Warcraft II Forum

Warcraft II => Mods & Development => Topic started by: Lambchops on May 10, 2016, 11:22:09 AM

Title: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: Lambchops on May 10, 2016, 11:22:09 AM
Those look great Lamby, very nice.

Thanks mousey :)

Ya unfortunately the game and the battle net client channel screen use different palettes.

I've attached a bitmap of it using the client palette, and ya the greens don't look right.



For anybody interested in making icons but doesn't understand 8-bit palette based graphics, here's a bit of background info.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Its like this:

For a given bitmap of this type you get to pick your favorite 256 colors from about 1.6 million.

The picture is then made up of those 256 colors. This selection of colors is the "palette".

In this case you can think of the server channel screen and the in-game screen as two different bitmaps, that have changing pixels.

As we know the game has a lot of green in it: trees, grass, peons, grunts, axers etc. So the game palette has a good variety of greens amoungst the 256 colors in its palette.

The channel screen has a different palette with a more blues, for displaying the channel screen plus ads etc.

-=> History Buffs ...
Yes this is why the swamp tileset is so hideous to look at, because it was added after
the initial release of the game, so the poor guys in the late '90s Blizzard graphic art
department had to come up with a totally new tileset still using the same palette that
was chosen specifically to make grass and snow look good, but somehow make it look
completely different. All they could do was go with that brown and orange 'turd forest'
look, because they were pretty much the only colors left....
...(edit) or was it? always assumed this but it might have its own palette, I must check
If so WTH were you thinking? Yuck!


So if you want to take a picture from a bitmap with one palette and display it using another palette, you have to do color matching. That's where you go through each color in the first palette, then find the color in the second palette that is the closest match, then change all the pixel data to from the first entry to the value of the second entry.

(There's also a process called 'dithering' which blends together colors by speckling little dots of one color on top of a block of another color. It always looks like crap - except in printing where actual ink is used. Fortunately as almost everything graphics-wise is at least 24 bit these days, its rarely seen.)

So in this case we've got pictures from the im-game interface which we want to display as icons in the channel. We have to use the channel palette. So the pics have to be color matched from one palette to the other.

>>> If you want to take graphics from any other source and try to make icons
>>> out of them you will have to color match them to the channel palette.

*Fortunately theres a dead easy way to do this*
-------------------------------------------------------------
Get a SS from the channel. This is an 8-bit palette base pcx file.

Convert it into a .BMP file, but make sure it stays 8-bit and is not converted to 24 or 32 bit. I use "Irfanview" to do this its freeware.... google it if you're not already familiar with it. So just open your SS there and go 'save as'->windows bitmap.

Then open the .BMP in good ol' MS Paint. Then all you have to do is copy / cut the bit of graphics you want to use from wherever (ifranview / another instance of paint / photoshop... etc) and paste it onto the bitmap you have opened in paint.

When you do this paint will automatically pick the best match for each color in the thing you paste from the palette of the open bitmap, which in this case has come from a SS of the channel and is the palette that will ultimately be used to display the icon.

---> This can also no doubt be done in photoshop, probably directly
      in Irfanview and a heap of other ways, but that's how I do it because
      its quick and easy and I've usually already got whatever pic open in
      paint if im messing with it anyway.

For a slightly more technical discussion plus everything you ever wanted to know about screen-shots see my next post.

HF
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Lambchops on May 10, 2016, 11:36:13 AM
SOME NERDY BITS FOR NERDY PEEPS:

(including how to find that SS ur looking for)


An 8 bit(1 byte) number can have values 0-255, so an 8 bit image can have at most 256 different colors. However,  when using a palette each part of the color (red,green,blue... or RGB) has a value between 0 and 255, so there are 256^3 (=16777216) colors to choose from, but only 256 of them can be displayed at any one time.

so :
255,0,0         is bright red  (red=255,green=0,blue=0)
20,0,20         is a darkish purple
255,255,255 is bright white
44,44,44       is a darkish grey
66,66,66       is a lighter grey
0,0,0             is black
etc....

