RA2/YR Building Artwork: Creating the Proper Filenames
by CannisRabidus and Blade. Published: 3/8/03. Last update: 3/8/03.

The game looks for theater-specific art ALL the time. If theater-specific art is NOT found, the game will FALL BACK to using "generic" art.

Building names should begin with either G (Allied), N (Soviet) or C (Civilian) for RA2, and for Yuri's Revenge, Y (Yuri). Otherwise you can't count on the building showing up, especially if it is to be player-buildable. So when creating a new building for your mod, you should retain this naming convention.

GANAME - arctic
GTNAME - temperate
GUNAME - urban
GDNAME - desert (YR)
GLNAME - lunar (YR)
GNNAME - newurban (YR)
GGNAME - generic

New buildings that don't leave rubble would require only GGNAME and GANAME versions. If a building is to leave rubble, the rubble frame uses a theater-specific palette (isotem.pal, isourb.pal, etc), so you really would have to make the whole list of building versions (but then you don't need GGNAME of course).

However, if you are really looking to optimize the number of files needed for buildings that leave rubble, you can take advantage of the fact that the isotem.pal and isodes.pal are identical. What you do is set your GGNAME image to use isotem.pal for the rubble frame, and omit the GTNAME and GDNAME versions of the shp files. The game will then use GGNAME.SHP for both the temperate and desert theaters. This saves you one file version.

As a final note, if you are replacing an existing building, you should check to see all the theater-specific versions that exist - since GGNAME never overrides a theater-specific version.