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If you've ever downloaded a scenario or a MOD pack for Civ2, you'll know that all the unit graphics in the game can be modified to represent anything that the designer desires. On this page, we'll look at some of the techniques you can use to create your own new unit graphics from scratch. Before you start, you'll need some extra software - an image editor. You can use any application that will open and save files in GIF format, but without doubt the best software around for this is Paint Shop Pro by Jasc, Inc. This is distributed as shareware - you can download an evaluation copy from the Jasc Website. Throughout this tutorial, we'll be describing things in terms of the menus and options found in PSP (as it is known) - if you're using different software, you'll have to adapt these instructions to the particular application you have. By it's nature, this page contains a lot of graphic images. If you have a slow connection, be prepared to be patient while they download. If your machine is set up to display only 256 colours, you'll have a problem too - Civ2 uses a very specific set of colours, and they're completely different to those used by most browsers, which means the images on this page won't come out well at all. Set your machine to high- or true-colour mode if you want to see the page properly.
The Basics Before you do anything else make a backup copy of a file called units.gif in your main Civilization II directory (this will be c:\mps\civ2, unless you chose a different directory when you installed the game). The easiest way to do this is to create a subdirectory, c:\mps\civ2\backup, and copy it into there. Now, use your image editor to load the file from your main Civ2 directory. You should see something like this (this shows just the top left-hand corner of the image, but you get the idea):
![]() As you might guess, each of the purple boxes contains an image that relates to a single unit in Civ2. The extreme top left-hand image is used for Settlers, the next for Engineers, then Warriors and so on. If you make any changes to these images, the game will use your modified image instead of the standard one. There are three images at the bottom right-hand corner put there intentionally for you to change:
![]() These are three units known as 'Extra Land', 'Extra Ship' and 'Extra Air'. They don't appear in a normal game of Civ2 - we'll see how to make them come to life later. You aren't confined to using just these three units. If you want your Settlers to push a lawn mower instead of a hoe (if that's what it is), feel free to alter the Settlers image. One word of warning, though - don't make any changes to the bottom line of the file (the one that starts with a barbarian chieftain followed by six blank spaces). It might be tempting to put your new units in these blank spaces, but if you do, the game will crash.
Bring on the Extras Getting the extras into your game means making another back up, this time of a file called rules.txt. Once you've made a copy of the file, open it up inside a text editor (Windows Notepad or Wordpad is fine) and search for the word 'Extra' - this should take you to a part of the file that looks like this:
Extra Ship, nil, 2, 4.,0, 4a,2d, 2h,1f, 5,1, 2, no, 000000000000000 Extra Air, nil, 1, 8.,4, 8a,8d, 2h,2f, 10,0, 0, no, 000000000000000 As you might guess from all those numbers, you can make these units do just about anything you want, but a discussion of that kind is way beyond the scope of this tutorial. For now, replace the word 'no' near the end of each line to 'nil', as shown below.
Extra Ship, nil, 2, 4.,0, 4a,2d, 2h,1f, 5,1, 2, nil, 000000000000000 Extra Air, nil, 1, 8.,4, 8a,8d, 2h,2f, 10,0, 0, nil, 000000000000000 The bit of the file that we changed here relates to the technology required to develop the unit. 'no' means the unit can never be developed (that's why you don't see them in a normal game), while 'nil' means you don't need any technology (in other words, the unit is always available). Is it possible to make these units dependent on a specific advance? It surely is - change the 'nil' to the abbreviation for the advance you want to use. For example, if you set the file up like this:
Extra Ship, nil, 2, 4.,0, 4a,2d, 2h,1f, 5,1, 2, Nav, 000000000000000 Extra Air, nil, 1, 8.,4, 8a,8d, 2h,2f, 10,0, 0, Fli, 000000000000000 You'd need Chivalry to build Extra Land units, Navigation for Extra Ships and Flight for Extra Air units. There's a complete list of all the technology abbreviations further up the rules.txt file (search for '@CIVILIZE' to find it). You don't need to worry about this right now, but you might want to experiment with it in the future. For now, just stick with the three 'nil's. Now save rules.txt and start Civilization II. Changes you make to units.gif and rules.txt only take effect if you restart the game, by the way, so every time you want to make a change like this, you'll have to come right out of the game, and start again. Once Civ2 is loaded, start a new game and have your Settlers build a city right away. When the City Window comes up, click the 'Change' button, and you should see the three new units sitting in the list, ready to be built.