A simplified example of how this type of graphics if stored in a file:

HEADER: "I'm a bitmap, im 8-bit, I'm 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high and i use 256 different colors" (could be <256 but not usually)

PALETTE: list of 256 x 3bytes :  -->  R,G,B for color 0 --> R,G,B for color 1 --> R,G,B for color 2.... etc. to 255

DATA: 1 byte for each pixel so 640 x 480 =  307,200 bytes*,  - i.e.  color 4, color 162 , color 99 .... or wvr
(*see RLE compression below)

Depending on the file type it will be arranged in slightly different ways: i.e. a BMP is laid out roughly as above, although theres a lot more in the header, which isn't very relevent here, a PNG file has each section compressed using good old PKZip (aka winzip, zlib, 'zip'), PCX is similar to BMP but stores the palette after the pixel data.... and so on.... but regardless of the file, in the end it will be loaded into memory as and array of pixel data  represented by 8-bit indicies into a 256 entry 24 bit color table because that is how that generation of graphics hardware made the pixels on our old CRT monitors light up.

Both BMP and PCX can use a simple form of compression called "run length encoding" or RLE.

RLE simply accounts for long sequences of a single value. For instance if you taks a SS at game start, usually most of your screen will be black, because you havn't scouted anywhere.  In this SS there's maybe half of each pixel line is just a great big line of zeros (pointing to the first palette entry which just happens to be 0,0,0). RLE accounts for this type of thing so instead of actually writing 47 zeros in a row it just makes a little note that says "47 zeros" or "16 '12's" or whatever. The actual way this is written will vary depending on the type of file, however obviously it can be noted using far less than 47 or even 16 bytes (typically 2 or 3).

If it weren't for RLE every SS would be _exactly_ the same size.

<<< HOW TO FIND THAT SS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR >>>

But now we know why they're different sizes you can actually see this by sorting a bunch of SS by size. They end up sorted by the complexity of the image.

Apart from in-game SS, the smallest files are of Human Victory screens because that is the simplest background image, if you look closely at it, you'll see it has not many colors and large blocks of a single color in the clouds and in the castle wall at the lower left. You'll also find that the smallest of these files are from 8 player games, because the stats bars for units, buildings etc. are single blocks of color, so the more players in the game the more stats bars cover the image and the more compressable the image is. The largest of these files will be from 1v1 games.

The Orc defeat screen comes next at the image is a bit more complex, in actual fact you'll probably find 8 player orc defeat screens creeping in around the same size at 6 player human victory screens. It depends on the actual stats of the players and the length of the player names. A little while after this you'll start getting channel screens. Even though there are lots of chunks of black in the text windows, the blue marbled background and bronze edging are actually fairly intricate so these add up to a fair amount of complexity. 

Around the end of your channel screens you'll get your 8 player Orc Victory screens with pre-game lounge screens at around 4 player orc victory size and finally, iroicly the most intricate background is on the Human Defeat screen although mostly because of the massively dithered sky / hills. The end of your 1v1 orc victories will be somewhere around the size of a 4 player human defeat.

Your in-game SS will be scattered throughout. A lot of them will be around the size of the lounge screen, however generally SS from earlier in the game where little scouting has been done especially where black unscouted areas are displayed in the main screen will be smaller. In a large collection of late game SS, those on smaller maps would tend to be statistically smaller than those on 128x128 maps, due to a lower complexity mini-map still being displayed using the same number of screen pixels, however this effect is less important that what is on the main display.

In my current folder the very smallest is from the start of a 2v1 chop game right after I halled, most of the screen and mini-map is black and the file is only 152K. I have a 1v1 Human defeat that is 302K (309,079 bytes) which is larger than the theoretical max size for an uncompressed 640x480 PCX with palette+128byte header which is 308,096 bytes, however there are no uncompressed PCX files and the overhead to support the RLE notation for an image that is not effectively RLE compressable will sometimes actually increase the size of the file as in this case..... yet another reason why dithering is crap.

