This is a small bonus project as I prepare to release my other bigger Civ2 mods to the world! I recently discovered John Valdez’s old mod and was massively impressed with the idea of making Civ2 look more like Civ1. I’d already been working on of a Test of Time graphics mod for Civilization 2 MGE (that nobody asked for lol) so I thought it would be fun to go the other way and ‘demake’ Civ2 to look even more like Civ1 than John had. All terrain, special resources, cities, terrain improvements, and units have been reimported from Civilization 1. More details coming soon!
John Valdez's Civilization 1 Graphics Modpack is pretty cool and fun idea! Although the OCD and modder part of me is finding all sorts of flaws in his work so I'll 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). 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 retro graphics 2D to 2.5D conversion plans).