Editing Leader Pictures?

[Blake00]

Okay I think I've made my selections.

Leader image 51 has a good selection of blues and other colours so i'll use that as the base.

Image 19 has a good line of reds so i'll take that little bit out.

Image 52 has some good greens and a few browns so I'll take those bits.

Image 27 has some nice light blues.

And for a few little extra browns and pinks I used image 16.

Oh and last minute addition. Image 53 had some nice purples.

I of course also added the central background pallet area too as we need those yellows and other blends.

And this is the final result. Note this is NOT a real usable palette, it's just a picture of a palette so you can't use it as it's actually 16mill colour image haha. But I'm going to now use this picture to go build a real palette that can be used. I know there's some pallet creation programs out there that I could properly just insert this image into but I didn't have any luck finding one so I'll just do it manually as it shouldn't take me long.

 

[Blake00]

Success!! I've built the palette file and tested it and the results look good!

Original Heroes of Might & Magic image

Old conversion attempt

New conversion using customized diplomacy palette

In-game test success! No glitches!

I've attached a 7zip file below to this post that contains both the new custom diplomacy palette .PAL file and also the converted .GIF leader head image using this palette.

@Metro Polis

 

[Metro Polis]

You definitely deserve a Civ2 wonder video of your own: The Colour Palette! Well done!

 

[Blake00]

Here's some more conversions using the pallet attached in the previous post.

HoMM2 Original / Old conversion / New conversion

@Metro Polis

 

[Metro Polis]

Hey! You let me look like a noob compared to you!

 

[Blake00]

haha sorry @Metro Polis I'll re-word those titles. Considering you just successfully created a custom Civ2 wonder video after I failed miserably it's now me who looks like a noob haha.

HoMM2 Original / Old conversion / New conversion

 

[Blake00]

@Metro Polis

 

[Blake00]

last one I promise lol! I'm alll done converting them all now.

@Metro Polis

 

[Knighttime]

Hi guys, you seem to have generated pretty good results using a standard palette for every leader image. I'm certainly not pushing you to change that, at this stage, but hopefully you realize that it's actually possible for every leader image to use its own unique palette of 64 colors -- those colors just have to be in palette indexes 32 through 95. GIMP is able to handle the necessary conversion and palette editing, although it takes a little bit of effort. I'm mentioning this here especially for the future reference of others reading this thread, just to be clear about what's possible. Here is an example of the result:

Original (129 unique colors) / First attempt (52 unique colors) / Your standard palette (64 unique colors) / NEW, custom palette (64 unique colors)

Images created this way work great in ToT and presumably MGE. But it may not be an effective approach if you're using GifXtractor and have to deal with the rule that a new image cannot exceed the size (in bytes) of the previous one -- I suspect that many of the new images would be larger than the game's original ones, although I haven't checked.

 

[Metro Polis]

HAHAHA, Blake, who's the noob now?!

But unique palettes for 42 faces means 42 unique palettes! Being myself not familiar with the palette issue that sounds more than just "a little bit of effort". As far as I understand "standard palette" that's only one, or isn't it? Because being a complete rookie (still using MSPaint and copy & paste) when it comes to such things, I'd rather have a single one which I can use to refurbish some older scenarios.

The size is no problem either because the original HOMM2 pictures were smaller and now it's simply double-sized, but it's true it probably won't work on other scenarios' peoples' faces.

 

[Knighttime]

But unique palettes for 42 faces means 42 unique palettes! Being myself not familiar with the palette issue that sounds more than just "a little bit of effort".

Well, GIMP can convert any image to 64 colors, automatically picking the "best" 64 colors to use, in just seconds. The "little bit of effort" is needed to turn the 64-color palette that it generates into a 256-color palette, and then move the 64 colors that are actually used to the correct slots (32 through 95). But yes, you would need to do this 42 times... so it's a repetitive and manual process, though not terribly difficult after you've done it once.

As far as I understand "standard palette" that's only one, or isn't it? Because being a complete rookie (still using MSPaint and copy & paste) when it comes to such things, I'd rather have a single one which I can use to refurbish some older scenarios.

A standard palette for leader images, like the one you posted in this thread, definitely seems useful and would indeed provide a quicker approach, especially if you want to upgrade a large number of scenarios or images.

If you'd like to move beyond MSPaint, I have to admit that I still use an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro for editing .gif files in Civ2, so that's not much of an upgrade. For .bmp files, though, I generally use a program called paint.net and I find it more intuitive than GIMP. But neither Paint Shop Pro nor paint.net seem to support the full process needed for leaderheads, at least without trying multiple third-party plugins, so I end up using GIMP just for that.

 

[Metro Polis]

Sounds cool. Do you also have a hint for a video editor that can cope the Civ2 videos, too? Because so far I only found one that can do the video but with the wrong and squeaking sound values and one that maybe can produce the right sound, but doesn't provide the right codec for the video. I need one that can do both.
The best so far is a png picture and some underlied text as a video.

 

[Knighttime]

Not for MGE or older versions, unfortunately. TOTPP has a patch that enables the support of DirectShow for video, so with Test of Time I'm pretty sure you aren't limited to the old Indeo codecs any more. Most modern video editors would probably work fine in that case, but to be honest I haven't really spent much time creating or editing videos for any version of Civ. For working with audio files, I have Audacity as was recommended in another thread, and a very old version of a program named Sound Forge. Sorry I can't help you more.

 

[Blake00]

Hi guys, you seem to have generated pretty good results using a standard palette for every leader image. I'm certainly not pushing you to change that, at this stage, but hopefully you realize that it's actually possible for every leader image to use its own unique palette of 64 colors -- those colors just have to be in palette indexes 32 through 95. GIMP is able to handle the necessary conversion and palette editing, although it takes a little bit of effort. I'm mentioning this here especially for the future reference of others reading this thread, just to be clear about what's possible. Here is an example of the result:

Images created this way work great in ToT and presumably MGE. But it may not be an effective approach if you're using GifXtractor and have to deal with the rule that a new image cannot exceed the size (in bytes) of the previous one -- I suspect that many of the new images would be larger than the game's original ones, although I haven't checked.

HAHAHA, Blake, who's the noob now?!

But unique palettes for 42 faces means 42 unique palettes! Being myself not familiar with the palette issue that sounds more than just "a little bit of effort". As far as I understand "standard palette" that's only one, or isn't it? Because being a complete rookie (still using MSPaint and copy & paste) when it comes to such things, I'd rather have a single one which I can use to refurbish some older scenarios.

The size is no problem either because the original HOMM2 pictures were smaller and now it's simply double-sized, but it's true it probably won't work on other scenarios' peoples' faces.

Thanks guys haha yeah I did know that but should have said it in my original post sorry! When I worked out that I could build a custom palette to use on all pictures I realised pretty darn quick that it meant I could create custom palettes for INDIVIDUAL leaders. However it took me ages to build that custom palette as I too am using an old version of Paint Shop Pro for all this. I have GIMP but I've never been able to get my head around it and usually get angry at it within 5 minutes lol. 2 days ago I did try to build the palette in GIMP but failed miserably and went back to PSP. I wish I had your knowledge of GIMP Knightime since if I could create custom palette as easily as you make it sound that I probably would have considered doing individual palettes. However it took me all day to do the 42 leaders using 1 shared palette so god knows how long it would take me to do individual palettes even if I knew your easier way.

I wanted to try to create a easy to use shared/standard palette for people to quickly use without worrying about custom palettes and the limited palettes of the original images. It's not perfect and obviously it's results won't compare to specialized individual palettes but its a nice easy quick option for people if they want to use it. If they want better results then at least you've now made it clear what they need to do (which I should have done in my post haha sorry).

 

[Blake00]

@Knighttime hi mate, just thought I'd let you and others reading this thread know that if you do go with individual specialized leader face colour palettes it will cause a problem with the military end game victory sequence where you see the faces getting shopped by a guillotine. Turns out that the Guillotine screen pulls from the big 16bit 65,000ish colour palette just like the diplomacy screen does (instead of using the simple regular Civ2 world palette). However much like with each leader portrait the Guillotine screen can only insert 256 colours or less into its palette . So as a result each dip portrait HAS to use the same limited selection of colours the Guillotine screen uses or you get the horrible glitchy colours. So if we had gone and done specialised palettes for each individual leader portrait we would have been stuffed!!! However because we just went with a that generic colour palette for all leader portraits that I designed and posted above, all I had to do was convert the Guillotine screen palette to my custom diplomacy palette and that was it! Problem solved haha! All glitches are gone!

 

[Knighttime]

Hi @Blake00, thanks for posting this additional info. You know, I don't think I've ever actually seen the guillotine screen in Test of Time -- I think you've been developing for MGE lately (is that right?) but I'm almost always playing ToT now. Is it still active in my version? When I inspect mk.dll, I do still see the background image (10000) and a guillotine blade image (10001) though. Perhaps my issue is that if I become so dominant that I clearly could conquer the world in just a few turns, I tend to get bored and just start another game! But after seeing your post, I tried to fake a quick conquest using cheat mode, and still didn't see the guillotine sequence... hmmm....

Turns out that the Guillotine screen pulls from the big 16bit 65,000ish colour palette just like the diplomacy screen does (instead of using the simple regular Civ2 world palette). However much like with each leader portrait the Guillotine screen can only insert 256 colours or less into its palette.

So, images 10000 and 10001 use the same palette. But in both of them, every palette index from 32 through 95 -- the ones available to be customized for leader portraits -- are an identical bright green. Indexes 96 through 235 are mostly dark grays, dark reds, and dark browns, many of which are apparently in use (the guillotine background contains 62 unique colors, although a few of those might be grays from indexes 0 through 31). These dark colors wouldn't be sufficient to display most base leader portraits though. So... when you say "the Guillotine screen pulls from the big 16bit 65,000ish colour palette just like the diplomacy screen does"... where does it put the colors it pulls? Into indexes 32 through 95?

So as a result each dip portrait HAS to use the same limited selection of colours the Guillotine screen uses or you get the horrible glitchy colours.

What puzzles me is that the 42 base leader portraits all use different palettes already (as you documented in a prior post) -- it was by inspecting them that I figured out that indexes 32 through 95 were the ones you could customize for each leader. So my expectation would be that to display (for example) the Aztecs being "chopped", the game would copy the colors from indexes 32 through 95 of the appropriate (male or female) Aztec leaderhead into indexes 32 through 95 of the guillotine image, which are unused. You're saying that doesn't seem to be the case? "[E]ach dip portrait HAS to use the same limited selection of colours the Guillotine screen uses" -- that doesn't seem to be true in the base game. What am I not understanding?

because we just went with a that generic colour palette for all leader portraits that I designed and posted above, all I had to do was convert the Guillotine screen palette to my custom diplomacy palette and that was it! Problem solved haha! All glitches are gone!

Glad that worked... but then what did you mean by "the Guillotine screen pulls from the big 16bit 65,000ish colour palette"? Wouldn't that process overwrite the palette you provided anyway?

Sorry for all the questions and thanks for any clarifications you can provide!