Another thing you might notice, is that black&white SS from when the game is paused are no smaller that color SS. This might seem strange at first, however there is actually almost no difference between the paused screen/SS and the color one. They are both full 256 color screens, the only difference is that when the game is paused the war2 exe swaps the PALETTE for one that has R,G and B values that are all even for each entry, and therefore all shades of grey. When the game continues the full color palette is replaced, however the pixel data for the display remains unchanged.

But anyway, when you want to find that 1v1 victory screen from last month for bragging rights, sort by size, and - if you were orc, you'll find your 1v1 victories are at the large end of your orc victory screens.

(HINT: They're almost always around the 279KB mark, 1v1 Human wins are about 183KB )

GG
=D

(edit) Supplimental info:

When im talking about "orc defeat" screen, im talking about the one with the picture of an orc on it, which comes up when you are human and lose.... cos the orc is smashing your suff...

...also should mention that there will also be differences in the file size between different tilesets i.e. forest!=winter, although this depends what's on screen at the time.






Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Lambchops on May 10, 2016, 12:12:53 PM
and before you ask, for anybody who doesn't know, yes it is very simple to change a black and white paused SS to a color unpaused SS and vice-versa.

Here's a combination of 4 SS. The two at the top are the originals paused and unpaused, the two at the bottom are are the same two SS with the color situation reversed. I didn't include the original files so as not to make it totally obvious for noobs how this is done, but it requires only a relatively minor alteration to the PCX file that would be undetectable by any means I'm aware of. Don't get upset, anyone with the skills to do this already knows how, and now we all know the fact, if not the means.

BTW: these are from a game I was watching where somebody else got asked for a SS - don't worry I'm way too bad a player for anybody to ever bother asking me for one. Just to be PC i removed the names; none of the names visible are the players that asked or got asked.

..and for anybody paying attention to my last post, yes this image displays the colors from 2 different 8-bit palettes so it can't be an 8 bit BMP file (its 24-bit)


Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Lambchops on May 11, 2016, 11:48:39 AM
THE LAST WORD ON PALETTES...

So I actually had a look and yes, the forest, winter and wasteland tilesets do indeed have their own individual palettes. More than half of the colors are the same in all, being I guess the colors used for the units, buildings etc. but there's a big chunk of colors thats unique to each tileset. So WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU THINKING guy who came up with the whole turd forrest look? Were you all doing some really bad acid cut with drain cleaner?.... OK so now I've got that off my chest, the really interesting one is the channel palette. No wonder things dont look as good there : a quater of the colors are all shades of blue AND another quater are all set to that bright lime green that most of the chat text is. As you can see on the attached image, colors 32 thru 95 are all the one color.... the good news is in a future release of w2combat it would be dead simple to add a nice array of other colors to the channel palette that would make any custom icons look much better :D


Anyway here's the extracted palettes from the 3 tilesets and the channel (attached)

 
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: EviL~Ryu on May 11, 2016, 01:06:43 PM
Making lamb burgers tonight, yum. [emoji14]


Sent from my Motorola DynaTAC 8000X using Tapatalk
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Lambchops on May 11, 2016, 01:40:32 PM
Making lamb burgers tonight, yum.
:O
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Lambchops on May 11, 2016, 01:41:02 PM
Making lamb burgers tonight, yum.
/me runs away screaming
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: EviL~Ryu on May 11, 2016, 06:42:10 PM
Making lamb burgers tonight, yum.
:O


From New Zealand [emoji39][emoji491][emoji491]
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Lambchops on May 20, 2016, 01:14:12 AM
Making lamb burgers tonight, yum.

From New Zealand [emoji39][emoji491][emoji491]

Excellent choice, I hear the kiwis breed very tasty lamb, much better than Australian lamb which I'm told is terrible (and noobish)   ;)
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: EviL~Ryu on May 20, 2016, 01:16:04 AM
Making lamb burgers tonight, yum.

From New Zealand [emoji39][emoji491][emoji491]

Excellent choice, I hear the kiwis breed very tasty lamb, much better than Australian lamb which I'm told is terrible (and noobish)   ;)


Yep! I am glad you know your meats. [emoji846] Many don't [emoji58] Some here are vegans [emoji43]
Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Lambchops on May 20, 2016, 01:36:57 AM
Oh here's the original button tile graphics. If anybody needs them. Pretty sure I pulled them from a memory resident mpq, but it was a while ago.

