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GalCiv Graphic Editing Suite ( release )

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GalCiv Graphic Editing Suite ( release )

from Stardock Forums
First, I know this should be in the mods forum but I'm posting this here for pretty much the same reasons as the Star Wars mod is posted here : The forum's pretty dead (mods forum that is).

So, what is it? A lot of galciv files are in a special format specific to galciv and were impossible to edit except with Mutil, which is very hard to use and prone to random crashes. There's three tools in the suite that will allow you to faily easily modify all those graphic files you couldn't change before.

If you want to see an example of a modification along with screenshots of the tools, you can visit my website : http://www.freewebs.com/galcivedit/

Of course, there's a link to download it too.

I'm hoping we'll see a lot of new original mods created with this tool. I imagine I'm not the only one who's tired of "new" anomaly that use the same graphics as before and random events being the bulk of the mods created for galciv.

Ships will be much easier to create now, heck ships with idle animations will be easy too. Not only that, suns, interfaces, planets etc are all easy to modifiy now.
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21,216 views 64 replies
Reply #26 from Stardock Forums Top

Ok for those of you who would like to see the ship created by Dark Rain.....

Hopefully Mr Rain will make this excellent looking ship available for download, along with the instructions on how to include it in your game. Perhaps even how to use it as an additional ship (thinking it would look great for a new type colony ship).

The graphics look great DR :HOT:

Reply #27 from Stardock Forums Top

btw DR could you please send me a copy of the excellent new ship > [email protected] 

Thanks in advance :)

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #28 from Stardock Forums Top
Yes, I thought too that it would make a great colony ship ^_^. After I played around with adding some more ships I'm thinking it might be more interesting to make them an alternate Terran graphic ship set.
Reply #29 from Stardock Forums Top
Nice work.

Now I just need to figure how to do somethinkg like that, without base from another game, caus i do not know any that yould provide me with the designs i think about.
Reply #30 from Stardock Forums Top

I'm thinking it might be more interesting to make them an alternate Terran graphic ship set.
End of quote

And your first customer is sitting here waiting :D


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Reply #32 from Stardock Forums Top
I won't be able to work on it for a couple of days. I'm going to spend 3-4 days at my gf place after my last final exam today.It *shouldn't* take too much time to make, about 2-3 days. I don't know.
Reply #33 from Stardock Forums Top
Must be superb to create a separate models for all the kinds of Colony Ships and Freighters. I would use it to implement new conceptual ships like mines, small and extra small invasion transports, extra long range sensors, bombers, interceptors etc.
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Reply #34 from Stardock Forums Top
I've updated the website and added the second tutorial. It explain in detail how to replace the colony ship graphics with your own custom ones. http://graphix.galciv.org/TutorialShip.htm
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Reply #35 from Stardock Forums Top
hey dark rain: can you tell me why the palette files i tried to import don't look the same? when use the sprite editor, the ship looks like a brown blob.

here is what they look like before i open them with your pal program and after:

http://www.geocities.com/russellmz/Crap/paltemp.html

do i need a program other than irfanview to make pal files?

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Reply #36 from Stardock Forums Top
Mmmm it's hard to tell, I've never used irfanview. I'll download it and take a look because I don't really know what could've gone wrong.
Reply #37 from Stardock Forums Top
It worked perfectly for me. Here's how I did it :

1-I opened an image and went into Image->Decrease Color Depth. I picked 256 colors(8 BPP) and I checked Floyd-Steinberd dithering.

2-After that, Image->Palette->Export Palette and I saved it as a .PAL file.

3- I opened the Palette Editor and create a new .PAL_ file with File->New. I used the setting "Import a .pal file ..." and browsed for the .PAL file I create in IrfanView. I clicked ok and it gave me the same colors as in IrFanview.
Reply #38 from Stardock Forums Top
The suite has been update to version 1.4. Get it at http://graphix.galciv.org/

Only the sprite editor has changed. The was a bug which prevented you from saving SS.SPR1 from startscreen.mtd.

For those wondering, it's not added support for 16 bit sprites. I've just fixed a special case of file that happens only in that file. I had thought I'd had taken care of it but since I never tested it before, it was buggy.

