Ripping 8 bit, 4 C-set, 64 color tiles? Yay, or nay?

[Anthus]

Is there a way to bring 64-color 8-bit tiles into ZC? Currently, I only see the old way of bringing them in with 16 colors, or one c-set. If I have the '64' color palette ready, is there a way to rip a selection into the colors?

Thank you.

[Gleeok]

If you have the palette set up properly you can simply "leech" the tiles in as 8-bit and they should be unchanged. You might have to edit the source in an external program if they are not aligned to the 16x16 grid, but if they are then it works great. :)

[Anthus]

Would "properly" be an image with only 48 colors, and these three c-sets ripped directly into ZC from the palette ripper?

I've never actually used the Leech command before, so I'm not entirely sure. The image is 16 tiles wide, and about 16 screens tall. It is a rather complex animation.



EDIT: Maybe I asked the question wrong. To simplify, can I rip something with more than 16 colors into ZC without it suffering color loss? I tried ripping my 48-colored version in, and setting the depth to 8 in the leecher, but this just makes them 8 bit, after they come in, and then they still only use the first 16 color c-set. I have palette 2,3,4 for the 48 color image. The tiles in ZC are 8 bit post-rip, but they are still only using one c-set :/

I will not recolor 4,608 tiles by hand. The animation is not THAT worth it.

I really hope I can do this, since it was not easy getting to this point (actually, it was, but still). I will be more than happy to post screen shots, and more details as needed.

[Gleeok]

OK, it looks like a simple palette mix-up. I don't know the first thing about photoshop, but if you have graphics gale it's a simple two-step operation to rearrange the colors from your image to match the zc palette (thus letting you leech 8-bit tiles easily). ..Since using an external editor is the only "easy" way of doing this, I'll just ask you if you have such a image program that lets you modify palettes and such. (If not, graphics gale is free).

[Anthus]

I've got Irfanview. It lets you reduce colors to any number, and I've used it several times for getting things to 16 colors (back grounds mostly). It also has a "palette editor" which allows you to manually select any of the colors.

Here is the thing in Irfanview, with the palette editor open:
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/8279/adfadsf.png

However, if it is not sufficient for this, I'll download Graphics Gale.

[Gleeok]

Ah, Irfan view. I forgot about that one.

There's two methods here that work wonders:

A) Modify your palette in zquest so that 1) Only color 0 of cset 1 is your 'magic' color, ie; (0,0,0) or (255,0,255) ..or whatever you want for transparency. 2) copy override *all* colors you don't want to use for leeching with some non-intrusive color (like (253,0,253)) in all your csets [even 12 and up!!!]. For example cset 6 changes with Links ring, so you might want to blank out cset 6 entirely. You should be left with colors from cset 0,1,5,7,8,10,11 or whatever at this point so now save a 256 color .BMP screenshot and you have your non-level 8-bit exportable palette. Now just blank out everything else and load you level palettes you want to use for 8-bit dungeon tiles or whatnot. Now save a screenshot for that, name it dungeon_pal_1, hit F4, and repeat however many times you like. The good news is once you've done this once you don't have to do it again and you don't have to mess with option B. ...Don't forget to NOT save your quest file after doing this. ..Now you can just 'recolor' sprites to match your palette then just leech them in with no extra work.

B) Edit the palette in irfanview so that it matches the zc palette. Notice in your pic you have colors 0 - 47, however what you want them to be is colors 31 - 78 (cset 2-4). Also try and match the tranparent color with color 0 here also.

Try that.

[Anthus]

I haven't gotten around to trying this yet, but I'll give it a try.. I think my problem was, well, I know it was not having the palettes in Irfanview correspond with the c-sets in ZC. I'll let you know how it works, when I try it.

Thank you.