour palette so the models require a lot re-colouring too (yeah I know I probably should have converted Wonx2150's scenario to Civ2 Test of Time lol). Takes hours to get each unit done but I think the effort pays off as they don't look too bad haha! Here's a shot of my latest work which includes a whole bunch of imported units:


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[Blake00]

Hmmm to cloak or not to cloak...

The NOD Stealth Tank spends most of its time cloaked in C&C until it attacks. Civ2 doesn't support any sort of unit transparency so all I can think of is a chequered effect. However with so few pixels in the model you lose a lot of identify and detail. But when on standard zoom your eyes do seem to 'connect the dots' and create a not too bad cloaking effect. Which one I should go with folks?

Units File:


In-Game (Standard 1:1 pixel zoom):


In-Game (Max zoom):

[Blake00]

Well I didn't hear back from anyone here but I got feedback/votes elsewhere for Cloaked! So I've gone with that. However I've stuck the uncloaked version in a unused area of the units file should anyone prefer that one and want to swap it in when playing.

All unit and terrain graphics have been finished now which was the hardest part, I just need to sort out the city buildings, extra bonus graphical changes and re-balancing all the units Attack & Defences as some of Wonx's original units are pretty unbalanced.

Here's a shot of all my finished unit graphics! Those with a keen eye will also notice that I've now replaced all special resources with C&C2 decorations too.

(click on it to view in full screen)

[Blake00]

Well I guess I should 'formally' announce that using the many skills and tricks I've learned making the Heroes of Might & Magic Civ2 Scenario with Metropolis, my old Star Wars Civ2 Scenario, my ToT Graphics for Civ2MGE mod, and my Remaster of Wonx's C&C Civ2 Scenario above that I'm also currently working on a Red Alert 2 Siege of New York Civ2 Scenario as well. Before someone says "what?? you haven't even finished most of the other ones yet" yes i know.. I suck lol. The others are either finished or very nearly finished, I'm just holding off on them as I want to get this final project to a good enough state that I can take a screenshot and  'advertise it' in the other projects readme files and tour videos etc. I haven't done much work yet on my Civ2 Master of Magic Jr Scenario Remaster For Test of Time project however I plan to proceed with releasing the other scenarios before I get stuck into that one.

So what is Red Alert 2 Siege of New York? Probably something too ambitious for my own good but I'm going to give it a bloody good try anyway. The aim is to try and make a similar map to the first Allied mission of Red Alert 2 in the Civ2 engine and have both sides battling across the map trying to breakthrough garrisoned sky scrapers with tanks and bombers etc (using imported RA2 unit graphics similar to what I did with Won'x C&C scenario above).

Visually there's no way in hell I can make it look anywhere near as good as the original but the aim to is try and get is as close as I can using lots of different Civ2 editing tricks.
Eg here's a shot of the original game in all it's beauty:
(Click to expand)


Using 3x3 super cell areas made out of River, Forrest, Hills & Mountain formations I can create 4 big sky scrapers, I'll also have leftover cells for 2 square diagonal buildings and of course I'll have lots of cells free for smaller 1 cell buildings.
Eg here's a shot of my first test super building, the surrounding cells inside the 3x3 will be MUCH more packed with buildings in the final version. You can also see I've made some test 1 cell burning buildings. I've also mapped out the shoreline border lines to later insert the cool seaside cement brick wall docks of the original map.


