Note on Unit Editor... good news or bad news?

[izmircali]

I looked at the unit graphics the other day and noticing as we all have that Civ3 will have units with color codes (like Age of Empires) instead of the colored shield like Civ2. Looking at this, I thought of something...

1) This could make editing a pain because you have to to change so many frames of different color units (hopefuly cutting and pasting will be easy and then you just fill with the new color) Remember 16 civs at once, a lot of changing! (hopefully their is a copy unit or copy frame for all corresponding and making the color code a transparency or something).
THIS COULD BE BAD.

What could be GOOD, is that if this is true then we can do something really cool for scenarios. For Example: WW2 you can make infantry have the various uniforms of different nations. Or instead of making all UUs, units that have the same ratings can just hav different graphics based on the player (and assigning tat color to a specific country).

Anyone know any info contrary to this?

[Lee Johnson]

I'm assuming they're using some kind of alpha-masking for the parts of the unit graphics that need to be coloured according to nationality. If they let you create unit graphics, presumably they'll let you create the masks as well.

Is anything known about the file format of the unit graphics at this time?

[Grumbold]

Dan did point out that most of the early unit pics showed dark blue identification markings because that was the way the colour mask defaulted.

To get unique unit graphics per country you're probably going to have to replace one standard unit with 16 UU's. Now that WILL take a lot more effort, even if you can assign lots of different UU's to each nation.