Help needed from MSPaint experts, this one has me completely stymied.

[AGRICOLA]

Often, when playing a scen, I use MSPaint to edit the Icons or one of the Terrain files to more closely correspond to what I consider to be easily playable. I've never had any problems with this.

I'm play testing DICTATOR 3 and am getting to the stage where I'm building RR's. Unfortunately, as roads and RR's look too similar for my liking, I tried to edit Terrain1 to make RR more easily distinguishable. I discovered that changing even 1 pixel anywhere in the file makes a complete mess of the game map. The bottom halves or quarters of many land squares turn a medium grey. There is no obvious pattern as to what squares are affected except that ocean squares remain OK.

As I had edited Icons at the start of the scen with no problems, I tried editing Terrain2. Again, there were no problems when I put chalets on mountain tops or changed anything else. I also tried downloading the latest version of the scen in case part of the zip had been corrupted. . . no difference.

The three files seem identical. All are bitmaps of the same size.

Any suggestions besides getting Paint Shop Pro? I doubt that PSP would make any difference anyway.

[N35t0r]

PSP would make a difference...

The problem is that civ reads the last three colours in the Units.gif pallete to be both colours of the XParent and the border, which are transparent in civ. (while which colours these are doesn't really matter in this case, it is their position that does)
What probably happened when you used MSPaint, is that it changed the pallete index of one of the should be background colours to another slot, and so it is showing up. Loading the pallete used in units.gif would be the ideal solution, but as you don't have PSP, i'd try changing all the violet background colour to the magenta colour. (just use the flood filler)

BTW, you only need to change it in the tiles that are used (don't waste your time with the alternative resource icons presented, for example)

[AGRICOLA]

Thanks for the idea although I could not make it work.

I keep wondering why only Terrain1 has a problem when Icons and Terrain2 can be edited freely.

I did a workaround by replacing Terrain1 in DICTATOR 3 with the Terrain1 from KAISER. The files are quite similar except that, in the Kaiser version, roads look like roads rather than vanilla Civ2 RR's

[Mercator]

I think the problem was that the Terrain1 file uses grey for one of the transparent colors. The exact same shade of grey is also somewhere else in the palette as a regular opaque color.

When you edited the file, it changed the transparent grey to the opaque grey.

PSP has the same problem, it will also change this. The only difference is that in PSP you can edit the palette. So you can change the transparent grey into something that doesn't clash with any of the existing opaque colors.

[AGRICOLA]

Read you loud and clear. Thanks!

[AGRICOLA]

My light switch was finally flipped to ON.

@ N35t0r
Your suggestion for using magenta was absolutely bang on except that I couldn't figure out exactly what you meant.

@Mercator
Your additional explanation provided the critical missing link.

Thank you both. I certainly received the expert advice that I was looking for.

As it was, I flooded all grey areas within the green box outlines in Terrain1 with violet. All German RR's are now double tracked!

[N35t0r]

Glad it helped.

Yeah, i meant to say what mercator did, only i need serious practise on my explanation skills