Getting rid of the health bar!

[Mercator]

Ahem, in reply to your later edits...

I'm not really sure now anymore whether my sprite utilities actually reduce image to 15-bit correctly, so I'll check anyway.

... Oh, I think I've figured it out. My color depth reduction matches that of how PSP renders ToT's 16-bit bitmaps. But ToT does indeed use a different color depth reduction algorithm... I'll fix it.

Originally posted by Catfish
Edit (again): Come to think of it, the top-left unit pixel is blanked in the bmp too, but it's working fine. Ah, bugger it - easiest to simply change the entire background to magenta before running SpriteGen. Over and out.

I noticed that. The bitmaps are happy with the darker purple shade as well, it seems (the standard sprites are not). But I decided to blame you.

Well, should I add this shade as a standard transparency color as well? Or should I get Angelo Scotto to change his CivConverter bitmap conversion scheme?

[Catfish]

Originally posted by Mercator
I noticed that. The bitmaps are happy with the darker purple shade as well, it seems (the standard sprites are not). But I decided to blame you.

Gee, that's very nice of you.

Originally posted by Mercator
Well, should I add this shade as a standard transparency color as well? Or should I get Angelo Scotto to change his CivConverter bitmap conversion scheme?

You can do both. It all reduces the probability of a stuff up. Many unit creators accidentally delete the transparent pixel, I probably have too, so these problems won't just be restricted to conversions.

If you have any influence over Angelo, then you can get him to lower the units by 6 pixels, too. It'd also be nice if the city objective multiplier byte was modified so that all values > 04 were changed to 04 - as you know, x3 or greater objectives are not used at all by ToT - even though it's in the Cheat menu.

While we're talking utilities, being the well of knowledge that you are, is there anything around that can easily add rivers to a .sav or .scn file?

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Catfish
Gee, that's very nice of you.

You can do both. It all reduces the probability of a stuff up. Many unit creators accidentally delete the transparent pixel, I probably have too, so these problems won't just be restricted to conversions.

On second thought... I don't think I will add the darker purple shade. I think it simply affects too many colors. Especially because people will be working with 24-bit bitmaps and won't pay attention to any colors being close to this rather more inconspicuous shade of purple.

I'll add a note on transparency in the readme though.

If you have any influence over Angelo, [...]

I'm afraid not, but you can PM him (his username's simply "Angelo Scotto" or e-mail him at his hotmail address: scotto_a (followed by the @ and all, but I don't want him to get spammed).

While we're talking utilities, being the well of knowledge that you are, is there anything around that can easily add rivers to a .sav or .scn file?

There are two ways. MapCopy, which can paste a new map (with the rivers added) back into your savegame, or a little engineering trick. These threads should fill you in:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=95486

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=66105

And another thing I just realised, about the color reduction thing... This actually doesn't affect how I reduce color depth from 24-bit to 15-bit, so SpriteGen works as it should after all. It DOES affect color depth increase from 15-bit back to 24-bit though, so I'll have to update CivSprite.

[Catfish]

Originally posted by Mercator
On second thought... I don't think I will add the darker purple shade. I think it simply affects too many colors. Especially because people will be working with 24-bit bitmaps and won't pay attention to any colors being close to this rather more inconspicuous shade of purple.
I'll add a note on transparency in the readme though.

True. I mean I found 3 shades of purple background in the one units file today.

Originally posted by Mercator
There are two ways. MapCopy, which can paste a new map (with the rivers added) back into your savegame, or a little engineering trick.

Thanks, unfortunately MapCopy doesn't work with ToT. The second method looks almost as labour intensive as another method I used once, where I flagged all the would-be river tiles with strange combos of units/improvements. These were then easy to find using a hex editor, and then I hex edited the rivers in.