Anyone have a link to Prom's website? I cannot find.

hive-mind'd. I totally didn't see this thread and made that exact suggestion just now in the Modding suggestions thingy that grif started.

Point taken. That's very valid.

And screw you on the pink glows thing. I have the right to my own aesthetic tastes, and if I want a hot pink space marine, by god I'll have one. As it turns out, there are things that can be done to the palette, so yay, I can. Didn't know that until I made this thread - which is why I made it.

Should I have checked the wiki better? Probably, yeah okay that was a baddy.

The graphical limitation is just more evidence that data is a crappy software engineer.

@rawtoast: yeah but we cant access bitmaps now anyway so you'll have to do the pink glow thing
i actually planned on making a super quick moving soldier with lua based dashing, energy sword, lasers and whatnot (horribly unbalanced of course) and i wanted it pink and white, with crazy anime-styled hairtennae. i'll make it some day, but it likely wont be pink.. maybe a light blue. i'll do some sketches when im in the hotel room, actually. thanks for bringing it up. if we get the palette alteration working, then my pink supersoldier 12 second fantasy might eventually come true.
jesus that was rambly. but yeah, lern2shadeskin noob.

that thing with an invisible face that's just the outlines and highlights, would be ♥♥♥♥ scary.


Also @Grif your link to the lua docs for CC, doesn't apply hear, thats the game's pallet, which I think is hard-coded to 256 colors, if you load a different pallet, everything becomes out of pallet. technically as long as nul is 250-0-255, we shouldn't get flipping errors, so you could make a bomb that rapidly changes the pallets and makes everything look all F-ed up. you could even be tricky and only use the same colors, but re-arrange them. and then out of nowhere INVERT them.

what you can't do is make the game use more than 256 colors.


Also I'd like to point something out. I suggested rotating glows in that other thread. I now also suggest controlling how 'bright' glows are, because eventually it gets so bright it can hurt your eyes, its scary, so that it doesn't do that. Then you could make a solid-white sprite, and a matching glow, over-lap them and suddenly we'd have what is it 24-bit color? the problem is everything would settle as the sprite's color... but if things 'phased out' with lua when they hit 0 hp, there'd be no settling.

Right now, we have an absurdly deep pallet that can only be used on circular shapes, there this thing called a glow. thats not to complain or anything... just pointing it out. i've never seen it done.

No ♥♥♥♥ duh. That's because you loaded a different palette, thus, everything that ran on the old palette is now out of palette because you loaded a new one over it. It will always be an 8 bit palette, because the game runs on an 8 bit graphics engine. The glows are on a separate level than everything else. Ever notice how they're drawn over menu items? You can't occlude them, only have them offscreen.

What we all need to do is ask Data "How hard would it be to, right now, change the palette size from 8 to 16, 24, or 32 bit?". Email it to weasel, and we'll get our answer.

EDIT: Forgot to point out, glows don't need to be circular.

Glows dont need to be circular, but they don't rotate. that means that if the sprite rotated the image drawn on top would NOT rotate. thats why it has to be a circle. and it would never rotate.

as for 8 to 16 to 24 and 32 bit, you CAN use 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, etc bits.
8 = 256
9 = 512
10 = 1024

I dont see why we'd need more than 1024 colors really. 256 is limiting, 1024 is 4X as big, thats plenty. we dont need the extra 6 bits past that yet. the ONLY problem is, I dont think a .bmp can handle it. we would need a converter. Converters DO exist, you can probably find freeware ones too. or you could just use GIMP. the ONLY problem I see is mac users. is there a mac gimp, and is there a PC and mac shared format that supports the unusual bits?


also I'd like to point out one thing.

What if we could make changing the pallet load a 2nd pallet and replace the colors with new ones. like if we switched the orange/yellows with the greens and that was it. coalition become yellow and dummys turn green. the zombies would be golden. I know it doesn't work now but as a side-note, wouldn't it be kinda cool?

As far as I can see with my limited knowledge of palettes in Gimp, you cannot have more than a 256 color palette. That's as far as the indexing dialog lets you set the palette size. You would probably need another utility.


Actually I think this might work, but not in the way you expect. When you replace the palette.bmp, the indexed colors change, so that the color at, say, index 127 is now (255, 255, 1) where it used to be (251, 7, 89). However, I think the reason that paletted images do not convert correctly to this new palette is each .bmp keeps a copy of the palette in it's file. So, when the sprite palette and the game's palette do not match, you have issues. Strange color problems appear, not because the game keeps it's palette, but because the palettes do not match.
That said, I'm no graphics person, so this is all conjecture.

thats what does happen, I meant if changing the games pallet would change the pallet and colors used of all .bmp's in use.

Hm. Not sure what graphics trickery goes on at that level, so I can't conjecture very well, but I'd say if there is a palette in the sprite there's not much you can do. Unless you can modify the engine to have it look at each color it's told to display and replace it with another.

This is what we should be talking about: You all have completely strayed from the main argument, which is that the engine itself is gimped through poor design.

^
Fine, but I'd also like to know why I can't just change pallet. If it's just hardcoded into the game, then why does what I do to the palette in base matter?

The game engine is limited to 256 colors, but you can change which 256 colors through the palette.