Well, I am making my first custom unit, and I have trouble with the alpha blend. I am modifying an explorer, and I understood the bright green zone beneath it would be the alpha blended shadow.

I sometimes "draw" on the green zones, when I accidentally paste something on it, or when I import the original cell again.

When I ask Flicster to show me the unit, there are no problem with shadows where I let them untouched. But when I had to redraw them (by copying/pasting from the original file), it doesn't work anymore, and Flicster shows a ugly green zone instead of a shadow.

More strangely, when I had to redraw a part of the shadow, Flicster only correctly shows the part that has been left untouched.

I made sure the green zones are of the exact same colour (0,255,0). I have Flicster 1.0.0 build 17. Can anyone help ? Thanks in advance

If you take a look in the pallet of the explorer, you will probably see that there are a lot of entries with the same colour (0,255,0)

But because of their entry numbers they have different functions in flicster and civ3. When you draw with this colour yourself it is very difficult to determine which entry you are using.

My solution has been to first change the pallet so that all entries are different.

What software do you use for drawing, Spiff?

In Photoshop, it is exactly as black_rose said it: if the shadow is green, you see lots of color slots in a Photoshop color table with exactly the same green. Then simply make a "color ramp" (hope that is the right expression) to have a range of different greens in the last row of the palette. I always leave the last two colors unchanged, I only change the rest of this row. You can edit the color table via Image> Mode> Color Table.

You can get the different greens easily in photoshop by clicking on the first color you want to change, the hold the mouse-button and move the mouse over the entire row to the last color slot you wish to change. Photoshop will then ask for the RGB values of the first, then of the last color. Choose a darker green for the first, a lighter for the last color, the software creates then all greens that are between those color slots itself (experiment a bit).

You can then draw the shadow by choosing one of those green tones (the darker the tone, the darker the shadow). You can save this palette separately and load it to other storyboards of that unit.

I didn´t get this to work with Corel´s Photopaint, at least not with my v9.0. I can´t say much about PSP, I don´t have it.