Hi, I want to know why every time I edit a sprite and launch the game, it says it was unable to open the image file of the edited sprite. I just re-sprited the Coalition Soldiers and used their custom ini's. Now it is unable to load HelmetGibA.bmp, so I need help. If no one can help me, then I'll make another topic on Mod Requests with my sprites and ask for a mod with them. Hope someone helps me with this problem, it's my first mod. I am really sorry if I misread anything on the sprite tutorials.

It means your sprite is not in palette.

If you take the sprite and paste it over palette.bmp in base.rte and save it as your sprite it should be fine.

Make sure to make a back up of the palette.bmp though.

Oh, so even doing the sprite using only palette colors, I also need to paste the sprites into the palette?

That is correct, otherwise your sprite will lose it's palette'ness and won't work.

Thanks Coops, you really helped me
EDIT: Just another question, we do it on Paint or Gimp? If we do it on Gimp, how do we do it? If you don't want to explain me, can you link me to the tutorial that explains that? Do we have to resize the image?

Either will work, depending on what kind of paint you use. If you use Vista's paint or older, It won't work so you have to use Windows XP's paint instead.

All you got to do is take your sprite, open up palette.bmp, paste your sprite over the palette.bmp, make sure to "save as" and save it. But also make sure you don't save over the palette.bmp, otherwise CC won't start.

Uh... you can just save the palette files from 8-bit images, and load that palette when you need to convert the image from 24-bit to 8-bit. I think GIMP works with .PAL files just like Photoshop does, it's a standard format.

You don't need to use the palette.bmp at all, basically; just tell your image editor what palette you're working in.

In fact, in Photoshop, and I presume in GIMP, if you have been working with an 8-bit palette, the next time you save an 8-bit image it will default to the last-used palette and will convert the image for you according to your preferences. You can even batch-process images to the palette you need, if you want, although with CC it's never that important, as unless you're working on a bunch of scenery images or something you're not saving enough time to bother.

I doubt if Paint does any of this stuff, but it's awfully silly to use Paint for this kind of editing work anyhow, as it's not really built for working with palettes and it's really inefficient

MSPaint works with palettes just fine.

I prefer it because it's completely straight-forward and I'm too stubborn to learn a different program.

Well, if that works for you, great; just thought I'd mention that you don't have to do it the way that's been mentioned here

Since this game uses several different palettes, it's nice to just save the .PAL files and load them to do conversions quickly and suchlike when building content, and it saves a lot of time to do color conversion and then do final cleanup if you're trying to emulate Prom's auto-palette stuff

I was just showing the simple oldschool way of doing it.

If I wanted to set him up for kind of stuff for extended spriting, like sprite sheets and whatever, I'd show him this or this.

Well, I used the way Coops told me, but I think I did it wrong. I put every sprite on top of the palette, resize it and save it as my sprite, and then it's fine. But I did that with Windows 7's paint, and every sprite was like if I used colors from other sources that aren't from palette, it had a white square surrounding it and it was very blurry. I did something wrong, right?

Meaning, Windows Vista's paint, or Windows 7 paint.

*Vista paint or newer.

As for other programs- if you're using GIMP, make sure it's not 2.8. 2.8 has some weird behaviour when it comes to exporting indexed bitmaps, perhaps due to the various changes to the saving system.

I'm using GIMP 2.8, maybe that's why I got the sprites all messed up in-game?