There's a few extras that never made it into the game. Check out the horses and wargs. I thought maybe there was and idea in the original design to produce horses then put a footie on them to make a knight or somesuch, but their position in the order of tiles suggests these were upgrades, like ranger/beserker upgrades only for knights and warg-riders? ?

Not sure what to make of the little spell icons that come straight after the orc shield upgrades, perhaps they were and original design for the little on screen unit spell markers, like the little blood droplet for lusties.


Title: Re: Re: Awarding custom client tags as a prize for your tourney
Post by: Delete mine too on May 20, 2016, 03:06:28 AM
Oh here's the original button tile graphics. If anybody needs them. Pretty sure I pulled them from a memory resident mpq, but it was a while ago.

There's a few extras that never made it into the game. Check out the horses and wargs. I thought maybe there was and idea in the original design to produce horses then put a footie on them to make a knight or somesuch, but their position in the order of tiles suggests these were upgrades, like ranger/beserker upgrades only for knights and warg-riders? ?

Not sure what to make of the little spell icons that come straight after the orc shield upgrades, perhaps they were and original design for the little on screen unit spell markers, like the little blood droplet for lusties.




Yes I found these also awhile ago. I assume the smalls ones are for the cleric upgrade that whole unit still has a grp file, plus if you edit the tbl files you can see the cost and names for the upgrades, etc. ;)

Edit copy your info for the palettes and icons post in the welcome thread in the mods section. Also use a spoiler to hide all that info. Thanks man!
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: mousEtopher on May 28, 2016, 03:01:18 PM
Why is there a gigantic gob of the same shade of green in the channel palette lamby? It seems like such a waste. Is this something that could be changed?

(https://i.imgur.com/LLdvE72.png)
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: shesycompany on May 29, 2016, 12:06:26 AM
nice work...i was in 24 bit bmp maybe why i couldnt get the .pal...u into making grps? u seem very keen in the paint stuff.
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: Lambchops on June 03, 2016, 10:49:57 PM
Why is there a gigantic gob of the same shade of green in the channel palette lamby? It seems like such a waste. Is this something that could be changed?

Hehe. Very easily apparantly. I was just going to write my theory about how it might be space for custom colors for the banner ads, but I just looked....

Yep sure is. No surprise to at least one person around here lol. Presumably the bnet client part was made to download the palette entries with the banner ads when you log on... or maybe theres a few built in palettes to choose from idk.

I took that palette from an old SS that's just got the big blue and gold "WELCOME TO BATTLE.NET" baner, however with the current 'summer festival' there's a bunch of new entries there. Cool :)

So, we should ask whoever puts the ads on the server how it works ... blid i spose

and I got to say, having a summer festival now is pretty silly cos June is in winter...  ;)

Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: Lambchops on June 03, 2016, 11:13:57 PM
nice work...i was in 24 bit bmp maybe why i couldnt get the .pal...u into making grps? u seem very keen in the paint stuff.

Happy to help if I can, but I must confess I'm not much of an artist. My interest is far more nerdy than that lol, I understand the internals of graphics containers as a by-product of programming, it helps to know if you want to display pics. I just did a quick prog to pull the palette info out of a pcx and make a bmp.

For the nerds:
grp is an interesting one, its an in-house blizz format. I think its main purpose was to have the graphics prepared for those 1995 486s to blast all those super-flash new graphics onto the screen :) its pretty cool, from a programming angle: each line of pixels is pre packed with a variable offset and length, so the processor only has to go to the exact spot it says to and then squirt out the exact pixels that are there.... very efficiant. Isn't that what normally happens? yes and no, often when you used to have a 'sprite' situation like this where you have to draw a little picture (say a grunt) over a background (grass or whatever) you might have a pic of a grunt which is actually rectangular, with a color (often color 0) designating transparancy. Then the processor has to decided whether or not to draw each pixel in the whole rectangle. grp has just the pixels it needs, and all the possible info that can be calculated before time. Its cool......... Of course these days that sore of stuff is done in nanoseconds by multicore GPUs, but it was neat work back then. Before modern graphics cards CPUs could spend 60-90% of their time just pushing pixels around.
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: Lambchops on September 22, 2016, 02:05:38 AM
      The return of  The Gigantic Gob    ( queue Scooby-Doo scary music now )



WARNING: Great big nerdy post ahead... continue at you own peril...



