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vinylrake wrote:I've had trouble recently with overheads appearing black as well. I've made several maps and imported plenty of different versions of overhead maps into loathing with no problems in the past, but I just noticed the problem recently that when I test the map the overhead is black (or dark grey at least). I tried resaving making sure the # of indexed colors are less than 240 and that I was using a standard size but am still having the issue.

I went back to a map to try to finish it and am again getting the black / gray overhead map phenom.

I've gone through the mapmaking tutorials to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything obvious, and no matter what I do, when I start up a game instead of seeing a nicely shrunken colormap image I see a semi-translucent grey 128x128 pixel gray box.

The overhead map image file I am using is a shrunken image (128x128px)
of my colormap indexed to very few colors (low 200's - definitely under
240 and WAY under 256). When I save it as a pict file I save it as 8
bit, I've tried transparency On AND Off, I've tried resetting the mode
of the image to RGB then manually editing the colortable and setting the
first pixel to a bright blue (unused in the map itself then filling the
(transparent) edges of the image with that bright blue then reindexing
the image, I've tried doing the same thing with the first 3 colors and reindexing, but NOTHING seems to work - every time I fire up Myth II and
start a game I get the solid grey overhead map.

I have also deleted all the overhead map collections between attempts and
assigned a new overheadmapname each time to make sure Fear isn't still
pointing to an older corrupted OM collection.

I've also re-downloaded the latest version of Myth II (build 290 I
think?) and replaced both Fear and Loathing with the latest versions in
case there was something messed up with the version of Fear I was using.

ANY SUGGESTIONS? Insight? HELP!?!

I know I have to be doing something stupid and simple wrong but I really can't figure it out.

(Could it be something stupid like not having the right color profile for my monitor associate with photoshop or the document or me accidently embedding the color profile when I am not supposed to?)

Hmm, I know it won't help at all, but I've always been just resizing my cmap to 128x128 and implementing it as an overhead map and it worked fine.

I remember seeing this before, as well as the occasional problem where an overhead map had transparent pixels.

The solution for me was to make a palette where the first half dozen colors were not used in the image (ie, strong green, yellow, pink, blue etc) and then setting the image to use that palette. I also imported the colormap using either Amber or Jade, not Fear.

iron wrote:I remember seeing this before, as well as the occasional problem where an overhead map had transparent pixels.

The solution for me was to make a palette where the first half dozen colors were not used in the image (ie, strong green, yellow, pink, blue etc) and then setting the image to use that palette. I also imported the colormap using either Amber or Jade, not Fear.

I'll give it a shot. I am somewhat relieved that someone else has had this problem - it's really been bugging me since it's such a simple thing I've done countless times in the past.

Question: Do you make the palette change before you shrink the file? e.g. I am shrinking then indexing with palette editing, is that the order you do it in or do you index first? (can't see why it would make any difference but there has to be SOME explanation...)

Definitely shrink first then index second - not because it fixes any bugginess in its display in Myth, but because you'll get a higher quality image. Make sure you convert the colormap to RGB mode (millions of colours) before shrinking it.

Re the palette, first index the image and create a palette from it. Then edit the palette, creating the six bright colours not used in the image and moving them to the front of the palette. Save it, and re-index the image to this palette.

iron wrote:Definitely shrink first then index second - not because it fixes any bugginess in its display in Myth, but because you'll get a higher quality image. Make sure you convert the colormap to RGB mode (millions of colours) before shrinking it.

Re the palette, first index the image and create a palette from it. Then edit the palette, creating the six bright colours not used in the image and moving them to the front of the palette. Save it, and re-index the image to this palette.

Well, I am not sure _which_ bit of the process I was doing wrong, but I finally got it to work.

What I ended up doing first which DIDN'T work was:

1) Shrink the full PSD RGB file to 128x128.
2) Indexed the image (less then 250 colors)
3) Saved the image
4) Edited the palette *manually* duplicating the first 5 colors onto the end of the palette then setting the first 5 to mostly primary colors, then saved the palette.
5) (Re)Loaded the color palette I just saved
6) Saved the file as a PICT file.
7) Started Fear, imported the overhead
8) Opened the mesh and picked the just imported overhead

when I started Myth up I still got the gray box instead of a mini colormap. So I went back and redid the last few steps...

6) Saved the file as Windows 8-bit BMP file, no transparency
7) Started Amber (thankfully it runs in classic mode on my OS X mac)
8) Opened the overhead 'collection' (the overhead PICT file I had imported with fear previously) and replaced the existing bitmap with the BMP file I just saved as real BMP
9) Saved the collection and closed Amber
10) Started Fear, opened the mesh and re-selected the image I just replaced in the previous step

This time when I started myth up I had a real actual mini colormap for my overhead map!!!

That seems like WAY too many steps to do such a simple thing (especially since I KNOW in the past I have used Fear to import my overheads and only used Amber for the pregame image), but thanks for the suggestions Iron - at least I now have a working overhead and can pretend I might someday finish my map.

Toxy i think he means you have to import bitmap with fear....then in the meshes tags within fear you have to find your mesh and in the on the little window that says "Overhead map" you then have to find the OH bitmap you just imported with fear. its 2 steps.

Also toxy maybe do some tests to see if Jade will make better scaled OH maps for our super huge maps like Battle for Covenant.

Glad you got it working with Jade though!

-Renwood

old thread!

stop grave digging =P

Is it possible to make a overhead map that is taller than it is wide? all these dimensions seems to be the same: 128x128, 256x256. My map isn't a perfect square! How would I go about making the overhead map look like the actual map?

There is a program called Jade (on the tain), that can make any size OH map.

Its pretty simple, just run the OH map through jade, then put it in your collections folder and link it in the fear mesh folder.

From my expeirence, OH map sizes between 100-150 look the best.