Now the real fun trick with these buildings is to downsize and convert not just the damaged version but also the healthy garrisoned version too! This will then allow me to break up certain areas of the super buildings into Civ2 unit images. These units will act as the garrisons and once they are killed it will reveal the damaged burning building underneath. This creates a similar fun effect to the original Red alert game where clearing out a building garrisons would leave a damaged burning building behind. I plan to use a similar trick (units over damaged terrain) to simulate the soviets destroying the statue of liberty!
Example of me converting healthy/damaged/garrisoned versions of a small building:


And a garrisoned/damaged super building for another 3x3 I'm working on right now:


Another tough thing I've managed to successfully implement is something that many Civ2 modders have experienced the 'joys' of and that's Land Bridges! I thought to myself.. how the hell do I create a bridge just like Red Alert 2's bridges that land units can cross but does NOT have the Civ2 shoreline textures. Then I remembered there is 1 texture in the game that overrides shoreline textures, river mouths! Metro used the 4 different river mouth textures to implement extra decoration in our HoMM2 scenario and I realised I could do the same and put bridge side textures on them. Of course to get river mouths I need a river going across the bridge which created another problem, as rivers override all land terrain types. However then I remember roads and railroads override rivers so I just needed to replace Civ2's roads with red alert 2's big fat highways and the sneaky subterfuge was complete haha.
Finished land bridge that tanks can cross:


The deception revealed. What it looks like with default Civ2 graphics:

[Blake00]

Disclaimer: Hopefully the final product will be waaaaay better than all these test shots but I gotta start somewhere haha.

Metropolis (who worked on the HoMM scenario with me) gave me a great idea of using terrain improvement graphics for base buildings around the cities. Irrigation could be Soviet Tesla reactors, Farmland could be Allied Power Plants, mines could be Ore Processing plants. Similar to my C&C Tiberian scenario above I plan to use Construction site graphics for city graphics so it will look very cool and Red alert 2 looking to have little power plants and ore plants around the construction sites just like in a real C&C base haha.


Also this gives me an extra idea.. if you look at the original Red alert 2 image in my previous post you can see a cool blue hew light affect over the entire allied base, on other maps there's a red light over Soviet bases. That's not really something I can replicate in Civ2 (without sacrificing more terrain cells that I'd rather use on city buildings) however if I put these power plants on concrete slabs (similar to my existing white concrete slab graphics) and give these concrete slabs beneath the buildings either a slightly blue or red tinge/glow this would then create a bit of a red or blue glow illusion around the city bases! Simulating coloured lighting in a Civ2 level would be another big wow factor feature I can't resist trying haha. I'll have to do some experiments!!!!

In the meantime an early liberty island with a multi cell destructible statue of liberty has been made. In the finished scenario I'll stick in an event that triggers if the soviets destroy it where it plays a WAV file of Premier Romanov giving his morale crushing "See your liberty, how she lies broken before you..." speech haha.

Intact statue of liberty (built from 2 extra tall units cells):


Destroyed burning statue of liberty terrain decoration (hidden underneath units):


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[Blake00]

Some more WIP shots where I'm testing a number of things. Once again I must stress that city buildings are not even near finished or properly imported yet, the broken up repetitive half finished buildings here are just placeholders so I can work out positioning of things.

Here's where things are at:

• All 4 3x3 super building templates have been successfully tested and placed (but not graphically finished)
  
• Roads now have street lights
  
• Dirt terrain replaced with RA2 style dirt with gold/minerals spread around them
  
• Mines and diggers added to dirt areas too
  
• Soviets and USA construction center city graphics imported and downsized to fit
  
• Base locations worked out & named (sometimes abbreviated or spelt wrong due to annoying Civ2 city name character limit)
  
• New NYPD 3rd faction added with police style building city graphic. The original RA2 level had police cars driving around so I thought it would be fun to have a NYPD faction that pumps out weak police car units to annoy the Soviet invaders lol.
  
• Farmland replaced with glowing blue cement (will later have thermal power building put on it) to primitively replicate the cool colour glowing base effects of RA2 (grassland bushes overlapping base cement will be removed).
  
• Irrigation replaced with glowing red cement (will later have tesla power building put on it) to primitively replicate the cool colour glowing base effects of RA2 (grassland bushes overlapping base cement will be removed).
  
