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Namphibian
Dianoga
Joined: 07 Oct 2003
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 Posted: Oct 26, 2003 07:02 Post subject: Trouble with BM's |
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I have a persistent problem involved in making my own textures: whenever I convert a 256 colour BMP to BM format, using 2DF, it comes out with the colours completely mucked up i.e. not what they're supposed to be!!! Can anyone help?
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Burning Gundam
Kell Dragon
Joined: 28 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 26, 2003 07:06 Post subject: |
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That's mainly because each level has it's own set of individual swatches. Also, you have to take into account the bright colors as well. So although it has 256 colors, it comes out all weird. Do the same thing with textures from Gromas Mines for instance. The texture looks like crap unless the Palette is switched to Gromas. There's also a way to make a custom palette, but I don't personally know how to do that. Ask Barry Brien, he should know, or Patrick Haslow. They're the big time BM creators.
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Tom Manning
Trandoshan
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 26, 2003 16:19 Post subject: |
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Matt H is the Pallete guy, but read his article before asking him. He would be very happy.
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Tom Manning
For all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you, Stand, Men of the West!
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Barry Brien
Dark Trooper Phase 1
Joined: 26 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 27, 2003 03:56 Post subject: |
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Remember to specify the palette file your using, i.e.
2DF texture.bmp secbase.pal
I do notice, sometimes that 2df doesn't convert the colours exactly. This even happens when you've applied secbase.pal to the image in Paint Shop Pro, or a similar program, before saving. I find it especially happens with colours like green or blue.
If you have Photoshop you should really get Mattias Welander's bm plugin. It makes texture editing so much easier.
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The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 27, 2003 12:33 Post subject: |
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I dunno how much you know about palettes, so I'm gonna explain it all. Please forgive me if you already know this stuff.
Old DOS games can only display up to 256 colors at any one time on the screen... this might be because the original developers of DOS, Pacific-something, thought that would be enough... or the guys who bought DOS, Microsoft, royally messed up stuff again :p.
At any rate, games can only display 256 colors. So many DOS games have palettes, which dictate which colors can be used.
When you converted your image, you were using your own palette in the image, which conflicted with DF's palette. So the converter did it's best job of forcing the palettes to match... you might want to manually convert the image to the DF palette you're using beforehand, so you can EDIT the converted image... also, if you have a palette converter that dithers, that may help if you run out of other options. (Dither basically = makes stuff look better than that washed out gray, but not as good as the original.)
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Mattias Welander
Trandoshan
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 27, 2003 14:19 Post subject: |
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The_Mega_ZZTer wrote:
Old DOS games can only display up to 256 colors at any one time on the screen... this might be because the original developers of DOS, Pacific-something, thought that would be enough... or the guys who bought DOS, Microsoft, royally messed up stuff again :p.
You're utterly wrong. The 256 color limitation of DF has nothing to do with Microsoft or DOS at all.
The limitation has to do with the cost of memory chips. Because of this, the very first commonly used PC graphics subsystem, the CGA system, supported four colors. That means a 320x200 pixel screen took 16 kB of memory. Also remember that video memory is quite expensive, since it both has to be fast and be possible to read and write simultaneously and asynchronously. Later, when the price of video memory went down, 16 color and finally 256 color displays appeared. Today it's perfectly possible to use 24 bit color in DOS, as long as your graphics card supports it.
So, if you're going to blame anyone for that, blame IBM for not giving away free graphics memory circuits... or, if you understand how ridiculous that is, stop throwing blame around at all.
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Nottheking
Kell Dragon
Joined: 29 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 27, 2003 18:53 Post subject: |
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Mattias Welander wrote:
You're utterly wrong. The 256 color limitation of DF has nothing to do with Microsoft or DOS at all.
The limitation has to do with the cost of memory chips. Because of this, the very first commonly used PC graphics subsystem, the CGA system, supported four colors. That means a 320x200 pixel screen took 16 kB of memory. Also remember that video memory is quite expensive, since it both has to be fast and be possible to read and write simultaneously and asynchronously. Later, when the price of video memory went down, 16 color and finally 256 color displays appeared. Today it's perfectly possible to use 24 bit color in DOS, as long as your graphics card supports it.
So, if you're going to blame anyone for that, blame IBM for not giving away free graphics memory circuits... or, if you understand how ridiculous that is, stop throwing blame around at all.
Exactly... You beat me to it.
I remember reading in the history of Id Software, that Carmack's brilliant idea for putting a scrollable background on the PC wasn't accepted at Softkey, because the technique required EGA (16 color/4-bit) graphics...
To repeat what the others have stated, the 8-bit/256 color system doesn't use a standardized pallette, unlike the 16-color (4-bit), 65,536 color (16-bit), 16,777,216 color (24-bit), or 4,294,967,296 color (32-bit) systems... Each image (or program that uses them) has its own pallete, containing 256 colors selected from a master 24-bit pallette. Your texture has transfered exactly; I.E, pixel 10,50 stays at color number X, but Color number X is suddenly different.
