trying to work out how pal files work for scenery objects

[dr rick]

I don't know how to control pal files for scenery objects properly!!  These posts show some experiments i have made.

What it did was to make an iceberg (from the in-game images extracted using zoot).  First screenshot shows this in APE.

Then I copied the se.pal sw.pal ne.pal and nw.pal files from my ice waterfall (second screenshot) into the idle folder of a new version of the iceberg ztd.

When I first tried it, the SW view had a big patch of black in the middle (forgot to do a screenshot) which i think is connected with the amount of white in the original image of the waterfall because when I replaced the sw.pal file with a new renamed copy of the se.pal file, renamed sw.pal, it worked as you can see in the third screenshot.

[dr rick]

Here's my mad idea... based on things i know work with animals...

I tried making a colour gradient (first image below)
then I fired up APE and the buffalo, and replaced the icon with the gradient, saved it and exited APE
then in winrar I copied the icon N.pal, which gave me a palette file for my gradient.
then i pasted this as ne.pal nw.pal se.pal and sw.pal into the idle folder of my experimental iceberg
the result is the second image, showing the black patch to advantage...

[dr rick]

then I tried it with a dark blue to see if that got rid of the dreaded black patch...

[dr rick]

then i tried it with a red to yellow gradient to see if that got rid of the ...

all the original images were png files but i converted them to jpegs to save bandwidth...

[dr rick]

Now I was beginning to get ratty (12 hours at work plus a meeting at my daughter's college plus a 10 mile cycle ride in the rain plus the above...)

I took a radical approach (!)
I made a rectangle in Word, shaded it with a rainbow shade (arghh!) copied it and pasted it into Powerpoint (hee hee) then right clicked on it and 'save as image' as a png.
This I then cut down to 255 pixels so it would fit in APE and made yet another buffalo icon N.pal
this, when made into the usual 4 pal files and put into the idle folder of the iceberg, produced the following...

[dr rick]

WOW!!!

not what I was expecting I guess, but at least it has character - and it recolours all of the animations in the iceberg - boy it is pretty (if not actually much use!).

Next, I tried replacing the yellow in the rainbow with turquoise (to see what happened to all that yellow) and tried the N.pal route again.  The result...

[dr rick]

Sooo...

I still don't understand how these pal files work but I feel I'm making some sort of progress.

Next I thought i might try the same series of transformations on an object that has more colours in it to start off with, but i have not yet got around to trying it...

i have a feeling the black may be the result of having less than 256 colours in the palette, so it just assigns black to all the shortfall of colours - so, if there were, for example 56 colours in the image used, then the pal file would have 200 'empty' colours which are just assigned black, so that much of the resulting image is black.  this hypothesis is supported by the above since the last two have loads of colours and no black pixel problem.  it may turn out to be something else altogether...