Why is there a gigantic gob of....

So, I've been having a look at the extra colors that are added to the channel palette for the banner ads with regards to using them for channel icons.

Some of the stuff I have been talking about with regards to this I have just been assuming based on the results I see being rendered in glorious 8-bit color on my monitor. Understanding how graphics hardware works, there can be no doubt about what is happening (things weren't too complicated in '96), however not having access to the server I could never actually try any of it out. After a recent conversation with Mousey (thanks for your help with that =) I now realise that some of the steps that I was assuming were happening server-side are actually being performed automatically by the client, I suspect in battle.snp or maybe storm.dll. Most notably the color matching.

if you want to take a picture from a bitmap with one palette and display it using another palette, you have to do color matching......Get a SS from the channel. This is an 8-bit palette base pcx file. Convert it into a .BMP file, but make sure it stays 8-bit
...etc

This is stilll a good idea because you will be able to see exactly what your icon will end up looking like, and you won't wate your time designing with colors that just aren't there when it eventually hits the screen, however it turns out that when the icons leave the server they aren't 8-bit palette images at all, they are sent as full 24-bit tga files. So the color-matching must be happening client-side.

The same process takes place, but unfortunatey it's being done automatically somewhere in one of the code modules loaded by the exe. This is nice programming from our friends at Blizz - saving extra steps for themselves later on when developing new stuff as bnet progressed, but sadly for us, it takes away the extra control we might have had by doing it manually and then just sending the finished product to the client.

Mousey tested this out, and despite the fact that the channel screen gets a whole gob of new colors from the banner ads, it seemed the icon color matching refused to use those entries. This puzzled me for a bit, as it would seem to be masive overkill to write in checks that deliberately rejected a certain range of palette entries from the color matching 'just in case' someone at blizz got a bit confused designing icons sometime. So why do it?

Well, maybe one of the programmers was just really anal-retentive and did it anyway...OR... as it dawned on me a bit later (duh) theres a much more likely reason why this is happening: --> As the icons are being served as 24-bit images, then it seems they're mixed down to the 8-bit palette when the client is constructing the channel screen from its various components, then it makes sense that a similar thing is probably happening with the banner ads, only the banners get a much more personalised color conversion, which allows them to import up to 64 new entries into the palette.... and again this would be done automatically by the client.

So... what it seems to me would be happening is: when you log in and the client constructs the channel screen, it starts off with the 'standard' palette that is hard-coded into the exe (or for the channel more likely one of the lib modules) which includes the infamous Gigantic Gob of 64 blank entries. Next the icons are imported and color matched to the existing palette, then finally the banner is imported and the extra palette entries are added. The icons are never matched to the extra palette entries, because at the time the icons are imported, those new entries still havn't been added.

So where does this leave us for extra icon colors? Well unfortunately it seems it would have to be some sort of war2combat client mod, no way around that. Maybe if we're lucky we could get away with just a simple war2patcher mod or perhaps something a bit more substantial would be required. On the face of it, you could easily just overwrite The Gob with a bunch of new entries at its source, then they would already exist when the icons are color-matched and hey-presto... more colors. That's all well and good until the banner loads, at which point it overwrites those entries with it's own and the colors go bleh.

So we can cheat and use the palette from the banner, so the correct entries from the banner are already there so when it overwrites them it does so with exactly the same values and everything works. Cool... well thats if you never want to change the banner, because as soon as you do, the palette changes and we're back to bleh again :/...

Lambchops scratches his head.... thinks hard (ouch)... then scrambles for the mouse and pulls up a SS with a colorful banner ...


