Dungeon Master Forum

I'm using Rain's DMExtract tool, to make my first attempt at placing new graphics into CSBWin

I've successfully placed a new floor, but when I come to replacing the walls and ceiling, I get very odd results. Pure black seems to be replaced with bright green, and the position of the walls is all over the place. Parts that are flipped shouldn't be, and vice versa. It's like everything is shifted by half a screen.

All I've done is overwritten a file with one that is EXACTLY the same size, with the same paltte and simply a new image. I don't understand why my changes would go so screwy.

If I rebuild a new graphics dat using my backup of the original extracted graphics, everything is fine. It only messes up with my new image.

Very, very odd indeed. Any ideas anyone?

BTW, it does the same thing with the -i flag set to 1,2,3 or 4.

I got better results with the palette by saving as 4 bit with the standard DM 16 colour palette, rather than the 8bit palette generated by DMextract. The flipping also seems to be fixed.

But now the images are going even crazier, being mixed in with other elements and all very squished and distorted. The ceiling is still too low as well, and some of the floor seems to be included with it.



Help!

Actually, I've realised even the floor is wrong -- it's too far across, and wraps around to the other side of the screen.

What on Earth is going on? I know graphics can be replaced as it's been done in Conflux 2....

Aha! I've fixed it....!

I remembered something from my distant days as a CD-ROM developer, about how we'd had trouble importing bitmaps from PhotoShop into Macromedia Authorware. I recalled that for some reason PhotoShop writes non-standard BMPs and the way to fix it is to re-save the BMP in another package.

I just tried this using Paint Shop Pro -- and it worked! Ta Da!

So for anyone else wanting to create images for CSBWin, don't use PhotoShop to save your BMPs!!!

you struggles won't be in vain then, as long as we remember this thread when someone else has a problem similar

and when can we expect to see this graphics.dat emerge? : )
is it for anything in particular?

It's a secret...

I have successfully produced a new graphics.dat with all walls/floors/pits redrawn and quite nice it is too. However, I did have a few of the problems Gambit was having. The green/black colouring was a big problem when importing images, but if you look closely it isn't pure black that is being converted to the green you see, but a very slightly lighter shade. Turn your contrast up and paint over the pixels! I only used paint for this.

As for the walls lineing up, yes I had problems there too: you just need to study the way DMExtract presents them a little closer and be absolutely pixel perfect when joining one section to the other. It seems likely you have missed a piece out resulting in the appearence of them being shifted down slightly. The image tag is -i4.

I have emailed a sample graphics.dat to Christophe to upload to his site. Still in development though!

The green/black wasn't an issue once I started saving the BMPs in Paint Shop Pro, so I think you must be having a different problem there.

I've been reading Charlatan's notes on file 0558 today to get some idea of what's going on in the engine regarding palettes. It's quite complex, but I think I understand it all now. To have absolute control over what happens with your images, and to change the way objects are drawn in the distance (in darkness), you have to get your hands dirty and start hex editing 0558... lot's o' fun!