Quick Question

[Oblivious]

Are all the colors of BG supported by MS Paint XP using a printscreen? If so, I can make paperdolls and some sprites with ease (mostly sprites)
I find photoshop difficult to use for edditting an image pixel-by-pixel.

[marzo]

Can't say, I never really tried. If you want, you can also try the Gimp with the Gimp shape editor plug-in (from the downloads page): when it prompts for a palette, you can cancel and a new palette will be autogenerated.

[Oblivious]

Is Gimp a freeware program?

[Dominus]

yes. http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
I'd also say stick with Photoshop or The Gimp. You don't want to have all your work ruined because of a wrong palette or so...

[Malignant Manor]

MS Paint should work fine for pasting into another program but it lacks transparency and indexing. If the scaler in Exult is set to 1, then it should be fine for screen shots and editing before using another image editor.

Yes, GIMP is free and open source. GIMP is unintuitive in a lot of things, has some awful defaults settings, and takes some getting used to. I still don't know how to edit multiple layers properly(which should be extremely simple). It gets the job done and is sometimes easier to do things like remove unwanted areas than MS Paint.

Paint.NET is freeware and supposed to be easy to use, but I have no idea if it is capable of indexing and saving transparency properly.

[Malignant Manor]

Oh, graphics card settings that automatically adjust images should be off if trying screenshots. It would be better to find the shape in Exult Studio and set the offset to 0, 0 and export the frame you want (just remember to set the offset to what it needs to be after importing.

If you are trying to use a specific palette you could likely screenshot the display of it in ES and put that into another Paint window or somewhere in the work area of the image you are editing. Just remember that some color values in the palette rotate colors in the engine.

[marzo]

Maybe it is just me, but I found the Gimp to be far easier to use than Photoshop, and I am more comfortable with it than with Paint.

[Oblivious]

Export from Exult Studio? Ugh, that sounds complicated.

[marzo]

Export from Exult Studio? Ugh, that sounds complicated.

Find shape in ES -> right click -> select export option.

Export frame -> saves the frame you right-clicked to a png; you can use frame display to select the frame you want.
Export all frames -> export all frames from the right-clicked shape to png files.
Export shape -> exports the shape to a shp file that (e.g.) the Gimp plug-in can read.

The last option is better, in my opinion.

[Oblivious]

Ooh, need to muster up the courage to try out a new program... (I'm bad at that, and at mechanical stuff in general, hence my namesake here. Ooh, dread...)

Okay, if I export the shapes, can I import/paste a bunch of them on one page at once in Gimp? I need to do this if I am to work on sprites, for compare and contrast.

Some quick questions about the keyring mod. (I wanna wait until some time later to play it; sometime after Geoffrey is joinable; I want it to be a surprise for myself) I had some ideas for some stuff to start out with:

--I assume nobody has worked on the magic spear yet; if not, I'll do that
--I also assume nobody has worked on Geoffrey's paperdoll face yet? If not, I'll take a shot at it. Can't promise it'll be good, though.
--I had the idea of making cloaks, dresses, pants, hoods, and tunics of various colors (palette swap). Has this already been done for Keyring Mod? If not, I'll do it.
--We need a staff, perhaps a druid's staff. I can make the sprite, but someone else may need to make the paperdoll.
--Are cups and pitchers fillable in Keyring mod? If not, is there a plan for this? If so, I can work on the sprites for that.

[Donfrow]

I have created a magic spear for my mod already. It's pretty much a spear based on the blue fire sword, though I'm not particularly fond of the spear-tip in the paper doll.

[Donfrow]

This seemed like the most appropriate thread to ask this in.

I'm not completely clear as to how Exult/U7 works with the colour palettes so that little issue is causing me a bit of an issue.

What I am looking to do is have a transparency with a blue tint to it similar to the way the transparent glass counter top that makes everything beneath it coloured slightly white. So pretty much if you placed an item under it, instead of a white tint, it would have a blue-ish tint.

