.flc files

[Rymdolov]

I've noticed that some custom facs, and all the official ones, have a file of .flc type. What do these files do?

[Buster's Uncle]

That's the little slideshow of tiny black and white shots from the leader's life that play bottom left during diplomacy.  I spent a lot of time trying to figure them out when I was starting out.  chuft cracked it, though he uses specialized programs you and I don't have and I think he's not great at explaining things, but here http://www.weplayciv.com/forums/showthread.php?2996-How-to-guide-making-flc-biographical-animations-for-faction-mods is his thread about how-to.

[Buster's Uncle]

Reviewing that thread, I see that Flygon knows a little something about the .flcs.  You should ping him and point him at this thread, as I seriously doubt we can get chuft here, alas.

[Flygon]

Know something? I created fully functional .flc's.

I'm not entirely sure if I still have the tools available, but it wasn't too difficult to do.

[Buster's Uncle]

Fly, did you know that I like you?

[Flygon]

I wouldn't know why, I'm an obnoxious crossdressing furfag that likes trains!

Anyway, from what I recall, all my method really involved was using a modified palette file to import images into GIMP (I think) with, modifying them as needed, and then importing them into the animation tool-thingamajig... it's been over 18 months since I did this, and all the tools were on my old laptop. I think I preserved everything necessary, though. And if not, it shouldn't be too difficult to reverse engineer, I have a lot of contacts, thankfully.

[Buster's Uncle]

If your recall, I worked out everything but the palette stuff almost four years ago, but do not remember how I did it at all - this was long before I knew GIMP and anything about animated .gifs.

I just can't believe an animation program does something palette-wise that's that crucial that GIMP won't...


I also can't believe the autocensor let you call yourself what you did in your first sentence - I've been meaning to have another look at the vocabulary, and I see I need to assign higher priority on my to-do list.  We can't have people talking about that railed vehicle.  This is a classy place.

[Kilkakon]

Well I like Flygon too, he's different and a bit weird, but hey I am too!

I'm also keen to see FLCs mastered.

[Rymdolov]

What about .DS_Store-files? What are those?

[Buster's Uncle]

Never quite worked that on out - they're junk that can be ignored, though.  Nothing to do with the factions.

You've been looking at the Network Node faction collection...

[Kilkakon]

Welcome to Apple land. Macs love leaving little ds_stores in directories...

[ars_belli]

That weplayciv link is dead now. 

GIMP uses something called "AutoDesk FLIC animation plug-In" to load the file.  Opening gaians.flc, painting on a few frames and saving via "Overwrite" or "Export" worked fine.

Initially GIMP had an issue if I deleted all frames but one, but I suspect that that was a one-off.  I've since been able to alter the number of frames without an issue.

The challenge now is getting the transparent palette colour to work in these files.  Filling a frame with 255-pink might have broken the file: in-game it defaulted to showing faction.flc.