New team colours!

[Sloth_MD]

Originally Posted by Civrules

Don't yet know how to use it (although it works now), so I guess I'll just get the others, along with any updates that might come in the future.

M'kay, there are five "control" colors grouped together to the left of the Load, Save, and Done buttons. If you hover your mouse over them, then tooltip text comes up to identify them. Once you've loaded a palette in - and, if I'm not mistaken, the program should force you to do this the first time you run it - it loads up on the screen, and those five control colors get set. The one on the far left is the left bound - normally white or close to it, this is used for the light band of the main color. The one on the far right is the right bound, and does the same thing for the dark band of the main color. Neither bound is actually used in the palette, but they are used for calculating the gradation of the main band. The left middle box is the primary color - index 7, the basis for everything else except the left and right bound, and by default about halfway between the left and right bound. The right middle box is the secondary color - index 7, and by default a couple steps between the primary color and the right bound. This color is used a lot for high-contrast details on units, like the crest on the Hoplite unit, or folds along the worker's cloak. The bottom box is the city-band color, used for shading some mid-range colors and determining the border and unit disc colors, and by default it's just a step up from the primary color. Left-clicking on any of the boxes will let you change that color, and the display immediately update. Right-clicking on a box will set that color to its default value.

The city-band color is the trickiest to work with - set it to something funky, and your units can end up looking very streaky. On the other hand, giving this a nice bright contrasting color is the quickest way to get a sparkly effect. The left and right bounds look cleanest when you use appropriate shades of gray or the main colors, but you can experiment and get other neat effects. For example, try setting the left bound to gold, the primary color to cyan, the right bound to dark blue, and defaulting the secondary color, and city-band color to gold. This should give you an interesting Egyptian-like color mix.

Finally, you can and should test these colors on the fly. Start up a game, with debug mode on if you want to add units to test, and you can load up a palette, save it, then save and reload the game to see the effect immediately. Doing something like this, it shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes to set and tweak each new color set.

Oh, yeah, that last color box all by itself on the lower left controls the background of the screen. It's basically just there if you want to see how the palette looks against a different background color.

[Civrules]

Thanks a lot for explaning.
I will try it later when I have more time.

[Pounder]

How do you start a game with Debug mode ON.

Do you have to add a line to the .ini file.

[Civrules]

It is somewhere in the editor, I am sure, but I donno where exactly.

[Sloth_MD]

Originally Posted by Pounder

How do you start a game with Debug mode ON.

Do you have to add a line to the .ini file.

Open the editor, create a new scenario file, and under scenario properties there's a check box for debug mode.

[Civrules]

Okay, so to use this do you have to save anything anywhere or do you just click on done and load a game?

[Sloth_MD]

Originally Posted by Civrules

Okay, so to use this do you have to save anything anywhere or do you just click on done and load a game?

Uh, you need to save. Done does not save. You do not need to exit - the save routine takes about 1/10 of a second, and does not keep the file open.

[Civrules]

Whenever I "save as" (Simply "save" does not seem to do anything) to "Color," for example, an error occurs saying "file does not exist".

[Pounder]

Works great.

Here is a screen shot of the utility.

Thanks again

[Sloth_MD]

Originally Posted by Civrules

Whenever I "save as" (Simply "save" does not seem to do anything) to "Color," for example, an error occurs saying "file does not exist".

Save works. It's just very, very fast. It saves to the file name displayed at the top of the screen. I can't reproduce your problem with save as - what are you putting in as the file name?

[Civrules]

Indeed, I see the same thing.

What do you see in game?

[CyberTyrant]

This program is very cool. Thanks again Sloth.

[Rhye]

Wow, works great!
Did you discover what is coloured with pixel n.67?

[Civrules]

Originally Posted by Sloth_MD

Save works. It's just very, very fast. It saves to the file name displayed at the top of the screen. I can't reproduce your problem with save as - what are you putting in as the file name?

I've saved to "COLOR" as I have said before in the post you quoted.

i donno, I may be stupid to not notice a difference.

[Sloth_MD]

Originally Posted by Rhye

Wow, works great!
Did you discover what is coloured with pixel n.67?

No, but I did notice it defaults to be the same as n.7. Actually, the fact that I couldn't figure out what it did was one of the main reasons I used it as the tertiary index. I can set it to a weird value without noticably screwing anything up.

[Civrules]

Sorry to make you go through all the trouble, but that's ok, if I can't get it to work for me, don't worry about it.

[Pounder]

Originally Posted by Civrules

I've saved to "COLOR" as I have said before in the post you quoted.

i donno, I may be stupid to not notice a difference.

I just place a copy of the ntpxx.pcx (from the art/units/palettes folder) file on the desktop, load it with the utility, save. Then copy to the art/units/palettes folder AFTER BACKING UP THE ORIGINAL OF COURSE.

[Pounder]

Sloth_MD, the colour on the mini map always seems to be lighter than the colour of the Civ, even if I choose the same colour for all 5 selections.

[Civrules]

This makes more sense, thanks.

[Sloth_MD]

Originally Posted by Civrules

Sorry to make you go through all the trouble, but that's ok, if I can't get it to work for me, don't worry about it.

That's very weird - basically, I copied all the palettes into a scenario directory and made a biq file to reference it. Then I just started going through them one by one, loading, editing, saving, reloading the game, checking it out, rinse, repeat. Just as a test, try copying one of the palette files to something else (test.pcx for example). Load it into my editor, change the colors in a really big obvious way, save, load something else, then reload the first one and see if it loads your new colors. If it does, it's working fine.