How would I go about finding the RGB combination that will use a blue-ish tint and work with the transparency option in ES, as opposed to the white tint of the glass counter tops (which is R252, G208, B112)? Or is it even possible to have a transparent blue-ish colour?

Thanks!

[Malignant Manor]

Take a look at the stained glass windows. I'm not sure how it is converted from the orange/yellowish colors and, but different color tints like blue are possible.

[marzo]

This seemed like the most appropriate thread to ask this in.

I don't know why not simply create a new thread with a more meaningful title than this, but anyway:

The best way to edit graphics for Exult is to use a paletted image using a palette generated by ES/ipack. Or better yet, export a shape and edit it directly using the Gimp plugin (and pressing 'cancel' when it prompts for a palette). Editing it in full color and hoping ES/ipack will do the right thing is a route to madness.

In the game palette, the last 32 colors are 'special'. They behave, by index (0-based), as follows:
- 224 to 231: Rotation group (8 colors).
- 232 to 239: Rotation group (8 colors).
- 240 to 243: Rotation group (4 colors).
- 244 to 247: Rotation group (4 colors), translucent for some shapes.
- 248 to 251: Rotation group (4 colors), translucent for some shapes.
- 252 to 254: Rotation group (3 colors), translucent for some shapes.
- 255: Completely transparent.

Thus, there are 11 'translucent' palette indices in U7. These are the semi-transparent colors you are looking for. That is, if the shape in question has/can have translucency. Based on shape source, here is the breakdown:
- faces.vga, sprites.vga: Always translucent.
- fonts.vga, gumps.vga: Never translucent.
- paperdol.vga, shapes.vga: Translucent if you check the 'translucent' check box in the shape information window in ES (in the appropriate tab).
(edit: corrected sprites.vga)

Now, for the actual translucency information. Normally, Exult will load the translucency tables from the "xform.tbl" in static dir. There are 11 such tables (one for each translucent color), and these indicate what each palette entry will look like behind that translucent color. If Exult doesn't find the above file, it creates the tables using certain RGBA values for each translucent color; these RGBA values are also used for OpenGL rendering, so they can be trusted. Here they are, again by color index:

Code: Select all

- 244: R 144, G  40, B 192, A 128
- 245: R  96, G  40, B  16, A 128
- 246: R 100, G 108, B 116, A 192
- 247: R  68, G 132, B  28, A 128
- 248: R 255, G 208, B  48, A  64
- 249: R  28, G  52, B 255, A 128
- 250: R   8, G  68, B   0, A 128
- 251: R 255, G   8, B   8, A 118
- 252: R 255, G 244, B 248, A 128
- 253: R  56, G  40, B  32, A 128
- 254: R 228, G 224, B 214, A  82

Note: These values are used for rendering. If you try to input these values in your image, you will not get what you want! Like I said, you have to use the game palette and use the colors for the corresponding palette entries or use the shape plug-in and paint with the color it generates for the palette.

[marzo]

Hrm. After posting that, I remembered a website that had a table of the translucent colors: The Fashionable Avatar. What made me curious was that it listed semi-transparent colors for color indices that Exult does not implement. So I went in and found out that the xform.tbl file has actually 17 translucency color tables. A quick trip to Britannia in DOSBox with edited shapes.vga courtesy of ES reveals that all color indices from 238 to 254 are translucent in the original game; not the 11 Exult does, but 17.

[marzo]

I have implemented the 6 missing translucency colors, and the next snapshot should have them.

[Donfrow]

Thanks for the information. If you hadn't put that note I am sure I would have set the colours to that without using the palette information!

Sadly, it seems that my plan to make a translucent "roof" over the Avatar has failed as I neglected to take into account that you wouldn't actually be able to pick up any items under it.

[marzo]

Try making it "transparent" as well (the checkbox in the shapes window); if I remember it right, it will do the trick.

[Donfrow]

You remembered correctly! You've saved the dream Thanks again.

[Malignant Manor]

If you are interested in editing the displayed transparency color, then you can read this log for more information.