Intro
In this ninth dev diary we replace Matt's dragon with a mighty Azure dragon, add a 7th neutral faction city, and begin work on a future HoMM1 addon for the Civilization 2 - Heroes of Might and Magic 2 Mod!
Background
As a kid growing up in the 90s playing endless hours of Civilization and Heroes of Might & Magic Blake always wanted some sort of hybrid game that gave him the HoMM experience but in the Civ sandbox world. Games like Master of Magic and Age of Wonders 2 sort of granted that wish however Tom2050's amazing HoMM3 mod for Civ3 mod has REALLY fulfilled that dream of a sandbox HoMM game. Blake was so inspired by the awesomeness of it that he wanted to try and make a Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Civilization 2 Mod to compliment it. Soon after this Blake discovered a talented Civ2 modder on the other side of the world called Metropolis had already started a similar project and the two of them got to work on finishing their dream!
Dev Diary
Hi guys, it's time to talk about that Dragon breeding spaceship construction replacer I mentioned in the previous dev diary 8!
While I discovered through testing that I did not need to convert the palette for the SS.dll space ship images to work with the new custom font colours (that I showed you guys in the previous dev diary), playing around with Matt Dempsey's Game of Thrones Civ2 Mod Dragon breeding spaceship replacement that I used in our mod still got me thinking about things. In that while yes I've credited him in our readme and yes many Civ scenarios contain elements & graphics from what has come before it still kind of annoyed me that I couldn't get his actual permission (as he's disappeared) resulting in this big chunk of the mod that Metro & I had not made ourselves other than changing the background image. Also in a game where there are buildable black dragon units you can take into combat it seemed kind of weird that you could just build this 'other' black dragon and magically win the game lol. So I started thinking about how I could make it my own plus also make it more HoMM lore friendly, and then the idea came. HoMM2 doesn't have any super dragons but in HoMM3 there is the mighty Azure Dragon, a huge blue super dragon that is far more powerful than any other dragon and that even just a mere handful of them can demolish entire armies of other units in the game. So I went hunting and found some pictures of them from HoMM3 to insert over the top of Matt's GoT black dragon. When I started testing my replacements I very quickly started coming up with more ideas (& more work lol) to improve things further. For example Matt's dragon only uses 5 frames (an egg, a tiny dragon, a small size dragon, a large dragon, & a full size dragon) repeated across the 24 growing SS Structural spaceship frames, and due to his dragon's wings being fully outstretched he also didn't really use the maximum area size available resulting in the his dragon looking a bit small even at full size.
So I decided to make all 24 frames look different despite only having a few source frames myself! I kept Matt's egg and made it slowly increase in size for the first 6 frames, then I created a egg hatching frame with broken pieces and a little blue head popping out, then I created 5 frames using a slowly growing version of the Azure dragon from the HoMM3 battle screen (the original image is small so it gives the dragon a nice adolescent hasn't taken flight yet look), and then to finish off I created 12 frames using a slowly growing version of a much bigger & cooler picture of a flying roaring Azure dragon which I think was from a HoMM3 addon or chronicles promotional shot. Sadly there is a limited amount of blue colours in the Civ2 Space Ship palette & I couldn't be bothered building a new palette for it so it's a bit faded compared to the HoMM3 original but it's still a pretty nice blue! I also worked out the maximum pixel area size available that you can use for each stage and put a pink border around it (that's indivisible in-game) should Civ2 modders wish to look at the images in dll file and use them as a template for their own work. Matt had also broken the OK and Launch buttons by putting some things out of order so I fixed them too.
Blake's new Azure dragon growing (Click to expand)
I decided to keep the same background image I'd used with Matt's dragon which is a HoMM2 campaign shot where evil Archibald had captured a dragon king. However like with the previously posted background changes in dev diary 8 I've switched it from the old faded look to a darker background instead and I also changed the green dragon king into a blue one! Here's some in-game shots of the egg hatching and the final fully grown Azure dragon!
(Click to expand)
I've also successfully reintroduced the SS space ship parts back into the tech tree & city build list, renamed them to dragon ones, and given them custom icons. I've also replaced the spaceship construction sound with a dragon roaring heh.
(Click to expand)
Next it was time to create the Azure Dragon launch and victory video sequences ensuring that now every single video in Civ2 (there's a lot lol) has been fully replaced!
These dragon videos ended up being quite the challenge to make as...
- Some of the source HoMM2 videos Metro & I used in 2019 that we obtained from the internet had nasty glitches in the parts I needed so I had to boot up HoMM2 in dosbox and record some fresh new videos myself (thankfully I still had my old savegames from the 90s!).
- For these HoMM2 recordings I was unable to turn off the campaign video commentary voice track without turning off the video sound effects too (dragons flying & roaring etc) so I was forced to redo all sound effects myself. So I used in-game battle screen dragon flying and roaring sounds which worked out okay albeit a bit repetitive, so I've done my best to cover that with cool HoMM2 music!
