Is GIMP OpenBOR compatible?

[Rock]

Howdy pals, I've been trying to replace the White Ranger version of Tommy Oliver in Merso X's Beats of Power game with Shaq from Shaq Fu and the White Ranger with Steel from The Death and Return of Superman.  I've replaced the Tommy gifs with Shaq gifs and renamed the Shaq gifs what the old Tommy gifs were thinking that'd be the easiest way to get the graphics in the game without having to muck around with code. The problem I'm having is it seems like no matter what palette I save the Shaq gifs with the game recolors him some sort of early MTV neon purple and blue. It's odd because I thought I got the palette from the Tommy gifs, I don't see any bright purples or blues on any of the original gifs or in the palette, but when I put it all into a pak and run it I get a mostly purple Shaq. 

I started to think maybe it's not the palettes themselves but how GIMP saves the .gifs that's the problem?


With most of the links down or broken it's pretty difficult for someone who has never done anything with video games or coding to get started around here. If what I need to know is covered in a tutorial I'd be more than happy to read and not bother y'all, but I can't find anything relevant that's working and not out of date advice. I'm not saying that to be a jerk about y'all's tutorials I'm just saying I did try to look it up before I bothered youse.

Thanks a bunch buds.

 

[Rock]

Thanks for your help bud. trust me I'm searching. I'm just having a hard time with the finding bit.



unrelated- I bought bad ass babes just yesterday. cool game, I love the FMV stuff.

 

[esn23]

As long as the first color in the pal is your background transparent color and all the images share the same pal you should be fine.

 

[Rock]

if your after topics to help you start out here's some

http://www.chronocrash.com/forum/index.php?topic=3359.msg46466#msg46466

http://www.chronocrash.com/forum/index.php?topic=13.0

You're right, I was being a dummy. I'd clicked a few links under the graphics section I thought would cover it a while back, but when they came up broken I didn't think to try the general help. I should have noticed the caskey links and the post that clearly points out those are broken before I posted. I was looking under the wrong sections of the right posts. Thanks again.

 

[Rock]

As long as the first color in the pal is your background transparent color and all the images share the same pal you should be fine.

I very much appreciate the effort, but I actually picked that up before I posted by mimicking Merso's work. My backgrounds don't have any problems, but there is a difference in how the game recolors Shaq once I put in the BG color. Dunno if that tell you anything or not.

Originally I thought I could get away with a transparent BG, but when I loaded the game the transparent became visible white and Shaq himself had become a black man in red and gold instead of a black man in blue, so I copied the original palette and color map from the original tommy gifs and that did away with the white box but that's also when Shaq became a purple man wearing all purple.

 

[Bloodbane]

My backgrounds don't have any problems, but there is a difference in how the game recolors Shaq once I put in the BG color. Dunno if that tell you anything or not.

Looks like that a palette problem

I can't tell further without any screenshots or sprites to review, so let me ask you couple things:
1. Is there any command named palette in the header?
2. Are you using same palette for ALL sprites?

 

[Rock]

y'all rock, got it done.

I had been opening indexed gifs and switching the palette to a saved palette to keep them all the same. I dunno why, I thought it was needed. To fix the issue I opened the indexed gifs set them to RGB mode then to the save palette. Everything's fine now.

I'm not real sure what the difference is there, the saved files look identical and have the same palette when I open them in GIMP but the ones I put into RGB mode then back into the palette work perfectly while the ones I only changed the palette on don't.

Anyway, everything is working great. Thanks a buds, I very much appreciate it.

 

[DCurrent]

There's a HUGE difference. When you just swap in a new table, it doesn't change the pixel reference. A given pixel is still pointing to say, color table entry (0, 2). When you force it to use another table, that pixel is still pointing to (0, 2) - it's just position (0, 2) in the new color table. That is in fact how most sprite engines - OpenBOR included, are able to swap color sets around just by switching the color table.

However, for any of that to work, all the sprites must have their pixel references "aligned". That's why you have to switch them to RGB first. When you then switch the image back to 8bit mode and force it to use your color table, the image editor evaluates the RGB value of each pixel, and searches for an entry within that table that has the best match. It then points the pixel to that color table entry.

That effectively aligns the image to your custom color table.

DC

 

[O Ilusionista]

For palettes in opennor the background colour needs to be first image in a palette. Cant go into more detail as on phone but search forum topics for help with palettes.

This is true only for PNG and GIF (dunno about BMP), but for PCX its the LAST color.

 

[Roel]

This is true only for PNG and GIF (dunno about BMP), but for PCX its the LAST color.

Not really though. It only seems that way because for some reason, Photoshop saves PCX palettes in reverse order.

 

[Rock]

There's a HUGE difference. When you just swap in a new table, it doesn't change the pixel reference. A given pixel is still pointing to say, color table entry (0, 2). When you force it to use another table, that pixel is still pointing to (0, 2) - it's just position (0, 2) in the new color table. That is in fact how most sprite engines - OpenBOR included, are able to swap color sets around just by switching the color table.

However, for any of that to work, all the sprites must have their pixel references "aligned". That's why you have to switch them to RGB first. When you then switch the image back to 8bit mode and force it to use your color table, the image editor evaluates the RGB value of each pixel, and searches for an entry within that table that has the best match. It then points the pixel to that color table entry.

That effectively aligns the image to your custom color table.

DC

Thanks for taking the time to explain. That makes absolutely perfect sense. 

 

[Miru]

I use GIMP all the time. What I find handy are the fact that any tool can be made a line tool with the press of a button, and the ability to extract palettes from images. I think it's the best tool to use. It's free and not too complicated (though that may just be from my photoshop class).

Glad to see a fellow GIMP user.