A quick question about Leaderheads....

[DJ Bonebraker]

Ok, before I re-upload my deleted LHs, I want to ask a fairly important question:

How many colors in the tiny cultural (the one with the itty-bitty head that appears inside the hearts of the other LHs) victory pcx file are transparent?

The reason I asked is that I recently finished a playtest of the final fantasy mod, and won a 100k cultural victory, but when the victory screen came up, the tiny heads inside the hearts were messed-up. The best I've been able to determine for certain, thus far, is that at least the last 8 colors are considered transparent, but unfortunately, when I re-did the tiny culture win LH pcx for garnet, almost the entire last two ROWS of colors weren't actually used (i.e. when I reduced the color depth, it changed the last 12 colors to 255,255,255, which PsP does when you use Median Cut color reduction and it runs out of actual colors)....

Help would be greatly appreciated, since this is not only going to affect my getting the files up on the site, but also the time-frame for the release of the FF mod beta.

 

[Grandraem]

I've never tested a cultural victory in my mod yet. I'm curious about this because I only include the standard two (though I usually have three) transparency colours in my LH tiny culture PCX files.

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

Well, from looking at the C3C LH tiny cultural victory LH pcx files, they have at least the last 8 (if not 16) colors of the pallette the same shades of red....

This is what the results of only having the last two colors preset as transparencies looks like:

 

[Grandraem]

Darn, I didn't notice that you said C3C LHs, so I just loaded into Photoshop the Civ Vanilla and PTW LHs. I loaded about 5 from each and noticed only that the first three colours (I assume you're using PSP or another program that the transparency colours are at the end) were definitely unused in the pictures, except for the first colour as the BG. When I tried to change the fourth or later colour on the palette to bright pink I saw an effect on most of the faces of the ones I'd opened up. I'm not sure about all the shades of red you mentioned, but it definitely seemed that the fourth colour in many cases wasn't a transparency colour. I'll have a look at the C3C and get back to you.

If it is only the first 3 colours, as opposed to the first 2 (or last 2 or 3 in your program), then I probably lucked out somewhat because even though I know most pics only use the first two colours I usually have the first 3 as unused.

Anyways, I'll check the C3C pics and maybe try to set up a quick cultural victory in my game to test it, but I may not get time to test the cultural victory just yet.

 

[Grandraem]

Hmm, ok now I'm really lost. I checked my C3C LH pics and noticed that although they had a black BG, that wasn't their first colour in the palette. It was actually the first colour of the second row on all four I tried. The first colour was bright pink that was unused in the pic and the BG as I said was a black from later in the palette. This contrasts completely with what I'd seen in all the CivIII Vanilla and PTW LH pics that used the first transparent colour in the palette for the main BG. I can't recall ever winning a cultural victory playing Civ though, as I usually go for Spaceship or most of the time try to kill off all my opponents Now I'm wondering how they'll show up in even a regular civ game for me.

Has anyone else noticed this peculiarity?

Anyways, here's a small example of what I was saying about the palette of the Vanilla and PTW tiny culturals. I changed the first four colours in the palette to bright pink. By the fourth colour, it was used in the pic. This isn't even the best example. Others had more use of the fourth colour in the pic. This leads me to think that possibly only the first three colours are transparent for these pics, but that still leaves those confusing C3C palettes.

Notice the dot on Brennus' lip from the fourth colour:

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

that's wierd, because I opened the screen capture (with the messed up looking face, and a copy of the cult_b pcx for garnet in PsP,(which, like every other program EXCEPT Photoshop, lists pallets in the proper order: i.e. color index #1 first... for some reason Photoshop lists the pallettes backwards. I'm convinced that it's part of Adobe's conspiracy to force you to spend $50 on a book as thick as your avarage dictionary in order to be able to even attempt to use thier programs, a suspicion that has been proven by my few attempts to actually USE photoshop), and colors that were affected were definitely in the last 8 colors of the pallette. I determined that by zooming far enough in that I could see the pixels clearly, then opening up the color pallette on the base PCX and clicking on corresponding pixels, which auto-selects the color in the pallette.

Like I said, I found that rather confusing, since, even though I actually TRY for a culture victory, I usually end up either (a) getting a space race victory or (b) "brushing off the sparks that land upon me" and getting a domination victory before that point in time.....