Ryandor.com

Ok, after reading Ryandor's post on this subject I believe I understand how to edit an existing color in Dragon in order to associate it with a different terrain type. What I'm not clear on is how to change the actual colors that Dragon uses. For example, my husband is mildly green/grey colorblind, and I'd like to change some of the colors that Dragon uses for grass, forest, etc. to make them easier for him to see. Also, I'm still using Mod 9+, and I noticed that there are some "empty" slots in the color table. I know that one cannot use more than 256 colors with Dragon, but can I add colors to these empty spots? The spaces next to where it says "cavewall" (I think they are CD, CE, and CF in hex) in the Mod 9+ colortable seem to be open, for example. I can define the landscape tiles with these slots in maptrans, but how can I associate a new color with them? How do I tell Dragon "Associate slot CD with *this* color that doesn't appear in the original color table"?
Thanks for your help!
-Janice
aka Sparkle!

Dragon doesn't actually care what the colors are, so long as they are distinct from each other. If you can tell 2 adjacent colors apart with your naked eye, they are generally distinct enough.

The way the maptrans works is that it checks against the colors in the palette on your map. So if you are just changing existing colors no modifications to it are needed.

The palettes that we have all done are mostly for user convenience. Grass is shades of green, water blue, etc. You could use any color combination you want and it should work.

_________________
This space for rent.

Ok, say I make a totally new palette, with brighter shades of green for grass and a completely different color (say light blue) for forest, etc. I re-edit the colortable bitmap so *I* know which colors I want to use. But how do I tell *Dragon* to use those colors? In "maptrans" there is a number, like 01 (forest) and in "groups" there is a number, (again 01 for forest) but which file do I edit to tell Dragon "Use this shade of blue instead of that shade of green"? How do I say "01=X Color"?

I thought at first that maybe it was drawing the colors directly from the colortable, so I replaced the colortable with my own version, but it didn't work. You make it sound as though I can use any colors I wish on the map, but if I do that, I will get incorrect results on my map unless I can change the colors Dragon is currently using (i.e. I'll get water instead of forest).

Thanks very much for your help, btw. I'm sorry if I'm being dense, I'm just trying to figure out how it works - so I can customize (read: break ;) it. ^_^

-Janice
aka Sparkle!

No. I know it's a little difficult to understand.
If you are not changing the sequence or anything else, but only the colors used (which is the impression I get) then you do not need to make any changes to any other files.

The thing that you do need to do is make sure your map image is using the new colortable and not the old one or you will get semi-random results.

The only other caveat I can think of is that you need to make sure the colors in your range are several RGB values away. Unfortunately I haven't gotten it down to a science how far. Some further than others. Black/Dk Gray is especially a pain in the ass.

A good example is here: http://www.websiteprimer.com/article1044.html
Now if you used say 404040 as your first color, you'd need to go to around 4c4c4c as the next (darker seems fussier) by the time you get to the lighter colors, say 888888, the next color you could use 8c8c8c without incident.

I had a lot of grief coming up with Mod 10's colortable. Fortunately by Mod 11 I had gotten a good handle on it (not to mention I had less changes to make). One big help was Calarus did some gradient tables for me that I then did colorshifts on to make new ranges. They aren't perfect but they were a bighelp. Unfortunately Ry is awol again and I can't get into the ftp site.

Hope this helps.

_________________
This space for rent.

As stated, the actual colors are not important, but the order of the actual colors in the color table.

Looking at the color table you'll notice that it's 16 x 16 squares. Starting in the upper left corner, going left to right, the colors are "indexed" (hence the name indexed color) from 00 up to FF (hex). These numbers are how you can tell what's used in the script files that Dragon uses. Based on this you can see why you were having a hard time trying to figure out how Dragon "knows" the colors. It don't know and don't care. It only uses the index number of the color. This is one of the reasons why when people edit the colors they get it messed up.

The easiest way to change the colors (for readability, contrast, whatever) without risking messing anything up is to simply open the color table from the Mode->Indexed Color->Color Table menu. Once opened you can just click on a color and then use the sliders to change it. Don't forget to save it and then apply it to your new map. Even if you've already started working on your map, once you've applied the new color table to the existing map the colors will change to the new colors.

Whatever you do, NEVER attampt to edit the colortable.bmp by moving the colors around. This is just a glorified visual reference file that makes it easy to pick colors from. You can create a new one of these by applying your saved color table that you created above (and also applied to the map).

Hopefully that will give you a better idea of what going on with the color table.

-Ryandor

This is *exactly* what I needed to know. ^_^ I actually understood everything else, but I didn't understand that colors could actually carry information like their place in the hex table. In fact, I still don't know how it does it, but I at least I understand enough to make it work! <g> Now that I've played around with it a bit, I completely understand what you were talking about. It was actually rather mind-blowing to edit the color table and then watch my bitmap file change automatically to match the new color scheme. ^_^ I'm finally beginning to see how Dragon can draw its palette "directly from the map".

Thank you so much, Ryandor and Stormcrow! I really, really appreciate how nice the people are here, and how much you've both helped me out already. Thanks to you, I am well on my way to creating a completely customized version of Dragon and making my own, unique map!

-Janice
aka Sparkle!