• The strange yellow and red lines in the base radius's are me mapping out 4 separate cells to place special railroad formations that I'm replacing 4 unique base building decoration for each faction (Radar, Barracks, Factory, Refinery) to really give that C&C/RA base feel. With 8 free railroad cells I was able to get the 4 decoration cells per faction I wanted (meaning each faction will have its own variation of those 4 buildings)!
  
• The equally weird red & yellow dots and crosses you may notice around the place are me mapping out special resource locations to eventually insert more decoration into.
  
• I've made the coastline guidelines even taller/wider apart so that once I put in a sea wall it's gonna be even bigger and looking real cool!
  

Next I'm going to look at using left over river/forest/hills/mountains not used in the super 3x3 building formations to create 1x3 diagonal buildings or other decoration (eg carparks, resorts, burger joints, hositals, warehouses, slums etc). After that I'll look at replacing special resources to give even more buildings. Then I'll finish working out what building designs and formations go where and try to pack in as much detail and variety as I can.

[Blake00]

Figured I should probably post an update on how things are going with Red Alert 2 Siege of New York. Been very busy in real life lately.. plus as well as ALL the bloody projects I told you guys about above I've also been helping out the FreeCol Project (Opensource Colonization remake) on their public image and presentation (website, moddb page, forums, welcome info, modding info, HD pictures & video etc) as most people think their project is dead due to the remaining team (nearly all programmers) quieting working on the game for the last few years and not updating anything else haha. Also helping a wee bit on the game too (testing, modding, organising maps etc) but not much as my skill set (not a programmer or high res artist) limits how much I can help on that.

Anyway so I've been continuing the long job of converting/downsizing/manipulating RA2 buildings into Civ2 terrain slots.

Started doing some of the 1x3 diagonal cell buildings.. these are really tough as I can't really replicate the height so I have to remove heaps of floors and details.

Original RA2 models:


Cutting out floors:


Downsizing to Civ2 resolutions:


Even at the above size they STILL don't fit in a 1x2 or 1x3.


I was facing having to squish and remove even more details which I REALLY didn't want to do as so much had already been lost! So I then decided to use the upper cell areas (as previously talked about upper areas in the cell above the diamond can be used but not lower areas. So I decided that I'd squish the diagonal building into 2 cells and then just stick another 1x1 cell sized building in the 3rd (allowing for even more unique 1x1 buildings in the game) and most importantly I changed my template to highlight these usable upper areas (in red) so I could see just how much I could squeeze the building into those areas.

This left one final problem where the non-usable area cut right into the top roofs of the buildings. I thought "what am I going to do.. every other downsizing option is unacceptable".. and then it dawned on me lol.. these damaged buildings are already full of blast holes so why not make big ones right where the unusable areas are. So as you can see I've drawn cracks and debris around the unusable areas. In-game this should create a nice illusion of 'just another blast hole'. These shots are still WIP as I've got to decide what 1x1 size building I want to put next to them in these 1x3s. Oh and add burning fire of course! Gotta have fires haha!


Why do 1x3 when its obvious the building is more of a 1x2 you may ask? well if I use the remaining cells (unused by my 4 super 3x3 cell buildings) in the Trees/Rivers/Hill/Mountains I've got a 1x1 and 2 diagonal slots of 1x3s. A Picture Metro Polis (who works with me on the HoMM2 scenario) kindly made for me illustrates this nicely.


I can ignore the cell in the middle of the 1x3 and just have 2 lots of 1x2 diagonal. However that middle cell is completely inaccessible and unusable unless you do a 1x3 so I'd be wasting 2 cells per the 4 special terrains.. wasting 8 lots of 1x1 cells in a scenario where I need to use EVERYTHING? I think not. So like I said above I'll just stick a 1x2 and a 1x1 building combo into the 1x3 and then just create lots of 1x3 formations in various parts of the map.

