Civizard tileset - possible?

Master of Magic is a classic, one of the most popular strategy games of the 90s. It is a 4X fantasy strategy game that allows you to play as an extremely powerful wizard, leading your troops and overcoming your magical opponents.
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Swithin
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Civizard tileset - possible?

Post by Swithin »

Hi Slitherine!

I just saw that you launched MoM on Steam, and have canonized Seravy's awesome CoM update as official! Congrats to all of you! I hope that this brings greater exposure to the granddaddy for those relatively new to fantasy 4x, and I'll be keeping an eye out for any news of possible sequels. ^_^

It's been a couple of years since I last booted MoM or CoM, but having them together in an "archival" package has rekindled my interest. I was curious whether there was any discussion to importing the tile set from Civizard into the Steam release? On the Steam forums Iain mentioned bringing talk of future modding to these forums, and seeing as Asmik Ace has left the games industry (and seems to lack the interest or rights to rerelease Civizard) this seems like the kind of thing that, if you're uninterested in pursuing on your end, a dedicated modder might accomplish on their own (with some participation from you in regards to rights to the redesigns.)

I know that there's great interest in a major graphical overhaul and minimal interest (and split opinion) on the '97 tileset, so it might be misspent effort, but this seems like the final step to incorporating all the classic content into one. What are your thoughts?
Blake00
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Re: Civizard tileset - possible?

Post by Blake00 »

Ahh yes that would be cool. For those unaware of it, Civizard - Majutsu no Keifu is the Japanese playstation conversion/remake of Master of Magic. Its essentially the same game but with totally new graphics. It's pretty awesome!!

The tiles appear to be stretched across a large world floor texture (kinda reminds me of oldschool Final Fantasy and SNES Mode 7 3D tricks) on an angle which makes screenshotting them impractical. That means the graphics need to be extracted out of the game and as far as I know no fan has done that sadly. If that was successfully done then presumably someone like Seravy or Serena would know how to extract and replace graphics assets in original MoM.

Sadly there's no English version of the game but if it's of interest to anyone I've done a preliminary English translation on GameFAQs of its main interface which was not easy as I don't speak Japanese haha! I plan to play a bigger a game of it in the future and hopefully translate more. I even bought a physical copy of it and had it imported from Japan! (posted photos in the MoM FB group HERE )

Actually you've given me an idea I might suggest to Slitherine regarding the missing long lost MoM source code issue. Probably a long shot but ASMIK did the conversion, not Mircropose, so presumably Micropose sent them MoM's sourcecode to build Civizard from as Civizard is identical in MoM in every way mechanically its just the graphics and rendering engine that's been replaced. All the background gameplay mechanics code should be the same. A good sign of that is the fact that all stats in the game are still English while only titles & descriptions have been changed to Japanese. ASMIK is not a dead company, they are still going today, so it might a long shot but its possible they still have backups of the source materials used to convert MoM to playstation. Slitherine's office might want to make some calls and emails haha.

Company info & website:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmik_Ace
https://www.asmik-ace.co.jp/english

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Blake00
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Re: Civizard tileset - possible?

Post by Blake00 »

Forgot to say a while back that I spoke with Serena on the MoM Discord and he confirmed that his MoM Tweaker tool can import and export classic PC MoM's assets

(Note: The post link below won't work unless you've joined the MoM Fans Discord using THIS LINK )

I like Serena 15/03/2020
Hey @BlakesSanctum,
Sure. All MoM graphics are available.
Tweaker can view, export, and replace most of them (LBX Editor).
And Tweaker's map view obviously has all the overland and combat tiles.


So theoretically his tool could be used to import the Playstation versions graphics into the PC version (although there will likely be some colour pallet conversions required beforehand). However the problem still remains of extracting the graphics out of playstation version of course haha.

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Last edited by Blake00 on Sun Jun 19, 2022 7:25 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Blake00
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Re: Civizard tileset - possible?

Post by Blake00 »

Someone was posting about this thread which reminded me that I haven't posted updates on our progress since the last post here.

(Note: The post links below won't work unless you've joined the MoM Fans Discord using THIS LINK )

Firstly one of your users Marzepain was able to extract graphics from the Civizard CD using a popular tool however sadly the extraction did not include tileset graphics.
https://discord.com/channels/6127257939 ... 3635093524
"Marzepain:
If you need the playstation gfx of MoM, there is a tool for that. The playstation uses a standardised format while most other consoles like the snes don't. Unfortunately not all was retrievable. Somehow the map tiles are not there. Maybe because it's 3d. The opening sequence of Civizard is 218Mb, the rest is just a few Mb. At least that's what I found.
cvzd.7z
934.20 KB"


Secondly I believe I was able to locate the graphics folder in which the tile graphics are stored in (probably the 3 WORLD files), however sadly I failed to find a way to extract them out. Implode also had a look but didn't have any luck either as we talked about the possibility of doing a Civizard graphics mod for his MoM-IME remake (which I should mention has recently finally hit version 1.0!) since that wouldn't have the colour palette limitation of the original engine I mentioned in my previous post.
https://discord.com/channels/6127257939 ... 3617148005
"BlakesSanctum:
here's a 7zipped copy of all the files in that folder should anyone else want to play with them..
GRPH.7z
1,014.00 KB"


So we've made some progress but we still sadly don't have successfully extracted Civizard terrain that could be used in mods for classic MoM, MoM-IME or CoM2Win.

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Blake00
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Re: Civizard tileset - possible?

Post by Blake00 »

Hey guys, just wanted to say that there has been more progress on the Civizard graphics extraction project but updates have been posted in a sister thread over at the realms beyond MoM forum here:
https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/sho ... #pid809918
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