There are plenty of things availible to convert image files, and still keep the same colors... the only ones I can think of have already been mentioned, though...
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The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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Nottheking
Kell Dragon
Joined: 29 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 29, 2003 15:41 Post subject: |
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For some reason, I can't think up of any DOS programs that use 24-bit color... The only 16-bit color one I can think of is Zelda Classic... Perhaps somebody could help me think here...
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Mattias Welander
Trandoshan
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 29, 2003 22:13 Post subject: |
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Nottheking wrote:
For some reason, I can't think up of any DOS programs that use 24-bit color... The only 16-bit color one I can think of is Zelda Classic... Perhaps somebody could help me think here...
I don't think there are any commercial DOS games using 24 bit color out there. Too little visual gain and too much performance loss from 16 bit color. Remember that more than 16 bit color wasn't considered needed until we started seing heavily blended multitextured 3D games. Even today, many games run virtually without any visual loss in 16 bit color.
Transport Tycoon (or any of the related games - I might think of the wrong one) was a 16 bit color DOS game.
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j-dogg
Gamorrean
Joined: 29 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 30, 2003 06:09 Post subject: |
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Yes, Gundam is right, each level has their own separate swatches, though I just use the default secbase.pal for my BM's
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J-Dogg: Formerly known as Death_Blood_Fire 
Member since March 1999 |
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Burning Gundam
Kell Dragon
Joined: 28 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 30, 2003 18:14 Post subject: |
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Same here, it makes my life much easier. However, it kinda sucks because I'm limited to what colors I can use. So any BM from any other leve that doesn't look right I have to go back and correct, which after a while becomes a royal pain in the arse. But I still enjoy creating my own to a certain degree.
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I don't think outside the box... I customize it. |
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Nottheking
Kell Dragon
Joined: 29 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 31, 2003 20:07 Post subject: |
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Mattias Welander wrote:
I don't think there are any commercial DOS games using 24 bit color out there. Too little visual gain and too much performance loss from 16 bit color. Remember that more than 16 bit color wasn't considered needed until we started seing heavily blended multitextured 3D games. Even today, many games run virtually without any visual loss in 16 bit color.
Yeah, that's what I thought... The only DOS programs I've seen that have used even 16-bit were emulator-type things, such as the Genesis Emulator Genecyst, and the SNES emulator ZSNES (DOS version, the windows one is much better)
Mattias Welander wrote:
Transport Tycoon (or any of the related games - I might think of the wrong one) was a 16 bit color DOS game.
You have Transport Tycoon? I love that game. Last I recalled, it claimed to be only VGA, but I find that hard to swallow, given the graphic richness it provides, along with variable color schemes for each player...
...Wait a moment. Scratch that previous comment. Mattias, I'm a tad confused: what is VESA? I thought it was an 8-bit graphic standard, but is it 16? I forgot that Transport Tycoon is VESA, not VGA. Sorry.
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Mattias Welander
Trandoshan
Joined: 27 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 31, 2003 21:34 Post subject: |
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Nottheking wrote:
...Wait a moment. Scratch that previous comment. Mattias, I'm a tad confused: what is VESA? I thought it was an 8-bit graphic standard, but is it 16? I forgot that Transport Tycoon is VESA, not VGA. Sorry.
VESA is one of very few unified interfaces ever developed for DOS. Not a very successful one at that, I'm afraid. It's basically a standardized driver interface for allowing programs to access non-standard video modes from different graphics chip manufacturers, without the programs having to know of the particular hardware details beforehand. The VESA standard includes everything from 4 bit modes to 32 bit modes. Compared to writing your own graphics drivers, it's nice to use VESA... but now when I'm used to programming graphics in Windows I can't really understand how I ever managed to survive VESA programming back in the old days.
As I said before, I'm not 100% certain the game I'm thinking about is indeed called Transport Tycoon. I think it is, but I'm not completely certain. At least I know it's a map oriented game where you earn money by building trains, roads, airports and so on, and transport stuff around.
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Burning Gundam
Kell Dragon
Joined: 28 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Oct 31, 2003 21:51 Post subject: |
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What does this have to do with the DF BM Palette?
I'm actually quite curious if it's possible to have more than 256 colors in a custom pallete.
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I don't think outside the box... I customize it. |
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The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Nov 01, 2003 04:05 Post subject: |
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Nope. DF doesn't use VESA to my knowledge. Just your standard 320x200x8 screen mode.
My graphics card goes into 720x400 when playing DF.. prolly cause it can't go any lower lol... 
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Burning Gundam
Kell Dragon
Joined: 28 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Nov 01, 2003 20:21 Post subject: |
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Guess that explains why my Loading Screen didn't turn out the way I had expected. Oh well.
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I don't think outside the box... I customize it. |
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japh
Gamorrean
Joined: 30 Sep 2003
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