Dungeon Master Forum

Here's a quick summary of how the colour specificity of monsters works using CSBuild:

If your monster graphics are well designed and you restrict the use of the 2 special colours, you can be very clever with placement, and actually end up with lots of colour variations of monsters.

In CSBuild, each time you add a new monster type to a level, it "sets" the palette for the level to the palette specified for that monster -- this is in structure 0558 from the GRAPHICS.DAT (or the numbers that are now exposed using ADGE).

Say you add monster types of a rock pile, a screamer, a magenta worm and dragon in that order. The Worm will be red because the dragon has set the palette to red.

But if you add the dragon type first and then the worm, your dragon will be magenta.

If you then add a new type, say the scorpion, then the dragon AND the worm will be gold (the scorpion colour).

Note however that this effect only works when one or both of the two special colours are set. If they are 0, then no colour transformation is made.

So if you then add a mummy after the scorpion, nothing changes because the 2 replacement colours are not defined -- the mummy only uses colours from the "base" 14 colour palette.

Thats the best explanation I have seen so far. I have many different coloured worms slithering about! Whats the lowdown with the 'transparent' pixel, as this differs monster to monster. ADGE says they all use the magenta pixel: I just use what the existing one was, such as cyan for dragon, light grey screamer etc. This way it is difficult to cock it up if you use that colour by mistake.

PaulH wrote:Thats the best explanation I have seen so far. I have many different coloured worms slithering about! Whats the lowdown with the 'transparent' pixel, as this differs monster to monster. ADGE says they all use the magenta pixel: I just use what the existing one was, such as cyan for dragon, light grey screamer etc. This way it is difficult to cock it up if you use that colour by mistake.

The transparent pixel does not even exist in the atari graphics.dat upon release. Perhaps I should just remove its existance since I think it only causes major problems. The transparent color for each monster can be changed, and that pixel is what is used for transparency in-game. The magenta 'transparent pixel' I introduced I believe now to be meant for animations, which existed on the amiga (i think?) and windows, but not atari.

-rain`

I don't know why ADGE and DMExtract use powerpink -- it's never worked for me.

The transparent pixel is set after the custom colours -- it's just the index of the colour you're using for the background of that specific monster. For most of them it's four (cyan). But obviously, if you want to use cyan in your monster, you can't also use cyan for transparent, so you need to set a different colour -- say yellow or whatever.

Here's the DM palette with the indexes: