Those look great Lamby, very nice.
Thanks mousey
Ya unfortunately the game and the battle net client channel screen use different palettes.
I've attached a bitmap of it using the client palette, and ya the greens don't look right.
For anybody interested in making icons but doesn't understand 8-bit palette based graphics, here's a bit of background info.
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Its like this:
For a given bitmap of this type you get to pick your favorite 256 colors from about 1.6 million.
The picture is then made up of those 256 colors. This selection of colors is the "palette".
In this case you can think of the server channel screen and the in-game screen as two different bitmaps, that have changing pixels.
As we know the game has a lot of green in it: trees, grass, peons, grunts, axers etc. So the game palette has a good variety of greens amoungst the 256 colors in its palette.
The channel screen has a different palette with a more blues, for displaying the channel screen plus ads etc.
-=> History Buffs ...
Yes this is why the swamp tileset is so hideous to look at, because it was added after
the initial release of the game, so the poor guys in the late '90s Blizzard graphic art
department had to come up with a totally new tileset still using the same palette that
was chosen specifically to make grass and snow look good, but somehow make it look
completely different. All they could do was go with that brown and orange 'turd forest'
look, because they were pretty much the only colors left....
...(edit) or was it? always assumed this but it might have its own palette, I must check
If so WTH were you thinking? Yuck!
So if you want to take a picture from a bitmap with one palette and display it using another palette, you have to do color matching. That's where you go through each color in the first palette, then find the color in the second palette that is the closest match, then change all the pixel data to from the first entry to the value of the second entry.
(There's also a process called 'dithering' which blends together colors by speckling little dots of one color on top of a block of another color. It always looks like crap - except in printing where actual ink is used. Fortunately as almost everything graphics-wise is at least 24 bit these days, its rarely seen.)
So in this case we've got pictures from the im-game interface which we want to display as icons in the channel. We have to use the channel palette. So the pics have to be color matched from one palette to the other.
>>> If you want to take graphics from any other source and try to make icons
>>> out of them you will have to color match them to the channel palette.
*Fortunately theres a dead easy way to do this*
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Get a SS from the channel. This is an 8-bit palette base pcx file.
Convert it into a .BMP file, but make sure it stays 8-bit and is not converted to 24 or 32 bit. I use "Irfanview" to do this its freeware.... google it if you're not already familiar with it. So just open your SS there and go 'save as'->windows bitmap.
Then open the .BMP in good ol' MS Paint. Then all you have to do is copy / cut the bit of graphics you want to use from wherever (ifranview / another instance of paint / photoshop... etc) and paste it onto the bitmap you have opened in paint.
When you do this paint will automatically pick the best match for each color in the thing you paste from the palette of the open bitmap, which in this case has come from a SS of the channel and is the palette that will ultimately be used to display the icon.
---> This can also no doubt be done in photoshop, probably directly
in Irfanview and a heap of other ways, but that's how I do it because
its quick and easy and I've usually already got whatever pic open in
paint if im messing with it anyway.
For a slightly more technical discussion plus everything you ever wanted to know about screen-shots see my next post.
HF
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