Generic Units and Colour Palettes!

[curtsibling]

So, I have a question for the palette wizards!

I notice Catfish has managed to make generic units adopt the colours of their owner civ.

How is this done? I am aware it involves an extra 'overlay' file to determine where the colours are...

I want to use this trick in Eurasian Wars and Ostfront to make generic units stand out.

Can anyone reveal the process - ???

[fairline]

It's done with smoke, mirrors, masks and SpriteGen + CivSprite ....

In essence you create a sprite with a mask layer for a unit; this exposes just the area of the unit icon you wish to be tribe-coloured.

If you have a specific unit icon for which you want to apply tribe-colours, I can show you the process and you can take it from there

[curtsibling]

Sure thing!

Does it have to be done on an individual unit basis?

Or can it be done to the whole unit.bmp file?

[Cyrion]

Now now, I wonder why you suddenly have this idea...

Which, BTW, is very good!

[fairline]

You been pinching Vincent's tribe-colour ideas Ciaran?

Post the unit C. and tell me which bit needs to be tribe-colour and I'll run you through the process. step 1 is get SpritGen and civsprite from Mercator's site

[Cyrion]

Originally posted by fairline
You been pinching Vincent's tribe-colour ideas Ciaran?

Not at all (this idea is too good to come from me ): while testing a scen for Ciaran I just complained about how difficult it was to differenciate the tribes for generic units! So it seems he found a good solution...

[curtsibling]

Thanks guys!

Indeed - Cyrion and myself just thought it would be nifty
to have all the generic units with some civ colours...

I've attached an artillery unit, I think the best
bit to be coloured would be the crew's uniforms.

Can't wait to apply this to other units too...!

[fairline]

Right, I'll make a 'picture-board' step-by-step thingy.

[curtsibling]

Great - Looking forward to trying this out!

[Mercator]

You don't need CivSprite anymore.

Download SpriteGen 1.1 from my site, read the readme and go do it.

[curtsibling]

Downloaded and checking it now...!

[curtsibling]

OK - Merc!

Created a Units_mask.bmp file to go along with
my Units.bmp - But can't get the masks to work?

Probably doing something wrong/dumb - But I followed
the readme and created a black units file except for the
green lines and white areas where I want colours to show.

I then ran the spritegen app - Nothing happened!

What am I doing wrong?

[Boco]

Hey, this is one useful upgrade!

Oops, well okay maybe after a little debugging session. When this is worked out, can you post both files? Or will Fairline's thingy cover this?

[curtsibling]

If any of the experts get back to us on this one, I will make the upgraded units/mask available!

[Mercator]

Can you describe exactly what you are doing?

You probably *are* doing something wrong/dumb but if you don't tell me what you're doing I don't have any clue what it is you might be doing wrong.

Which files do you have? Are they really named Units.bmp and Units_mask.bmp? Are they in the same folder?

Do you select the right Units.bmp with the SpriteGen Browse... button? Did you click OK after?

What exactly do you mean with "nothing happened"? You got no pop-up? No error? You got no Static.spr in the same folder? Or are the colours just not showing up in ToT?

... I won't be doing any debugging sessions. I created this upgrade months ago.