Matrix Games Forums

I like images for my inspection pages, so I figured I'd see if I couldn't figure out where they needed to go and in what format.

Turns out, it was pretty easy: 256x128 px in .bmp format, with a '-s' after the unit name. Next, I needed to know what images the game was looking for, which can be found in the D column of the ..\Modules\Common\Data\[CountryName]\CW 80s [Country Name].xls file

Easy enough. Off to Wikipedia! Found lots of great images, all with delightfully nonrestrictive licenses. The 'harshest' one was CC BY-SA 4.0, meaning you must attribute the author and you must allow people to do what they like to the image that you give them. The vast majority are public domain, meaning you can do anything you like to them at all, and use them in any way you like.

Even better, Wikipedia has a wonderful "here's how to cite" function built into their image viewer!

So, here's the complete list of US equipment ingame, in the proper image format, with an accompanying text document citing every image and the license.

Unzip the file to ..\Modules\Common\Data\American\Unit Images\ so that you have entries like the following -

..\Modules\Common\Data\American\Unit Images\A10-s.bmp
..\Modules\Common\Data\American\Unit Images\M1A1-s.bmp

That's it. The game will automagically look up that folder to see if there's a matching unit and will put it in the subunit inspector window. Let me know if there's anything missing, wrong or weird and I'll see what I can change. Next up will be the Soviets.

Here's what it looks like ingame:

if anyone wants to do this themselves, it's pretty easy. I used the ImageMagick (6.x version, available by default on Ubuntus) command line utility to batch convert all the images to the proper size and format. It's available on Windows and Linux. I used a WSL Linux instance on my Windows PC because I'm more familiar with Linux, but it's just as easy on Windows. If you end up being curious about ImageMagick, be careful, the utility is ... unbelievably comprehensive in what it can do. It's easy to get lost in the well written documentation. You've been warned!

Download the images you want into a folder. From your CLI, run the following command:
repeat for images of type .png, .tiff or whatever, it's actually faster to up-arrow, change 3 letters and hit return than to try to write a script that will walk through all the various image extensions.

once you've done that, batch rename the new files to have a "-s" at the end of the name, before the .bmp extension.

I'll leave that as an exercise for the interested reader.

thank you!
, I also like to make such things for my own use.