Wasteland too bright

[Spikeone]

The original used palettes for coloring their buildings and textures on different worlds (winter, greenland, wasteland). Guess RttR is handling this different as you can clearly see differences in bushes. Overall RttR is just too bright. If you take a look at the screenshot - on the left RttR, on the right S2. Looks for me like it's just brighter. Guess same goes for objects and buildings.

[Flamefire]

RttR is using a single palette (PAL5) for everything.
I had to look very long for differences in your screenshot. Probably you mean the stone-with-green on the right side of the "water"? For me it's hard to tell them apart unless you really compare pixels.

The problem and solution is much harder than it may seem:

• While paletted images are nice and small, they are hard to use/modify/create
• Doing the same modifications to full RGB images (PNG, BMP, ...) are hard to impossible
• One may want to mix terrains from different landscapes in 1 map
  • I added basic support for this. The description is not hierarchic anymore so you have gl_meadow, wl_meadow, ww_meadow (example) and could use them all in 1 save game
  • Using the "correct" palette would make this impossible.

So overall I would say: Only 1 palette used (where required)
Hence modifications based on landscape/palette are impossible.
As a gain you can use RGB images for new textures and mix terrains from different landscapes etc. Problem with mixing terrains is still the decisions if summer or winter buildings shall be used...

The other option is to reload all textures for every map using the landscape palette and make stuff hierarchic again. This disqualifies RGB images restricting everyone to paletted images (which most modern programs can't handle properly) and makes one unable to mix terrains.

[Spikeone]

Well, was actually talking about the textures and at least for me it looks clearly brighter. Haven't compared any pixel but the overall impression.

As I'm not that into the current loading - isn't it possible to load textures using the apropriate palette, if no palette is set just use pal5? I do understand, that this isn't working for objects that are mixed. One may only use the pal6 object if it's placed on the pal6 texture. This would also solve the "summer or winter" question as it becomes "is it a pal5 or pal7 spot". On the other hand I'm not sure how the current implementation works. I thought every texture is loaded into some kind of resource manager where you then have an array of pixels you may manipulate at will. Hence you'd be able to load the same texture with different palettes as this becomes merely a replace option which is at least in .net quite easy.

Overall at this point I'd be happy if the darkening when playing wasteland maps is just a bit increased.