-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 57
Game Assets
Notes on OpenCiv3 game assets and the two game modes: standard and standalone.
OpenCiv3 comes in two flavors: standard mode and standalone mode.
Standard mode relies on a local installation of Civilization III for art assets. To make use of Civ3 assets in OpenCiv3, you need to declare the installation directory of Civilization III either in the project UI when first running it, or by setting the CIV3_HOME environment variable.
Standalone mode makes use of custom assets and allows OpenCiv3 to run without a Civ3 installation. Release builds of OpenCiv3 will have OpenCiv3 assets bundled together, so you should be able to run the game right away. If you are developing the game, you'll need to download the assets separately, as they assets are included via git submodules. See below for detailed instructions.
For now, OpenCiv3 prefers to load any necessary game assets (art, sound, text, etc) from a local Civ3 installation on demand, if the game can be found. The goal for OpenCiv3 is to provide a complete standalone game using freely redistributable assets, meaning that we need "replacements" for all assets that feature in Civ3. For the time being these replacements are a mixture of pre-existing, placeholder, and purpose-made assets, and need not match 1:1 with Civ3 assets in terms of file format or content. For example, many OpenCiv3 image assets are 32-bit image with full alpha channel support, so a separate alpha mask file is not necessary.
As of Dutch Preview 1, Standalone Mode features essential assets, so rudimentary gameplay is possible, but the majority of the assets are rudimentary placeholders.
As we develop our own permanent assets (as opposed to barebones placeholders) particularly for the UI, we should think about a consistent theme and design language. So far the preference has been for an ancient look akin to the original game.
OpenCiv3 assets are managed in the Assets repository. See #563 for some discussion of our asset policies.
OpenCiv3 assets get included in the main game repository as a git submodule.
To initialize it and fetch the assets, run the following commands from the main repository root:
git submodule init
git submodule update