What is the deal with 8-bit color and Csets anyway?

[redmage777]

I notice some C-set can be edited in the main palette editor (12,13 & 14) but don't appear correctly when using the tile editor. I understand that one of them (was it 14?) is reserved for boss colors. So whats the deal with the other 2 not being consistent from the Palette editor and the Tile Editor?

Also is there a practical reason for not being able to use palette 15? I understand not being able to change it, but shouldn't you be able to use it when editing tiles?

[4matsy]

Since ZC and ZQ run in 256-color mode, and a CSet is 16 colors, there should be 16 CSets in all, 0 to 15. Right?

Well, that means 256 colors total...the programs reserve the slots in those weird CSets for the game and editor's menus and stuff to use.

Otherwise, the user interface would have to improvise by picking the best matches from whatever colors you've put into the CSets. Which is an accident waiting to happen, because if you were to make every color of every CSet the same, the whole screen would be limited to that one color, so you wouldn't be able to see anything. :p

[Nicholas Steel]

Hypercrash, he doesn't want to edit that special 16th cset, he wants to USE IT.

[Dark Nation]

The very last CSet is actually reserved for the GUI. Since you can change GUI colors, there's no guarantee that the color would be the same in ZC as in ZQuest.