Map and unit questions

[fairline]

It's at the top right of the units.bmp file: the pink area (R:255, G:0, B:255) of the health bar equates to the unique civ colour - increase the area covered by this pink to increase the size of the civ colour coverage.

[AGRICOLA]

Yes, that much I know.

What I want to do is to change the colors that the "heads" of German (grey) and Allied (brown) health bars have on the game map. The two colors look much too similar.

If the color of the "heads" of the health bars were distinctly different, it would be much easier to distinguish the units of the two combatants. I'm wondering how to change them to two very distinct colors like, for example, white and blue.

Thanks for the tip on enlarging the colored portion of the head of the health bar.

[Mercator]

You can change the colors in the cities.bmp:

http://coc.apolyton.net/guides/tribe_colors.shtml

Unfortunately, the color in the health bar will always be a drab, dark variant of it. The RGB values are halved to get that color. For instance, even if you make a civ bright blue, RGB(0,0,255), the color in the shield will be dark blue, approximately RGB(0,0,128). I say approximately, because there will be slight differences due to the 15-bit nature of ToT graphics.

[AGRICOLA]

@Mercator

Thank you very much for your explanation and the link.

If I had checked this thread sooner, I could have saved myself a couple of hours work locating in which Midgard file the different colors are defined and then looking at the same file in techumseh's Market Garden scen.

Cam Hill's article is excellent. It was some consolation that other players have had problems with this, so mine is not the only voice crying in the wilderness. I found his advice to designers " Are the colours in both the bright and dark form clearly distinguishable from other tribes? " to be spot on.

Do you know if Draco Omega ever finished his "the Sprite Workshop"?

After a trivial edit job on CITIES, I now have no more excuses for not playing Market Garden.

[kobayashi]

Why can't a city be made invisible simply by using a blank in the cities.gif? You'd have to shift the size box to the bottom right or simply use the 'invisible' colours for its flag and colour bar?

[Mercator]

Originally posted by AGRICOLA
Do you know if Draco Omega ever finished his "the Sprite Workshop"?

No, he didn't. I made CivSprite and SpriteGen, though, (largely thanks to his and Angelo Scotto's findings) which can be used to edit the sprite files. Unfortunately, they are quite limited. And that won't likely change soon.

Originally posted by kobayashi
Why can't a city be made invisible simply by using a blank in the cities.gif? You'd have to shift the size box to the bottom right or simply use the 'invisible' colours for its flag and colour bar?

But the main point of making the cities invisible was to make them inaccessible. A city that can never be taken.

[Alinestra Covelia]

The city hiding tech that the Mercator Civilization gifted to the Allie Cove civilization has been found to be in perfect working condition and we have mastered it.

Now to go onwards to that Discover 8 tech, "linking maps" (as we're hoping to techsteal from techumseh)...

[Mercator]

Splendid!