Prehistoric posts about SMAC

[MysticWind]

https://www.coroflot.com/mhaire/Computer-Games

Portfolio of SMAC art director Michael Haire, this is gold:

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was an unofficial sequel to the incredibly successful Civilization series. Colonists from Earth vie for power on an alien world. I wrote up an initial brief on the principal characters and designed each faction leader and their emblems.



My original sketches are above; the final game portraits below were done by Jerome Atherholt. You see the pieces in action in the screen shots on the bottom.



I designed dozens and dozens of icons for the game interface, representing technologies, social concepts, locations, etc. This is a sampling.



At game's end, one gauge of your success is the kind of (e-) book your career has inspired. Many of the titles are takeoffs on popular books ranging from great literature to self-help books. The graphic restrictions were pretty severe but it was a fun project.




The game had many animated "cut scenes' and I helped storyboard many of them. This is one I provided to an external production company for "The Self Aware Colony", a hybrid of "1984" and Hal 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey". Resources for each movie were limited so I designed the action to minimize expensive elements like human animation and focused on camera cuts and sound effects to create the appropriate mood. The animations used a game specific format but you can see the final product online at: youtube.com/watch?v=iwqNSUr-wPO or at: poetv.com/video.php?vid=79631.

The Civ and Pirates! art is beautiful as well. Pure planetpearls.

[MysticWind]

DataPacRat archived a ton of old SMAC files back in the day. Summary of the directory:

DIARIES/ are archives of Brian Reynold's SMAC developer diary from '98-'99, published by GameSpot.

SITE/ is the original AlphaCentauri.com website for the game from July 1998. Tons of images in the sub-directories.

OLDSITE/ an even older copy of the site from May 1998. Contains two incredible finds that predate the Internet Archive's own- rough drafts in progress of faction profiles: Santiago who was a Navy SEAL recommended by Prime Minister Villalobos, and Lal, who served in the Node Riots, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2044, and has the venerable Rank of "Something." Really wish there were more of these for the other factions.

IMAGES/ is just a ton of random old image assets that were on the website or just generally floating around the web, I guess. (Like p/reviews on game sites, maybe.) I'm amused to find out that the buildings on Morgan Industries were called the Morgan Twin Towers. And hey look, the original Hive icon.

MISC/ has even more archived images and webpages, including non-Firaxis ones (IGN preview, Games Domain E3 coverage), and I guess pre-release notes like this? Lots of old beta designsthat you can also find elsewhere like on AC2 or on the Apolyton forums, but good to see it collected here. Skeuomorphism everywhere. So many textures.

Fun one- MISC/Quotes.txt, a collection of early quotes, reveals some of the cut faction names. Prokhor Saratov, Director Morgan, Marshal Joachim Ortega, Academician Sorov, Keeper Pravin Lal. I assume Lal originally having written "Librarian's Preface" ties into how the game emphasizes the role of librarians, which was never explained until the GURPS sourcebook.

MOVIES/ just three teasers and trailers. Glorious late '90s Y2K futurism graphics!

MYTH/ background on the Greek mythological figures that AC features (Chiron, centaurs, etc.)

REAL/ actual astronomical information about Alpha Centauri.

[Induktio]

Regarding MOVIES folder, most of the footage seems to come from secret project movies. They don't really show actual gameplay in the trailers. Secret project movies are also separately watchable with VLC player, I think it includes support for the video format. I've been also wondering about upscaling some of these videos. There's already some results of upscaling monument images on reddit, the results were generally really good for that sort of graphics.

[BFG]

Looking at the tech icons, and assuming this is the complete lineup (not just a "sampling"), there's a few interesting things to note:
(1) They appear largely to entirely unchanged from the final versions.
(2) They are mostly in order, with the exceptions of techs 13, 19 and 40 (High Energy Chemistry, Matter Compression, and Photon/Wave Mechanics respectively), which are appended to the end.  That may indicate they were late adds or reworked somehow.
(3) Even at this point, there's no separate icons for the two "lost" techs, #24 Inertial Damping and #70 Global Energy Theory.  Their icons are duplicates of #26 Singularity Mechanics and #75 Sentient Economeetrics respectively, so it's also possible the latter two didn't exist yet.

Oh: and if anyone has time/interest, these would be GREAT adds for the Cutting Room Floor page on Alpha Centauri.  The entire site's about this sort of stuff: https://tcrf.net/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri

[MysticWind]

Poking around the archives of the defunct SMAC Planet site, run by one Josh Monson, led me to this also defunct site created by one Novagene (aka Gene Lyons):

This site is devoted to those of us so obsessed and addicted to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri that when we're not actually playing it, we're building it with Bryce 3D. Here you can find downloadable predesigned objects that you can import into your own SMAC realms, request full-screen (800x600 BMPs)free via email, and hop to other related sites.

The following tools were used to construct this site:
   Allaire HomeSite 4.0
   Adobe Photoshop 5.0
   MetaCreations Painter 5.5 Web Edition
   MetaCreations Byrce 3D 4.0

A Chaos Interceptor:



A University base:



Sadly, the archives seemed to have been made during an earlier, flakier version of the Wayback Machine, so few images have been archived. We are left wondering what their rendering of faction portrayals would have looked like. Forever lost to the mists of time of the internet.

Funnily enough, I had just recently been recommended a nostalgic retrospective on Bryce 3D recently by the YouTube algorithm: