How can I edit a unit's colors?

[Gomurr]

Could someone explain to me what it takes to edit the coloring a unit? With aaglo's Tomb King units coming out lately, it occured to me that the eagle unit in the Warhammer mod could serve well as a Carrion bird of Khemri if it was colored differently. So, how could one go about doing that?

 

[magus77]

Copy the 32_units (or units_32, can't remember) file to your computer's Art program, color the unit you want to change, save it, open it in something other than Art, then re-save it as a .pcx, and finally put it int the Units sub-folder.

 

[Gomurr]

Isn't that just the little unit images that appear on the city production menu in the game? I'm talking about changing the colors of the actual units as they appear on the map, like how ED edited the colors of elephant units to represent mammoths and how he changed the colors of the Easterling unit to be a Dark Elf soldier.

 

[sourboy]

You have to open the unit in FLICster, export the storyboard, edit the colors for each frame of each sequence in each direction for each action, then convert it back to standard. It's a tedious process to say the least.

 

[mrtn]

sourboy, you don't have to do it like that. It depends on what you want to change.
When I re-coloured the Nazgul (link in sig) I made a new palette, then darkened the whole (apart from the magenta) pcx (all frames at once), and applied the palette. Just took me a couple of hours.

 

[Gomurr]

Thanks for the information, both of you. One more question, though. What program do I need to edit .pcx files? Are there any out there one can download for free?

 

[Drift]

1. Open the unit flcs with Flicster.
2. Export storyboards.
3. Close the flcs in Flicster.
4. Open one of the storyboards in PSP/Photoshop/GIMP...
5. Edit the palette so that you get the desired results.
6. Save palette and apply it to all other storyboards (with 'maintain indexes' or something like that selected)
7. Open all .fxm files and export flics out of them.

With palette editing, you may get some unwanted results with the top 3 rows (or bottom 3 rows if you're using Photoshop) of colors. They are somehow hardcoded and can cause flickering in the unit that becomes evident only when civ color is applied. My only fix for this is to select a color that is used in the unit outside civ color, replace it throughout the storyboard with a similar color from outside those 3 rows. (every second color in those 3 rows is a color that may appear in the unit and the ones in between are shades of blue and used for civ-color.) This is probably pretty confusing BTW.

Edit: PSP has free trial. I remember something about one of the old versions being freeware these days, but I may be wrong.

 

[sourboy]

sourboy, you don't have to do it like that. It depends on what you want to change.
When I re-coloured the Nazgul (link in sig) I made a new palette, then darkened the whole (apart from the magenta) pcx (all frames at once), and applied the palette. Just took me a couple of hours.

The only time I messed with units is when I made the Sniper - and I tackled both color & detail mods at the same time, so ....too bad I didn't think about that before. Would have saved me a day or so.

 

[Gomurr]

And what do you mean by export storyboards? I'm sorry to be such a bother, but I'd like to be able to contribute something regardless of how insignificant the contribution might be, and I'm completely clueless about all this. However, I downloaded FLICster and have Photoshop, so if I could figure this out I should (at least in theory) be able to manage changing the palette

 

[Drift]

Open flc with Flicster, switch to the last tab ("export") and hit the button "export". Program asks whether you want to open new .fxm file. Answer no as you need to reload the .fxm file after changes to the storyboard anyway.

Now there are four new files in the unit's directory in addition to the GiantEagleDefault.flc (just for an example) you are editing.
- GiantEagleDefault.pcx
- GiantEagleDefault_StoryBoard.fxm
- GiantEagleDefault.pal
- GiantEagleDefault_Alpha.pal

The palette files are unnecessary so you can disregard them. What you need is the storyboard file GiantEagleDefault.pcx and the fxm file GiantEagleDefault_StoryBoard.fxm

Edit the pcx file and when you are done, open the fxm file with Flicster, switch to the last tab and hit export. That simple.