Mod palettes

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entropicdecay
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Mod palettes

Post by entropicdecay »

When using the patch to change the colour palette in Keen: Vorticons, is there a way to be able to edit the tileset, sprites etc. and see them with the palette they'll show up with in game while you're editing them?
Benvolio
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Re: Mod palettes

Post by Benvolio »

There is.
In 2003, adurdin wrote:You can change the palette of the bitmaps if you want, so that you when editing them what they'll look like in the game; but you won't need to.
Modkeen will import images as long as they are in 16 colours. Any moderately sophisticated image software (as always I cite Paint Shop Pro 7) will be able to import/import palettes from images. In the case of PSP you can choose between its native .pal format and a more generic windows format also with that extension. What you need to do to get a hold of the palette from your mod is take a screengrab with dosbox - ideally having set up screen contents such a title screen containing all 16 colours. You can then essentially export the palette from your screengrab as a .pal (of whichever type) and subsequently load the saved palette into your 1til0000 etc images. Again I speak from my now decades experience with PSP but I can only imagine these functions being so generic would be replicated in other programmes. The concept of maintaining palette indexes can become quite important so that what you see really is what you get. For instance you want the colour you have replaced cyan with to occupy the slot of cyan in your image editing software. You can run astray if you let software change palettes on a "nearest colour" basis, which can not only alter which colours are used but can even alter the number of colours used and the nature of software-generated dithering. Apologies it this is long and unhelpful but my take home message is that what you ask should be very straighforward in pretty much any image editing software.

Of course an alternative to capturing the precise palette from a screengrab as suggested above, would be to just make a mock up of your palette manually within your software. After all it's all rgb, with the patched range of 0-63 for each of r, g and b expanded out fourfold approximately to 0-255 in standard software usage nowadays. So for example, if your patched bright red is now 63 00 00, then you can select Edit Palette (or whatever your software allows within a 16 colour depth) and amend that bright red manually to 255,0,0) and apply to your 1til0000 etc and/or your mock-up files for creating tiled content. Mindbelt and Tileinfo kindly take on board altered palettes if applied to your bmp files too, so the WYSIWYG extends beyond the pixel art creation stage.
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entropicdecay
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Re: Mod palettes

Post by entropicdecay »

Glad to hear it, thanks for the info.
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