Problems with colors

[Cartagia the Great]

Hey, I have a small problem with the colors on SMACX when I'm editing, perhapse someone could tell me what is wrong?

I'm creating a new faction, and sued the Usurpers as the template. After creating the faction I went about adding the new pictures and such(which I finally figure out how to do!..I'm a bit slow when it comes to this). ANyway, I didn't want them to be the same color as the usurpers, I wasimagining this nice Imperial purple color with Silver, and such. So I go down to the place on the bottom of thee screen where it shows the colors, and I changed them. here is where the problem began.

When I went to play the faction on my first game, I saw that their colros were completely black, with a black boarder. This isn't bad, it looked neat, but sadly, it doesn't allow me to see any numbers in the city block, as they are also written in black, so I can't tell how large my cities are.

Could someone give me a hand? oh yes, BTW, I'm using MGI PhototSuite.

[SEE]

Odds are that the purple you chose as your faction color is the same purple as the background purple of the file. SMAC treats that color as "invisible" when interpreting the bases and as black if it is used as the faction color. You'll just have to pick a different color.

[AlexanderIII]

There's an interesting little glitch I found out about SMAC 4.0 when hardwiring faction substitutions.

a) Whatever color you select at the bottom of faction.pcx doesn't change the colors in the game. The game always uses the colors of the particular faction replaced.

b) The slot/color allotted for the Spartans is particularly problematic. When a faction is replaced in alpha.txt with a substitute, it would normally go like this:

For example, if I wanted to subtitute the Believers with a revised version of the Caretakers, the following in alpha.txt would be different:

##### IMPORTANT NOTE TO TRANSLATORS
# For this list of adjectives, please translate to all genders & plurality:
Alien
Gaian
Hive
University
Morganic
Spartans
Cartakers
Peacekeeper

...
...

#FACTIONS
GAIANS, GAIANS
HIVE, HIVE
UNIV, UNIV
MORGAN, MORGAN
SPARTANS, SPARTANS
CARETAKE, CARETAKE
PEACE, PEACE

...which comes out fine. But if I were to attempt to sub into the slot where the Spartans are, you get the black-on-black bug. The way I have found around that is to fool the game into believing it is loading the spartans, when in its place is my own faction. In order to do that, if, say, I wanted to put the Pirates (using SMAC-X graphics), we need to change the name of 'pirates.txt', 'pirates*.pcx' to 'spartans*.*' . Then we raname all spartans files to spartansx*.* (spartansx.txt, spartansx.pcx, spartansx2.pcx, etc.). Then we need to go into spartansx.txt and change #SPARTANS to #SPARTANSX. The final to go into alpha.txt would look like this:

##### IMPORTANT NOTE TO TRANSLATORS
# For this list of adjectives, please translate to all genders & plurality:
Alien
Gaian
Hive
University
Morganic
Pirate
Caretaker
Peacekeeper

...
...

#FACTIONS
GAIANS, GAIANS
HIVE, HIVE
UNIV, UNIV
MORGAN, MORGAN
SPARTANS, PIRATES
CARETAKE, CARETAKE
PEACE, PEACE


And now if you want to load the Spartans into the game instead of another faction, you must input 'spartansx' in the Load dialogue window.

And that should solve your black-on-black dilemma.

[SEE]

Originally posted by AlexanderIII on 11-23-1999 01:05 AM
There's an interesting little glitch I found out about SMAC 4.0 when hardwiring faction substitutions.

Okay, but why would someone with SMAC-X hardwire a faction substitution anyway? Just add the faction with the included faction editor.

[AlexanderIII]

Someone might want to hardwire a faction if they're creating a modpack. As for problems with SMAC-X, not familiar with them, don't have it yet. Should be possible to sub your own colors in with SMAC-X, cause you can't do that in SMAC. And maybe the Spartans color glitch, by the sound of it, also pops up in SMAC-X.

[Cthol]

Thanx AlexanderIII !!!