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Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 2:19 am
by Industry
I am pretty sure the second and third colors in the color table are for the primary and secondary colors for multiplayer color substitutions. That is, the collection maker colors the warriors shirt color 2 and his shield color 3 or whatever and they are substituted for the players primary and secondary colors in game. A pretty neat feature if you ask me.
I'm finally back in Alaska and have access to something better than a Pentium 166 with a 800MB harddrive so maybe I can make some real progress on this.
Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 11:56 am
by haravikk
Industry, the primary and secondary colours are actually handled by things called Hue Changes, these allow the user to specify a colour (or range of colours) that are to be substituted with the player's chosen primary and secondary colours (or a hue change can be neutral using colours from it's collection reference, like a dwarf's beard). They also allow for an offset so the colour a player gives can be 'offset' so that it displays differently, ie if you offset green (120º) by -60º then you get yellow (60º).
The colour table colours are fairly simple:
1st - background colour. This area is simply removed, typically blue but sometimes different (because I can never get blue to work damnit!!!), also used for the background of sequence/alpha-map plates (the single big images that contain all the smaller images).
2nd - slice colour. This colour is used to seperate the individual images on a plate by drawing a grid that defines the maximum width and height of a sequence. Unless someone beats me to it I'll post a bitmap plate so you know what the hell I'm talking about!
3rd - transparent colour. This colour works the same as the background colour, however it must be used instead of the background in order to remove areas of an image that is to be used as a texture (e.g arrows or model surfaces). Don't ask me why it has to be done that way, I don't see why the background colour can't be used anyway! Unfortunately that's just how Myth works though.
All other colours from 3 to 255 (with the ones I mentioned being 0 to 2) are used for general colours.
Note however that it is perfectly acceptable for a unit to use the 2nd colour (slice colour) in it as a normal colour, as Myth doesn't actually seem to care. It is possible however that if a perfect line measuring the full height or width of an image were to use this colour then there would be an error, but otherwise it should be fine.
I'm in a bit of a hurry, so if any of that is unclear, confusing or just downright garbage then let me know and I'll try to explain it better (with pictures).