[Freeciv-Dev] Re: indexed palettes

[Morgan Jones <morgan.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On  6/11/2003, you wrote:

> Raimar Falke wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 01:33:21PM +0000, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Raimar Falke wrote:
>>> 
>>> I just found out that isotrident and trident tiles.png have a
>>> different number of indexed colours.
>> 
>> This means that graphics made for isotrident will not
>> automatically work fortrident.
>> 
>> Why? The graphic program should cope with this. I.e. transfer
>> graphics from one to the other in RGB mode.
>>> 
>>> Well, I am a newbie with gimp, but when I tried to copy&paste
>>> Daniel's veteran icons from isotrident to trident tilesets, some
>>> colours were lost in the copying. I noticed that trident had less
>>> colours, so I jumped to a conclusion and complained - but I might
>>> be stuffing the wrong duck here.
>> 
>> 
>> And if you convert both to RGB first?
> 
> I agree, you should convert both to RGB form first if there are
> problems. I guess if gimp is stuck using the trident palette and you
> import an unavailable color, I suppose you'll get problems. So this
> probably applies to any importing of graphics into the tileset.
> 
> Originally Vasco pointed me to some palettes for trident and
> isotrident (or was it hires?). But later I just got Gimp to generate
> the palettes "optimally". So perhaps these colors were in the
> original trident palettes but were dropped by me.
> 
> As a side note, we could switch to RGB PNGs except (1) they are
> larger and (2) the XAW client requires indexed ones.
> 
> jason
> 
The trident tileset seems to have a depth of 5 (32 colours) and most
of isotrident 6 (64 colours).  From what I can tell, not all the
individual graphic files share the same palette anyway, in particular
flags.png. 

Personally I think 32 colours is more than enough to render the
(iso)trident graphics, given their size and style.  Increasing their
depth, especially to 24bit would be a waste of disk space and CPU time
for some clients.

With the Amiga (MUI) client, the depth of the graphics makes a massive
difference to speed.  I've converted all the freeciv graphics (except
the intro screens) to 5bit or less.  (I run freeciv on a 6bit screen)

I don't use GIMP but you shouldn't need to convert the files to RGB
first.  Just reduce the 6bit files to 5bit or vice-versa, whichever is
your preference.  No point in making them 24bit in between.

If you're interested I could post a version of the (iso)trident
tilesets that uses (more) consistent palette and depth.  The Amiga is
well set up for doing this sort of thing easily.

     -Morgan