Cool. So i just did a quick crop of just the banner part of a SS, then pasted it back onto a reduced size 8-bit bitmap saved that, then loaded it with Irfanview and it says: "63 unique colors." Nice, so it looks like the banners only use their extra 64 colors (I probably cropped one off at an edge somewhere) and they don't do any color-matching to the standard palette entries. This means that if the people waving the banners are happy settling on having only one palette, we can write that in to the client they can still change the banners without messing up the icons.... Maybe.

Yeah there's always a maybe. The other problem that might occur is that by rights, according to the official specs ... certainly for .bmp format.. and possibly for others as well... palette entries are supposed to be ordered according to their frequency of use... i.e. if your picture contains a heap of a certain shade of green, then that color should be placed at the start of the palette, followed by the color that has the next highest amount of pixels using it, right down to the color that is only used for a handfull of dots at the end. The theory being that this reduces cpu usage as the rendering routine doesn't have to search as far through the palette to locate the colors its more frequently using.

In practice it's such a tiny amount of data anyway that it really doesn't matter in the slightest, and many libraries don't bother doing it............If you still don't know what im referring to, 'it' is the process of, when saving or constructing a new palettised image, going through each unique color that occurs in the image one by one and counting up the number of pixels that use each of those colors, then resorting the palette entries according to this associated frequency data .......So if Captian Anal was programming that bit, there's a chance that even if a new banner contains all the same colors as the old one, they might possibly end up in a completely different order..... and we're back to bleh again. But I dont think this is a big chance, its far quicker and easier to just copy the imported palette straight over The Gob. Anyway it's something that's relatively easy to test.

But REALLY what we want to do is have the client just load the banner ad first, then load the icons after it, and everything would be fine. At first thought that didnt seem too hard - these processes would undoubtably be written as seperate subroutines, then we could just put a debug watch on the memory addresses where The Gob lives and track down the instructions that write to that location, then its relatively simple to trace it back to the call that enters that sub. The icon matching might be a little bit trickier to find, but once we have those, just exchanging their call targets so that they are executed they other way round is easy-peasy.

Seemed like a nice idea for about 1 minute before the obvious smacked me in the face (story of my life). Problem is that this stuff is part of a conversation between the client and the server, and its very unlikely that the client receives all of the info from the server and piles it up in a great big heap and then starts processing it... that would be very inefficiant and make it a resource hog... most likely each section of data is received from the server and processed on-the-fly ...first it gets icons.bni which is then processed into whatever format the client ends up using it in at which point the client is finished with it, then the next bit - maybe the banner, or the list of players in the channel, or whatever - is received and it overwrites the received copy of icons.bni which is still sitting in the input buffer. So if we wanted to change the order that these are processed in we would have to either:

a) Change the order that the server sends the info to the client  or  b) allocate another buffer and make a backup copy of icons.bni then replace it in the input buffer later on before we call the color matching subroutine.

Method a) would, at worst, require modding not only the client but also the server (yuck.. bugs... headaches... crashes... stuff that), although depending on the actual structure of the client- server conversation, it could be as simple as just getting the client to request the various bits in a different order, and the server might happily comply without a care in the world. If we we're really lucky the network requests from the client might be housed in the same subroutine as their relative graphics importing code and we're back to the simple switcheroo again. But thats a lot of maybes, and a lot of tracing, debugging and swearing at screens full of disassembly to even start testing the theory.

Method b) is technically a bigger mod as it would be actually adding new code to the client, but allocating a buffer and copying a bit of data back and forth is pretty basic stuff and would probably be quite painless to insert, however to get there you still have to do a whole pile of debugging to find the right places to put it.

.... and then there's the cheating method. Just an idea, but one way to avoid the whole client- server transaction and image import routine head-fuck is just to sneak a little bit of code in right at the end that simply saves the 64 entries that make up The Gob to a disk file then have the war2patcher or something write those in when the module is first loaded. The only drawback would be that when the banner is changed, the first time you log in the icon colors would be bleh, but it would only be a matter of exiting out and restarting , and everything would be perfect until the next banner change.

