What's with the pink background for city graphics?

Emperor C

The Brain
Joined
Aug 16, 2002
Messages
75
I downloaded Rufus T. Firefly's Roman city graphics and installed them but now I have a pink box behind the cities. How do I go about getting rid of it?
 
About the question in the title: Pink is the color in which civ reads as transparent causing you to see (or at least what your suppose to see) as the terrain units or anything else.

About the question in your post: It has to do with the pallete that is used. If the pink isnt in the right spot it won't be transparent.
 
Rather, if the pink isn't the right shade, it won't be transparent. That's why you have to be careful when adding/reducing colors in an image.
 
ok, so what shade should it be? I believe it can be altered with photoshop or paintshop?
 
256 colors, palette
Red = 255
Green = 0
Blue = 255

Also, you can just use the eye-dropper to get the correct color.

Unless Rufus erred in the actual creation, it's likely you altered something - maybe shrunk/enlarged the image? What ends up happening in those cases is that the image stretches/compacts and thus the image blends with the surrounding pink. The bordering pixels may then become a color somewhere between the 2 adjacent colors, thus producing an off-pink image that doesn't become transparent in game.

If you were altering the image size, here's a correct way to do so:
Copy the image onto a new canvas where the background is transparent. Remove all the pink, so you only have the actual image left. Make your size adjustments, then copy the image and place it back on the proper pink background.

EDIT: and yes Photoshop works, I believe Paintshop is fine as well. You essentially are looking for anything that can handle a pcx image.
 
Chieftess said:
Rather, if the pink isn't the right shade, it won't be transparent. That's why you have to be careful when adding/reducing colors in an image.
:nono: That's absolutely wrong. It doesn't matter what colour it is, the important thing is that the last two (photoshop) / first two (paintshop pro) colours in the palette isn't used in the anything other than the background.
Just to give an example my elven cities have red background...

I have a link to a tutorial in my sig on how to get correct transparency in Photoshop.
 
Emperor C said:
ok, so what shade should it be? I believe it can be altered with photoshop or paintshop?

Just try to copy/paste the bad file on top of a good one, that should fix it.
 
Willem said:
Just try to copy/paste the bad file on top of a good one, that should fix it.
Or it will only muck it up more. If the palette is mostly greens and you try to add a red city, you'll get maybe two colours that fit, i e it will look awful. If Emperor C use Photoshop he really should look at my tutorial. This will give him the best palette possible.
 
Thanks for the help y'all, especially mrtn. The problem was the original file from Rufus had the wrong transparency as stated earlier. I redownloaded it to be sure and when I found the problem I followed the tutorial. Simple :)
 
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