First off, I'm trying to make a giant robot actor because it's what the cool kids do
I've been using a combination of SAI and Paint in order to make the sprites but I'm having some difficulty getting the results I want, namely because when the bitmaps are loaded into CC they do this:



When looking right the purple bits that should go translucent still show, and looking left I get god knows what.

Here's some info that might help you guys help me:
-I've tried saving it as a 24-bit bitmap, 256 color bitmap and 12 color bitmap. None produce desirable results.
-I've tried copying the canvas into a limb bitmap that I know works in CC. Did not fix.
-I'm sure that's the right shade of magenta, copied and saved a swatch from a working bitmap.
-The bitmap is 42x66 px

Is there a px dimension limit that I don't know about or what? This is happening with all the bitmaps I've tried to make on this machine, using the same techniques as I used for a weapons pack I started months ago.

EDIT: That's a thruster/jetpack thrown way the hell over to the left/right of the actor. I was dabbling with the offset to see if any of the bitmap pieces were working. Offsets are not what I'm struggling with (yet).

Your sprites are not in palette. This means that they do not follow the colour-code that all CC sprites must. It's nice to see you had a go at putting them in palette at one point, so I'll be brief with this.

Follow this guide to using GIMP with palette. All of your pictures will come out nice and pretty with it.

It's not in the right palette.

You usin' Photoshop?
There's a Cortex Command palette in in one of the spriting tutorial threads.
Anyway, once you get the palette, load up the sprite files and go to

Image > Mode > Indexed Colour

Then choose the Palette dropdown and pick custom and load up the Cortex Palette.

This should give you your sprite in the correct palette.

Edit
Jesus christ, I'm slow.

Alright, thanks. I was using Photoshop when I made my guns and dropship, but that was on a separate machine than I am using now.

Also win7 paint sucks because it doesn't save the current colour index and just slaps its own colour index on there (and to make it even more stupid it uses a default palette instead of using the colours from the image), but the old one is great for this stuff, copy palette.bmp from base.rte into your mod folder, open in old version of paint paste your image on top of it and crop, save and presto your image is in palette.

Old mspaint: http://www.sheeptech.com/download/mspaint.exe (v.5.1.2600.1106) courtesy of geti on the forums (couldn't find a link to mspaint elsewhere but this same thread has been made a few times). Grif posted an updated version (v.5.1.2600.5512) but the link is down, if you even care about that then you might be able to find it somewhere.