First Steps with Unit Graphics That's more than enough theory - now to create our first unit graphic. To start with, you'll need a blank purple box to work on - here's one we prepared earlier:
![]() You can download this image to work on - just right-click and use the pop-up menu. With some browsers, you can copy it and paste it straight into your image editor, while others need you to save it somewhere first and the open it in your editing software. You might be tempted to just copy one of the blank graphics at the bottom of units.gif, but don't - as we'll see later, these have vital components missing and will cause your game to crash if you use them. The purple patchwork in this box represents the terrain that the unit will occupy in the game. The main pale purple diamond is the terrain square where the unit will actually stand, and the others represent the squares around it. As the file says, units cannot overlap the area below this main diamond. In other words, you can draw anywhere in the box except on those parts marked red here:
![]() As you can see, the green border and blue dots are also out of bounds. Now, we'll draw a very simple new unit to replace 'Extra Land':
![]() Keep it simple at this stage - don't try anything like pasting in samples from other images, or changing colours in the palette, because there's a strong chance you'll confuse the game. Just draw something by hand using the colours provided (or download the image shown above, if you like). Copy the image, and paste it into units.gif over the top of the existing Extra Land image. You have to be very careful to make sure that you get it in exactly the same place, and that the green lines match up right to the pixel. When you've finished, the relevant section of units.gif should look like this:
![]() The next step is to save units.gif in your main Civ2 directory. The file should be saved as a GIF and, importantly, you should make sure that the version saved is non-interlaced 87a (PSP will use the latest version, 89a interlaced, unless you tell it otherwise). Close down Civ2, if it's still running, restart it and get into the game. We'll use Civ2's 'cheat' facility to quickly see our new unit in action. Press Ctrl-K to enable Cheat mode, then press Shift-F2 (Select Map View). Make sure 'Entire Map' is selected, and press OK. The entire map will now be visible. Pick a likely spot to show off your new unit, and right-click there (it should be a land square). Now press Shift-F1 (Create Unit) and choose 'Extra Land' from the list (if it isn't in the list, you didn't make the changes to rules.txt we discussed earlier, so you'll have to backtrack and sort that out). If everything's gone according to plan, you should get something like this:
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Now For a Real Unit In practice, you'll only need a Huge Yellow Ball unit very rarely, if at all. Most units are much more complicated than this, and you'll need to be able to draw realistic human figures, horses and so on, in correct proportion. Or, you can cheat. The quickest and easiest way to create new units is simply to adapt those that are already in the game. As an example, let's create a Klingon Warrior. First, pick a unit that looks something like the one you want to create - in this case, the Warriors and Pikemen images are both candidates, but we like the Partisan because of his angry stance.
![]() (To do this, we just pasted our new image over the 'Extra Land' unit in the units.gif, saved the file, restarted Civ2 and created a couple of units). For a final touch, go back to rules.txt and find the 'Extra Land' line, which should look like this at the moment:
Change it to:
Save it, restart Civ2, and you can impress your friends with displays like the one shown below (assuming you have friends who are easily impressed).
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Green Lines and Blue Dots: Placing Shields If you look closely at our new unit, you'll notice that his right arm partially obscures the front of the shield showing which civlization he belongs to. This isn't too bad in this case, but what about something like this?
![]() The shield is so badly obscured that you can't even tell who this Extra Ship belongs to! (We hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with MicroProse's original graphic - we've introduced this error deliberately to demonstrate what can happen if you're not careful). Look back at the original images from units.gif, and you'll see that each is accompanied by two blue dots - one in the green line above the unit, and one in the green line to its left. These dots define where the top left-hand corner of the shield will be when the unit appears in the game. By moving the dots, you can move the shield to a better spot relative to your unit, like so:
Creating a Brand New Unit Eventually, you'll want to create a unit that's completely different from any image already held in units.gif - an airship, say, or a moon buggy. You first port of call should be the various Civ2 sites on the Web, many of which carry extra unit images - we have a few ourselves in our download section, and you'll find larger libraries on other sites - try our Links page for some suggestions. If you still can't find a suitable image to base yours around, you've no choice but to start with a blank purple square, and create your unit image from scratch. It isn't possible for us to explain every aspect of creating a new image here, of course, but we can give you a few tips that might be helpful.
1. Get the Shape Right First
2. Shadows
3. Shading
Don't use shading effects that are two subtle - these tend to show up well against the purple background when you're designing the image, but can disappear altogther when seen against the more colourful backdrop of the game itself.
4. Use Detail
5. Think About Your Background
6. Using Clipart or Scanned Images Images like this are generally held in full colour, and you'll need to change this to Civ2's own 256-colour palette before you can use this in the game. To do this, first load units.gif into PSP. Choose 'Save Palette...' from the 'Colors' menu, select 'JASC Palette' as the file type, and save the palette as 'civ2.pal' or something similar. Now, open your clipart, and pick 'Load Palette' from the 'Colors' menu. Pick the .pal file you just saved, and click OK. PSP will automatically convert the colours to match Civ2's requirements. Sometimes this can produce a fine result, and sometimes your image becomes pretty well unusable - it depends on the original image. You can try experimenting with the settings on the 'Load' dialog to optimise the image - 'error diffusion' typically gives the best results. You should remember, of course, that the normal Civ2 units aren't photographic quality, so if you add one from a photograph, it'll look a little strange next to the others. If you do this, it's usually a good idea to retouch it by hand to make it look more 'Civ2ish'.
Clearing Up
Do you want to keep your changes?
Recover the old files
Whoops!
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