MS Paint Debacle

While I'm not making a scenario per se, I had dusted off Civ 2 Mars scenario to try and make a terraforming game for myself and I get this horrible grey crap everywhere.

The problem is clearly that by editing the the terrain in MS Paint like I used to, being sure to save it as a gif file, the borders have become visible. But how to do I fix it? Saving it as any other type of file causes CTD as soon as I load the scenario. I want to be able to create units and such for myself, and this grey borders becoming visible crap is preventing that. I know it used to not work like that, but it does now.

Is there a workaround for modern computers? For reference I'm running on Windows XP as the series does NOT work on Windows 8. Trying to fins abandonware conversions has well, my laptop is in the shop right now.

Konig15 said:

The problem is clearly that by editing the the terrain in MS Paint like I used to, being sure to save it as a gif file, the borders have become visible. But how to do I fix it?

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This problem has been documented many times. It's caused by 8-bit colour palettes that have two indices, one flagged by the game as transparent and the other, as visible, sharing identical RGB values. When you save the graphics file, the editor doesn't recognise the distinction and merges all like pixels into the lower index value. In this case we're looking at palette indices 16 (visible in game) and 255 (used as a background colour in the file, transparent in game), which share an RGB value of #878787 (a medium grey). The best way to avoid the grey triangle plague is to replace index 255 with a unique colour before you start editing. The cities and terrain files all suffer from this problem. The units file doesn't. To edit, load or save a colour palette you'll need a better graphics editor than MS Paint; GIMP is free. I've attached the 3 offending files from the Mars scenario with palettes imported from units.gif. That should solve your immediate problem.

Konig15 said:

Saving it as any other type of file causes CTD as soon as I load the scenario.

Click to expand...

If you're using Fantastic Worlds or Multi-player Gold Edition, you should be able to save as an 8-bit GIF or BMP. Apparently, iterations of MS Paint more recent than WinXP will mangle the GIF format: palette, interlacing (none) and version number (87a); another reason to move away from this software.

Konig15 said:

Is there a workaround for modern computers? For reference I'm running on Windows XP as the series does NOT work on Windows 8.

Click to expand...

What version of Civ2 are you running? FW or MGE? Are your WinXP and Win8 installations 32-bit and 64-bit, respectively? Classic Civ2, CiC and FW will not run on 64-bit systems, full stop (see Technical Support subforum for advice on virtualisation or dual-booting). MGE and ToT will run on 64-bit platforms with the help of 3rd-party patches (here and here, respectively).