Hello and welcome to the thread about my graphics pack for Space Empires 5 - "Captain Mayday's Beautiful Universe Graphics Pack".
Or, more specifically, a graphics pack for the only SEV mod still updating,
Captain Kwok's Balance Mod. Most currently confirmed fully working with version 1.19h.
If, for some reason, you've entered this thread not knowing what this game is,
this is the game's website. It is effectively a somewhat dated 4X TBS Sci-Fi game.
The AI, however, is completely retarded (which is the reason Balance Mod exists), and the graphics look as though they never left beta (which is why my graphics pack exists), with many of the planet textures looking like they were drawn by a highly distractible cat.
So as not to seem ungracious, this is an example of the original texturing rendered as a world, chosen completely at random.
And this is what I replaced it with (and it's not even one of the better ones). This is, specifically, the replacement file for the one listed above. I should note that this one actually reflects what atmosphere is found on the planet, being oxygen. I am not certain what was going on with the colour scheme in the original, as planet colouring often seems wholly unrelated to the atmosphere.
I have managed to increase the resolution of textures while simultaneously massively reducing the amount of memory actually being used. This was done largely by converting files that did not need to be in bmp into jpg. You see, for some reason the creator of this game decided to use black, in the bmp format, as the transparency colour, and made most files in bmp format despite them not actually needing transparency, and despite the game's support of jpg.
I did use this to my advantage to create glittering rings for planets rather than flat, horrid textures with big black outlines, however.
Please feel free to download my graphics pack
here. You will need to copy the contents into the mod's directory (\gametypes\Balance Mod v115+) and overwrite.
Please let me know what you think of my work.