Graphics

[hyperdriveJ]

Does anyone have any alternative graphics for terrain improvements like the bunker?

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't know of any.  Not a bad idea, though...

[ars_belli]

I'm having a glance at my collected tutorials to see what I said about custom landscape colors -changing the look of the fungus, especially, which I've done a few times and is not tough- I'm guessing someone who finds the faction colors garish would love to fool around with that...

Would you mind pointing me in the direction of any landscape alteration tutorials?  I find the pink fungus on the dark-pink dirt difficult to see, so I'd love to make the dirt more brown. 

So I see a few possibilities:

• change this in a graphics or text file if the setting exists
• adjust or swap colours in palette.pcx (does this actually work?)
• swap the sea fungus and land fungus if there are files for them
• worst-case scenario, this is an .exe edit job

Which do you think might work?

[Buster's Uncle]

As well as being posted in this thread, all my tutorials are also in one place here: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=articles;cat=6

-but while all the Photoshop/GIMP skills you'll need are gone into, there isn't a specific tutorial about landscape textures.  Hold on; I need to do some poking through old folders...

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay; it's been a few years, and I had to refresh my memory.  The file you want is texture.pcx - I'm attaching a version I did seven years ago, with the fungus recolored as grass.  A lot of the screenie below is forested; you can tell the fungus apart by the light green specks.

There's also a version with it turned to frost/snow, if you're interested, that I'd have to dig around to find...

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, the snow texture's included in this scenario... http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=250

[ars_belli]

As a quick fix, copying texture.pcx from the "Color Blind Palette" subfolder in SMAX works on vanilla SMAC too (as well as SMAX, obviously).  I'll have a look at the standard textures with the "snow" fungus too.

When you open the textures file in GIMP, do the colours look significantly different to in-game?  The original file (and the snow file) looks much less saturated than in-game, but it might be the purple background playing tricks on me.  Whereas the CBP one looks much more saturated, oddly...

[Buster's Uncle]

I never noticed a difference - but ISTR that the pallet is slightly different than for faction files.  No idea why.

[Tayta Malikai]

Hi there.

I have been eagerly following the tutorials on this site in order to put out some custom factions of my own, but alas: an old nemesis has surfaced again to torment the neophytes.

No matter what I do, I can't seem to solve the damn blue box problem.

Attempting to copy and paste anything into a working .pcx causes it to break, even if it never touches the purple. I have created a custom palette from palette.pcx and obsessively load it at every opportunity. I literally copied-and-pasted spartans.pcx into blankpcx.pcx, and it broke. I am using GIMP 2.10.12 on Windows 7.

I'm at my wit's end trying to deal with this. I would greatly appreciate some veteran advice in this matter. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Sorry to have to eliminate the knucklehead stuff, but did you erase the background pink/purple before you copy/pasted?

[Tayta Malikai]

No problem, I understand.

To the best of my knowledge, I did. Layer -> Transparency -> Add Alpha Channel, Select -> By Colour -> Click background -> Delete; Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, export.

I also attempted Select -> By Colour -> Click background -> Invert.

[Buster's Uncle]

...I wonder how we can eliminate the GIMP version as the problem...

[Tayta Malikai]

Well, at the risk of sounding glib, you had a version that works, right?

I could always try downloading that one and seeing if it works...

This one is definitely newfangled - it only features the convenient "Erase Every Other Line" as a 'legacy' feature...

That said, it is past midnight here, so I should sleep and try tomorrow. Thanks for responding so quickly.

[Buster's Uncle]

GIMP 2.6.6

[Tayta Malikai]

I downloaded and installed GIMP 2.6.6. I then pasted the contents of spartans.pcx into blankpcx.pcx (I'm just borrowing them, I'll come up with some proper custom base designs... eventually...), pasted my (pre-indexed) leader portraits on top, and loaded it into the game. Success!

Thanks again for the help. It may have been a simple solution, but those are often easy to overlook.

I wanted to try GIMP 2.8 as well to try and narrow down the version, but it didn't play nicely with my computer for some reason. In the meantime, perhaps a little note somewhere on the page advising which version to try would not go amiss.