- Then I had the problem of trying to make the green dragons in all the videos blue to match the Azure super dragon theme which I really struggled to sort out. However eventually I found some answers on the Shotcut video editor help forums where a girl was asking how to make her yellow dress red without ruining the surrounding stuff in the video. People's answers showed me some tricks with using multiple layers of the same video combined with cropping and chroma key colour hue replacement tricks. Which as you can see below successfully turned the green dragon blue! Although not quite perfectly, as the really light green bits on the wings wouldn't go blue and if I tried to put a lighter green into the chroma key it started messing up all the surrounding brown wall stuff, so that's about as good as it gets using this software.
- And lastly I had to go find all the Alpha Centauri spaceship text and change it to talk about your Azure Dragons destroying all who oppose them. I didn't think it was possible to change that but I recently noticed the old Atlantis scenario managed to do it for it's submarine spaceship replacement and sure enough all the text can be found in Game.txt.
(Click to expand)
Lastly I also worked on adding a 7th faction city graphic into the cities file. Metro & I talked about doing this years ago but because the 7th city graphic slot is not usable in Civ2 MGE we didn't bother. However there's a chance that FoxAhead may grant my Civ2UIA wish list request to allow the use of it in MGE in the future, and if not then it's not a waste of time as I'll be able to use it in the Civ2 Test of Time conversion later as ToT allows the use of that city graphic slot! Heroes of Might & Magic 2 only has 6 factions however Sir Albe and the awesome guys behind the amazing HoMM2 style Succession Wars mod for HoMM3 (which I've been playing quite a bit of lately) have kindly given me permission to use their custom graphics for their special addon 7th desert Dervish race that uses many of HoMM2's existing neutral units similar to what we've already done in our mod so it was a perfect fit! The Dervish castle has been in their mod for years but their town graphic is not even released yet and will be in their next version (which is hopefully coming soon) so it was super kind of them to give me an early copy of it for use! :) They've also created a cool 8th swamp Witch faction (similar to HoMM3's swamp faction but with HoMM2 style graphics!) that I'd love to possibly use in the future ToT conversion too (maybe in the 8th CivBarb slot or as another creature spawner map object similar to the ones Metro has already created) so just for fun I converted that too while I was 'in the zone', however they've not granted permission to use that at this stage so this is just an experiment and it won't be used in our mod (and even if permission is given we're aaaaallll out of unit slots in Civ2 MGE lol so it would have to be the Civ2 ToT version later).
I converted all the original HoMM2 towns and castles into our mod waaaaaay back in 2019 so I was super rusty and it took many revisions before I was happy with the new conversions as the original castle graphics are more than 2x wider and 3x taller than a Civ2 city slot and of course don't fit in the useable diamond shape either so a lot of work was required to get them done and to ensure they were in a similar style as my 2019 cities but I think the result has turned out pretty good!
Of course after putting in all that work to get 'back in the zone' with city conversions I started thinking about taking advantage of the situation and doing some more conversions. Years ago I talked with Metro about doing a special Heroes of Might & Magic 1 addon for our HoMM2 mod that converts most of the graphics to HoMM1 style. We sort of laughed it off as something I'll probably never get to lol, and maybe I still won't! However the greatest hurdle with that addon mod would be having to sit there converting all the HoMM1 castles and towns over so I figured why not give it a shot while I'm in the zone otherwise it would have probably never happened. Sure enough I kinda flew through it and got them all done within a day! HoMM1 castles are thankfully not quite as tall as HoMM2 ones which made the downsizing a bit easier, although their front gates are off to the right hand side which was not so easy due to the Civ2 diamond issue but I was able to move them over a bit! There was only 4 factions in HoMM1 so that also made the job quicker too haha! Don't worry though guys, I'm probably not going to do any more work on the addon until after the main mod is released so no more time will be wasted.
So that's pretty much it for graphics now, everything I planned to do (and more lol) is done! All that's left now is looking at the unit balancing again (as I'm not happy with some of my 2020 special ability choices), then design a cool map for the scenario and then play a test game while writing up the documentation. Once these final jobs are done, this whole thing will be finished and ready for public release finally after all these years! :)
If you like my work please feel free to check out my other mod projects such as my & Metropolis's Civ2 - Heroes of Might & Magic 2 scenario, my Civ2 - Red Alert 2 Siege of NYC scenario, my Civ2 - Command & Conquer scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Dune 2 Dynasty scenario, my Civ2 - Terminator Future War scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Civ1 Graphics mod demaster, my Civ2ToT - Master of Magic Jr scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Deadworld Reborn scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Starcraft scenario addon, my Civ2 - Warcraft scenario addon, my Civ2 - Better Terrain Graphics mod, my Civ2 - Playstation Graphics mod remaster, my Civ2 - ToT Graphics mod remaster, my Civ2 - Alpha Centauri scenario remaster, my Attila's Conquest - Play as Barbarians in every Civ game scenario series, my old Civ2 - Star Wars scenario, and my Civ1 - Soundtrack Overhaul mod. I'm also the creator of the popular GZDoom - Star Trek TNG Doom and GZDoom - Quest For Glory IV 3D Hexen mods.