I'd like to thank Martin Dobias for pointing that one out and giving me precise instructions on how to reproduce the bug.

Have fun modding!
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Reply #39 from Stardock Forums Top
It took about a year longer than you originally estimated ;), but bravo! Looks like a wonderful tool, DarkRain. Great job!
Reply #40 from Stardock Forums Top
Heh, yeah I know. I hacked the file format and sat on them for about 10 months hoping someone else would do it. The reverse engineering was the fun part, writting the tools was mostly grunt work ^_^.
Reply #42 from Stardock Forums Top
Dark Rain, is it possible to create a new ship model (not to replce an existing one)?
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Yes Yuri you can. :D It's an awesome tool!
Reply #43 from Stardock Forums Top
Anybody (who's not professional artist) tried to create a new model just by modifying an existing one? I mean, if I want to create a new ship (advanced transport, for example), how can I create a model for it that is similar to the model of existing transport and based on it?
Reply #44 from Stardock Forums Top
Update to version 1.5 .As usual, you can get it from : graphix.galciv.org

An encoding bug has been fixed, I'm not too sure how it slipped past me for so long since it was a fairly big encoding error. I'm pretty sure it was there from the start but I still have suspicions it was introduced in version 1.4 .Anyways it's working now, thanks to Horst.

Remember folks, if you don't report bugs, I can't fix 'hem!
Reply #45 from Stardock Forums Top
Yuri : Well I'm not a profesional artist but I'm not exactly a newbie either. For me, getting really good looking ships is really hard without having 3d models to render into the final result.

Of course, nothing stop you from trying to get a more old school look, since it's "easier" without 3d models (which would be interesting IMHO). I'm thinking of the look starships had in old SNES games and such.
Reply #46 from Stardock Forums Top
Edit : yes, the bug was something I introduced in the last version, I just checked, sorry for that!
Reply #47 from Stardock Forums Top
Ok, new update, version 1.6 is done.

-It now support 16 bit sprites.
-A major strip import bug has been fixed. Any image sequence you imported using the strip import didn't use error diffusion as it's dithering method but instead always used the closest color dithering method. That and the images you saw until you saved didn't correspong to the closest color dithered versions.
-A very minor bug in the palette editor has been fixed. When reloading a new palette, the color being currently edited stayed the same if you were editing the color index 0.

Ok, as for the future a new update may or may not be close because I'm going on a two weeks vacation soon. Because of this, I've released it even if 16 bit support hasn't been tested as much as I'd have liked to. Of course, as far as I can tell it's working perfectly. The update assuming there's no bug will be a menu to switch the color depth from 8 bit to 16 bit or 16 bit to 8 bit. Oh yeah, I might even get my ass in gear and get that movie import working.

As usual, get it from http://graphix.galciv.org
Reply #49 from Stardock Forums Top
Hey I was wondering, how do you get your own graphics model into the galciv writer? I've edited a ship in the game, and now I'd like to get it into the game. I've made all new ship data for my new ship I want in the game, but I can't get it to save to the correct kind of file so that I can load it into the galciv writer. I'm usig MGI PhotoSuite as the program to edit the way the ship looks, but I just can't seem to get it into the galciv writer!! >:( Any help is welcome.
Reply #50 from Stardock Forums Top
As far as I know you can't use GalCivWriter to add new ship models directtly. However if you have the ship model successfully archived as a Pear file using Dark Rains tools, you can manually add ship model to .ship file created with GCW by using .txt editor like NotePad.

A .ship file looks like this:

//------------------------------------------------------------------------
SHIP DeathKnight
//------------------------------------------------------------------------

Name "Death Knight"
Model "deathknight"
Description "The Death Knight is the capital ship for the wealthy."

HitPoints 60
Attack 10
Defense 5
Speed 0
Cost 750
SensorRange 3
Tech_Requirement "Battleship1"
Maintenance 18
Range 1
ENDSHIP


Substitute your model name for the temp model name you entered using GCW.

I'd back up all of your Data and GFX folder data before experimenting with this.