I'm trying to create my first custom actor, but have already run across a problem--Sprites. No matter what I make, what colors I use, even from the palette the game recognizes (Of course!) all my sprites still appear incredibly bugged ingame. While my soldier is facing one way, the transparent parts on the retextured areas completely block other parts of the soldier from rendering, and when facing the other way the textures look buggy/glitchy similar to missingNo. Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong?

No matter what colours you use or the file format you save it in it'll appear that way unless the sprite is in palette. What that means is that the file specifically only uses the colour in that palette and cannot deviate. Basically CC has it's own image format (almost).

There's a couple of threads on this but here's one asking the same question: http://forums.datarealms.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25413&hilit=Palette

Keep in mind images cannot be paletted by windows vista and onwards versions of paint. I have also attached a paletted 'null' sprite. TO use simply open with mspaint xp version and paste in your sprite and save as.

Thank you so much for the quick reply. I'll try to figure this out with this info.

Okay, so I've followed your instructions and used your null file and sprited over that, but it still shows as very glitchy. The only colors I've used are from the palette, nothing from anything else. I'm using BMP files, and no transparency and magenta where I want it transparent, but it still won't work.

What program are you using

Did you make sure to export your sprites in palette? It sounds like you might not have, even if you use the right colors, the actual file format of the BMP has to be arranged a certain way (which you cannot change just by using the right colors). Check this tutorial if you haven't already.

Okay, never mind. I figured out something that works. I make the sprite in Paint.NET, then save it, then copy it over to the null file using MS Paint, and save it as the original name.

Sorry if I didn't make too much sense. But what you're doing when you paste into mspaint is putting the resulting sprite into palette and in this bitmap the only colours that are usable are the ones in the palette because mspaint auto configs the image provided the palette is in the image (the first time). But that process should be all you need soo what I said may or may not be irrelevant.

This is my most hated problem in all of Cortex Command modding because you can't make sprites from any other programs at all. You have to make everything from scratch in MS Paint. No more advanced editors allowed in any stage of creation, which really sucks.

You can use any editor you like, you just have to do the final paletting step in some editor that supports paletting.