I've found that car parks go great into a full 1x3.. so I made some! If I do diagonal rivers across 2 squares I get the red car and white car combo.. if I use the full 1x3 combo then a nice limousine and green car join the little parking party haha. All cars are taken from the car parks in the original level of course. Those with a keen eye will notice I've also imported in the water fountains seen in the original map so you'll see them pop up here and there in the nice park & trees areas. Naturally in the final product I'll have that funny Monkey Burger place and a Petrol Station next to those car parks too.
Disclaimer: All buildings in this shot are just unfinished WIP placeholders.



And finally I've also made my city wall faction variants for my city bases. I was quite proud of the ones I made for my C&C Tiberium Sun style remake of Wonx's scenario that I originally posted earlier in this thread.

It worked well as C&C2 TS has cool laser and firestorm fences plus I was working from lower resolution originals so the conversion was less of a headache.


However with these new RA2 ones its harder work as the Allies & Soviets just have boring walls and the original buildings and walls are at a much higher resolution.

Original models:


Meaning there's just so much more detail to lose and so much more work to get some of it back into the downsized Civ2 sprites. So I'm still not quite satisfied with the models but here's how they look so far walled and unwalled.

[Blake00]

mmmm yummy burgers.. there's nothing better than visiting McBurger Kong.. unless of course the building's on fire and there's a full blown shoot out between US marines and Soviet paratrooper forces happening there haha.

In the original map Soviet paratroopers constantly drop ever 2mins next to these buildings and all hell ensues if you've garrisoned the nearbye buildings. So naturally the plan is to recreate that fun in this scenario. I'll have paratroopers dropping to the sound of sirens every 5 turns or so. If the garrisons fall then the allied player will have enemy paratroopers running around unchecked.

Garrisoned McBurger Kong and Petrol Station using destroyable unit slots (haven't decided whether I'll keep the flags yet):


Destroyed and burning McBurger Kong and Petrol Station using terrain slots:



After doing all these recent base buildings and special buildings I've started to realise just how bad my early buildings were.. they're so shrunken to fit in a standard Civ2 diamond cell that they've lost way too much detail, they also look ridiculous next to the larger super buildings due to them having way smaller/compacted windows and floors. Since making them I've worked out a number of tricks mentioned in previous posts such as using the upper cells areas above the diamond, adding blast damage to the top most corner (so I can cut it off and buy more vertical space haha), and also removing floors (and making them roughly 3-4 story instead of 10 lol). That allows me to go wider and use more horizontal space and naturally pack in way more detail. Here's some examples of this...

Firstly I added a brand new small building.. not ghetto but.. erm.. Brooklyn/Queens style cheap old housing/apartments shall we say lol. They'll be a lot of these outside of the office districts. Sure enough I was able to get it way bigger and wider than previously imported buildings.


So naturally I had to go back and redo the other 1 cell buildings. I thought redoing these old ones would be quick, however just like the first time I did them I still had to manually paint back in all the columns and window shadows as they still downsized so badly lol. But they definitely look much better now!

Old:


New:


Old:


New:


Old:


New:


If we focus on this last example above, the center damaged building still has to fit in a classic cell but its still an improvement over the old one due to me reducing/pancaking floors and removing the top area with blast damage. The one on the right is of course the garrisoned unit version and unit cells are much bigger than terrain cells so I'm able to leave the building tall with more floors, it is sooo much better than my old one lol. The left one will go in as background decoration in the 3x3 super building area where I'm also less size limited so have made it a match for the garrisoned version.

Here's a damaged one inserted next to a new 2x1 building of similar architecture to make a 3x1 diagonal group. I couldn't really stretch out the buildings anymore but the gap between them annoyed me so I put in a little park as hey, that's what they do in real life haha.


And this is how they look in-game (surrounding decoration are just temporary space fillers):


Looks so much better.. in fact the new building models look so good I realise I'm gonna need to do another pass on my original super 3x3 buildings as this one's floors look wonky and uneven lol. Oh and it's roof is at a weird angle.. and its windows need bluing.. jesus haha!!!

Always happens though with a big project.. you compare your later work to your earlier stuff and realise you're pretty much gonna have to redo all your earlier work lol!

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