To continue thinking about this I need a bit of info on how the banners are produced. What format are they in when they server sends them to the client? The .bni writer doesnt seem to have anything to handle banners so its some other related format? Are they 24-bit when they leaves the server or already paletised?.... anybody?
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: shesycompany on September 22, 2016, 03:17:19 AM
i caught you lamb like a pokemon!!!!!!!i got your scooby doo lol whole season
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: Lambchops on September 22, 2016, 05:33:05 AM
i caught you lamb like a pokemon!!!!!!!


I almost get that ....but I hate turning on location services - its the ultimate invasion of google data mining - so I don't do the pokemon thing.

I did see bits of the cartoon once, it was kinda like astro-boy with bright orange wind-up pet guinnie-pigs that shoot lightning bolts or something. Freakin Japanese are nuts sometimes.

But yeah, have to admit I did watch the first Scooby episode lol....  :D

..... and i would have gotten away with it - if it weren't for you meddling kids!


Hey! Here's a real cartoon for ya  --->


(http://ss.war2.ru/ss/8999.gif) (https://youtu.be/GAh4oONsFLc)


Witness my GIGANTIC Awesomness!



... and BTW why cant I work out how to imbed YT on here?..... is that just cos I'm stupid, or do I need some sort of privilage?
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: mousEtopher on September 22, 2016, 07:27:08 AM
Hot damn, lamby, what a post ! Thank you for your investigation & such a thorough and entertaining explanation of the situation :D I feel better now that I understand the purpose of The Gob and know it's not just pointless lazy waste.

To continue thinking about this I need a bit of info on how the banners are produced. What format are they in when they server sends them to the client? The .bni writer doesnt seem to have anything to handle banners so its some other related format? Are they 24-bit when they leaves the server or already paletised?.... anybody?

yay, I get to contribute to this conversation that's way above my head! They're .smk "Smacker" files:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smacker_video (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smacker_video)
http://www.radgametools.com/smkmain.htm (http://www.radgametools.com/smkmain.htm)

The conversion software is on that second site, iirc there's two versions and you need the older one to convert the banners, and I think it only runs in x86 XP. (Not sure if that version's on the site actually.) I'll assemble any useful materials I can find and send.

astro-boy

Careful lamby, you're showing your age! My dad watched both those shows... xD

... and BTW why cant I work out how to imbed YT on here?..... is that just cos I'm stupid, or do I need some sort of privilage?

Just paste the full url, it won't show in the preview but will work when you publish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NQyzcDnMdE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NQyzcDnMdE)
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: shesycompany on September 22, 2016, 09:29:34 AM
youtube sucks i suggest hopefully finding it on a ftp or other means,naw the pokemon thing was capturing a modder lol ....let me read what you was saying since i can now see straight.

wow great youtube dude that put that up....they usually screw them up like my scooby looked :/ go to keepvid.com if you want to save them.

yeah the vids are smacker..in sc1 the unit portraits are smacker :O why it looks so 3d.
yeah smaker is like 2000 win98 only to create.but u can watch.

the images,from looking in my paint shop they are 8bit.(my grp's)

wanna play with tiles they are .raw but out of order. :(

i take that back i can write to them using .raw but i still cant read them,the header is missing wonder what happen if you put a header back on it....perplexing
Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: Lambchops on September 30, 2016, 10:25:08 PM
........from looking in my paint shop they are 8bit.(my grp's)

wanna play with tiles they are .raw but out of order. :(

i take that back i can write to them using .raw but i still cant read them,the header is missing wonder what happen if you put a header back on it....perplexing

Hey mate. Sorry, missed this post, thanks for the info - will have a look at this stuff again soon, very interested but flat out right now.

Careful lamby, you're showing your age! My dad watched both those shows... xD

 :'(  I know right? I swear to God im 15 and looking forward to being all mature when I hit 16... lol


Title: Re: Color palettes in channel, tilesets, screenshots, etc.
Post by: shesycompany on October 01, 2016, 02:42:32 AM
Hey mate. Sorry, missed this post, thanks for the info - will have a look at this stuff again soon, very interested but flat out right now.

lol about the same