Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => Modding => Topic started by: Sriseru on March 20, 2014, 03:16:25 pm

Title: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Sriseru on March 20, 2014, 03:16:25 pm

I was working on the graphics of my Alpha Equulei mod when I encountered a pretty big problem. As probably all of you know, SMAC uses both pink and purple to identify which areas are to be transparent. Unfortunately, one of my new faction leaders has a lot of both...

Original Image	SMAC Palette	In-Game
(http://i.imgur.com/gaOPYgh.png)	(http://i.imgur.com/R7IQBtV.png)	(http://i.imgur.com/lwm4MrG.png)

I'm unsure of how to solve this problem and would love some advice on this matter. Ideally, I'm looking for a solution that doesn't require radically altering the character's hair color.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 20, 2014, 03:56:16 pm

You want Kilkakon.  He can tell you how to change the palette.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Geo on March 20, 2014, 06:03:08 pm

Would a leader picture be affected? it isn't really used in the game screen, only in the info sections and diplomacy/council screens?

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 20, 2014, 06:10:51 pm

Those pixels display black, thus the third picture.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Geo on March 20, 2014, 06:13:36 pm

Ah, I see.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Ford_Prefect on March 22, 2014, 06:49:07 pm

Hmmmm.  There is a few darker shades of purple that I can see on the palette.  You could try them and see if you like the hair color.  Otherwise, you will likely have to change her hair color to green, blue, brown, red, orange, blue/green, etc.  The shade you picked is almost exactly the same shade as the transparency color.

Also... is she an original character?  I don't recognize her.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 22, 2014, 06:57:45 pm

That's a My Little Pony.

As Sri said in the OP, he wants those colors - but I wonder that just changing the shade slightly hasn't worked.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: gwillybj on March 22, 2014, 08:01:23 pm

I do a lot of reasonably acceptable image importing for my own games, but I use an old version (3.11) of Paint Shop Pro. Over the past couple of days I tried a few things. I can preserve the Pink (index 243), but I can't preserve the Purple (index 252 and 255). Changing the color of index 255 to 000,255,255 (Cyan) didn't work for me  ??? The purple still came out black.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 22, 2014, 08:19:15 pm

Changing to the closest shade -not those exact colors- in the SMAC(X) palette ought to do the trick.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Ford_Prefect on March 22, 2014, 09:09:37 pm

Oh.  I recognized it being My Little Pony: FIM.  I was curious if it was a background pony that I didn't know about or if Sriseru created an OC to avoid copyright issues.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 22, 2014, 09:31:22 pm

I don't know if we have enough bronies here...

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Sriseru on March 23, 2014, 11:43:04 am

Quote from: Ford_Prefect on March 22, 2014, 06:49:07 pm

Hmmmm.  There is a few darker shades of purple that I can see on the palette.  You could try them and see if you like the hair color.  Otherwise, you will likely have to change her hair color to green, blue, brown, red, orange, blue/green, etc.  The shade you picked is almost exactly the same shade as the transparency color.

Also... is she an original character?  I don't recognize her.

Yeah, I guess I'll have to try and find some other shades of pink and purple that might work. If that doesn't work, I'll probably see if I can find and get some help from Kilkakon.

And yes, she's an original character, all of my new faction leaders are OCs. This is mostly because my mod takes place one or two centuries in the future of MLP:FiM. :3

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Ford_Prefect on March 23, 2014, 04:27:06 pm

I'm gonna have to put in some work into my tool so that you can ponify the units as well.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Kilkakon on March 25, 2014, 12:54:41 am

Can your image program edit the colour palette? :) If so, just change the two ingame transparent colours and you should be right. If not, send me the pcx and ideal image and I'll see what I can do.

I'm amused though, I had an epic pokemon one and now a MLP one is starting. My one advice: enjoy it for what it is and playing it with your own friends :) We don't really have many MLP fans here so yeah.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Ford_Prefect on March 25, 2014, 12:53:58 pm

Quote

Can your image program edit the colour palette?

No... but my research might help.  Each unit stores a copy of the color palette as rgb values.  So to get them to all render right when you change the main game color palette, you could use what I figured out to either change the units color or get the unit to use the new color properly. Otherwise it will most likely render incorrectly.

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Kilkakon on March 25, 2014, 02:33:40 pm

Oh I was asking the Sriseru person there. Sorry to confuse!

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Sriseru on March 25, 2014, 03:17:12 pm

Quote from: Ford_Prefect on March 23, 2014, 04:27:06 pm

I'm gonna have to put in some work into my tool so that you can ponify the units as well.

If your tool would allow that, that would be absolutely amazing. :D

Quote from: Kilkakon on March 25, 2014, 12:54:41 am

Can your image program edit the colour palette? :) If so, just change the two ingame transparent colours and you should be right. If not, send me the pcx and ideal image and I'll see what I can do.

I'm amused though, I had an epic pokemon one and now a MLP one is starting. My one advice: enjoy it for what it is and playing it with your own friends :) We don't really have many MLP fans here so yeah.

I work with Photoshop CS5, so most likely it can. :) Now, when you say edit the color palette, do you mean the palette of the individual pcx or is there a way to change the palette of the entire game?
If you meant the former, then I sort-of tried that (probably incorrectly):

(http://i.imgur.com/yaIdWAu.png)
I changed the transparent pink color in the upper left, but when I tried the new pcx in-game it looked like this:
(http://i.imgur.com/gF2t7v2.png)

What am I doing wrong? :(

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Kilkakon on March 26, 2014, 12:16:27 pm

It might be best if I show by example. I had a purple hero and needed to make sure he didn't have the same background. So what I did is change the background colour and then stuck my hero on.

Important: this doesn't change the colours ingame! Just the colours on the pcx to be something more convinent.

Bit of an old pcx, and he's a boy, just FYI. :) But hope it helps as an example...

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Sriseru on March 31, 2014, 10:36:04 am

Alright, I think I got it now. Thanks for all the help, you guys! :D

Title: Re: Purple and Pink?
Post by: Kilkakon on March 31, 2014, 12:23:00 pm

You are welcome. :)