cyotek
commented
7 years ago Hello,
Thanks for the suggestion and thank you for taking the time to put together a list of helpful resources. I do have a long list of formats to add to our palette editing software (the palette serialisation in this particular repository is a bit out of date and is another outstanding task for me to sort out).
However, ideally I need raw palette files - it's probably out of scope of our editor software to extract the palettes from mix files and I doubt I'd be adding support for that at this point in time.
I do have Red Alert 2 installed locally from Origin - plenty of mix files, but no palettes. I downloaded the OpenRA setup and extracted that and found 3 pal files. I then adapted my existing RgbTriplets/AdobeColorTable codeto shift the bits of each byte as per the OpenRA class you linked and could successfully read those files, so there's no problem there. However, the 3 files (jungle, snow and cursor) are very similar to each other (only a few subtle changes to each (unless of course I've read them incorrectly!)) so ideally I'd need something completely different and with a reference image I can compare with.
The main issue is that this format is exactly the same as RGB triplets palettes also used by older games, so that if I had a Westwood palette and a triplets palette, you can't tell the difference. But loading a Westwood palette using the full 8 bits results in a very dark palette, and loading RGB triplets using only 6 bits results in a completely wrong palette. Therefore there's plenty of scope for confusing end users into thinking the software is broken if it guesses wrong.
I'm definitely not against the idea - the more the merrier, and the fact that it is identical to another format (with the exception of the bit shifting) means it's trivial to implement. The problem is that as there isn't a way of telling the two formats apart (as they are both have the same extension, and both have 768 bytes without a signature) then I'd have to have the UI prompt for which format to use. At least act files have a different extension and usually 3 extra bytes containing the number of used colors.
I'm going to log it on our internal tracker for looking into in a future update. As you can could see from the roadmap I do plan to include a number of additional formats in the non-bugfix version of the software. (I don't have a date for this at the moment as I'm currently working on a whole bunch of other outstanding work).
If you wanted to save me some time, if you have any palette files you've extracted from the mix files you can attach to this issue (if possible with a corresponding image file as a reference to make sure my implementation is correct) that would be helpful.
Once again thanks for the detailed suggestion.
Regards; Richard Moss
xan2622
Hello. First of all, thank you for creating this software.
Here is my request: I am a fan and player of (old) Command & Conquer games. The community is still very active and there are many people who create "mods" for these games. Yes, even in 2017. 😊
Here are some websites/forums to prove that there are still many people who are interested in modding these games: http://ppmsite.com > https://ppmforums.com http://www.openra.net > http://www.sleipnirstuff.com/forum http://cncnz.com > http://forums.cncnz.com https://cncnet.org > https://forums.cncnet.org
Most of these games were developped by Westwood Studios, a game company which litteraly created the RTS (strategy) genre.
Why do I tell you all that? Well, because I think your software could be really useful for modders. These 2D games use .SHP and .VXL files for units/tanks/buildings.
SHP files contain many frames (256 colors indexed images), used for the animations of these sprites. But to create .SHP files, palette files are needed: C&C games use Westwood .PAL palette files.
Tools used by modders:
Here is some documentation about this .PAL file format: https://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/196957-command-and-conquer/faqs/1835 (2nd paragraph) https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/Palettes-and-Remaps
According to what one of the OpenRA developers told me:
You can download these palette files here: LKOccallpal.zip. I got them from this ppmforums thread.
And here is how OpenRA supports this file format (OpenRA is an open-source RTS game engine coded in C#): https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/bleed/OpenRA.Game/Graphics/Palette.cs
That's why I ask you (if you agree, please say yes) to support Westwood .pal files in your software.
This "feature request" matters a lot to me because supporting this palette filetype will let modders convert .ACT/.ACO/.ASE/.GPL to Westwood .PAL files and vice versa.