29-11-1999 02:37									#1
	Finally! I found out how to change the radar map colours! Suffering from ads?

I originally intended to keep this secret until the revealing of my next scenario, but it's not só useful after all . So I decided to reveal my "secret" to the scenario community so they can enjoy too making nicely coloured radar maps.


Observating an extremely shitty scenario (no offense to its author, if any) from the Apolyton archives, one "Biowar", I finally found the solution to a mystery that has haunted me all too long.
This scenario's author took the big step of including his own units.bmp, but used a strange palette (not the standard one). Obviously, all game colours were now messed up and the whole game looked like ****. It surprises me that he didn't notice it during playtesting, but perhaps he did not playtest it.
Anyway, the colours of the radar map were also changed to this strange palette and this enabled me to realize that the radar map colours were changeable (not hardcoded as I always thought) and how they were to be changed.

Apparently, as I found out the colour palette of UNITS.GIF determines the palettes of all other .GIF files too. If colour at palette no 0 is black, it supposes it is too in ICONS.GIF. If you turn this palette colour into white, it will also change the black colours in ICONS.GIF into white when playing. Therefore, if you change the palette to your liking in UNITS.GIF, save that palette and apply it to all the other files too.

The radar map has land (normal=green) and sea (normal=blue) colours. They are paletter no 38 (land) and 83 (sea) in UNITS.GIF and changing these will change the colours of the radar map. (be sure to check if all units still look good and be sure to apply the palette to the other gifs and check their colours).
This is not very handy in most scenarios, but can be useful in desert scenarios, such as Stefan's Pharaon, or Afrika Corps when you turn palette 38 into yellow.

As I went further experimenting, I found out that all colours in the game were actually determined by this palette, so also: the background colour behind the civ2 logo (palette no 148) (nice for something different, or for changing back all of ToT to civ2 ), a large (if not all) number of in-game text colours and so on.
For example: Normal text colour has pixel number 6 with a shadow of pixel colour 23. Text in the title border of pop-up boxes have pixel number 16 with background 0 (also used for shadow of city names). A number of other texts have 31 and also 0 for their shadow.

Anyway, these are just a few of the things you can do. Basically every single colour in the game is determined by the palette of UNITS.GIF.

	29-11-1999 03:07									#2
	Increase Your PM Length

Thank you, Allard!

This is very interesting. Would you consider writing a tip on this topic?

	29-11-1999 03:55									#3
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Thank you! Thank you William for asking exactly what was on my mind!

Allard - if you don't want to do a tip on this finding, I'll be happy to look into it myself.

I don't think it's a "not só useful" finding at all - particularly as the Civ2 palette seems to use only about 200 of the 256 colours available. With these extra colours, it seems you have found a way to address Techumseh's inquiry some weeks ago on how to change the text colour. I suppose that you will also need to include a scenario palette in with the zipped package of a scenario now?

	29-11-1999 04:28									#4
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A tip? Actually I more or less considered this as a tip already.. But ok, I'll try to write something more decent

It ís useful, but not for my scenario. Changing the radar map colours is not handy here (there still are only 2 colours) and changing text colours is fun but not great.

quote: I suppose that you will also need to include a scenario palette in with the zipped package of a scenario now?

What do you mean? The palette is included in any gif file. Well, yeah, I guess you could add a .pal file to the zipped archive for decency, but it's not necessary for functioning.

	29-11-1999 05:00									#5
	Inflate your Upload Space

I am continually amazed by the ingenuity of people on this forum! Kudos to you Allard for finding a new twist in what is really a VERY old game!

	29-11-1999 05:31									#6
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This is great! I would definitely want to see this in tip format.

	29-11-1999 06:57									#7
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Allard,

Once you start swapping colours around, I thought that the traditional Civ2 palette wouldn't by definition be the same and a new one would need to be provided(?). Sorry if I've got 'the wrong end of the stick' here.
[This message has been edited by Cam (edited November 28, 1999).]