Pulling out my hair over bif's

[vs the world]

Hey all,
I've been in the process of creating a mod for VI and am having troubles with changing shields/flags. I've read through the dungeon's various topics on this and yet to no avail.

Whenever I edit a shield in Photoshop (I save it as an indexed bmp and import it to a new bif file) I run into 2 problems; one is readbif doesn't want to save any new bifs I've created (only preexisting ones I've modified) and two, if I edit in Photoshop in standard rgb format save to a bmp and transfer that into readbif the colors don't stay right.

Arg Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is the last thing I need to do to complete my mod.

Is there any drawback to editing in readbif? Also a fourth question, when in the game any shields I've designed for the campmap look blocky and distorted except for say, when I pick up a unit and it's enlarged - then the shield looks the way it's supposed to. Any artistic tips on creating good looking shields?

[the Black Prince]

as to your first point, try editing or drawing the .bifs in paint not a photoshop editing program or something. save the file as .bmp in paint, then open it with your photoshop and resave as .bif, you should be able to save over an existing one, or save as a new file name and change the faction shields info in the startpos folder.

as to the 2nd point, i'm not an artist, the best i've managed is to change the colours on aragons stripy shield to reflect the colours of my new faction you'll have to wait for the next reply i'm afriad.

[vs the world]

Sorry, I guess my post did not have the clearest description of my problems. The issue is with readbif, I use Photoshop to save my shields as a bmp file but then readbif doesn't recognize some colors nor will it save to a new file (only over-write preexisting files). If I try to edit in Photoshop save as a bmp, import to mspaint, save as bmp, and open in readbif I'm still dealing with color loss...

[Kraellin]

you need to read in the dungeon some more. not sure where, but i know this stuff is covered in there. there's also a program you can get that will make this easier, if i remember correctly, but again, i forget what the name is. i think what you're running into is a color bit problem. .bmp's like 24 bit color, with a 16 million color palette where the .bifs are 256 color(?). been a while, so you'll have to find this stuff in the dungeon.

and just as an aside, there was a problem also with .tga's in photoshop and paint shop pro. apparently CA uses an older format of .tga's and the more modern paint programs dont convert it the same way. there is also a freebie program that does that, but again, you'll have to search the dungeon or have one of the guys from there show up here and help ya out.

K.

[Duke John]

I'm making new units for the Lord of the Rings mod, and I've given up making new pallets for units. Existing BIFs use a palette with a green background colour as the first entry and green and purple colours as replacable faction colours. You can check that with readbif.
Using any other palette with ruin your colours. What I did is extracting some BMPs from BIfs and use their palette. I then use an appropiate palette so that the colours the same as much as possible.
Using a existing palette is the key

Perhaps you could change the colour entries between the 1st entry and the last entries, but I don't know if that works without running into other problems.

Cheers, Duke John

[vs the world]

Thanks for the responses but I'm still stuck...

Duke John, I suspected that the problem was due to the palettes not transfering from bmp to bif I was just hoping that there could be a way to do that with out choosing a bif with a similar palette and having to manually change any colors that didn't match up.

Kraellin, I've read all the topics I found in the Dungeon and followed the given instructions but there's something I'm not doing right, so hopefully someone can walk me through this. Thanks for the heads up on the tga's though at least in the meantime I can work on that.

[Earendil Finarfin]

Hi iisomaii,
Photoshop is not the tool for the job because it will definitely alter the palette of bmps extracted with Bif reader. Also it's pretty unfriendly when it comes to saving and loading colour palettes. Use Paint Shop and you won't have any problems: Simply load a bmp from a bif and under the 'colours menu' save the palette as Bif.pal for example. Then always use this palette for doing your graphics mods (you can even import it to a pic thats been done using a different palette). When you import the new pic back into bif reader the palette will be ok. As for writing over the file when you save from bifreader (22a?), I believe that the older version, doesn't do this. I haven't tried it myself; I've got used to renaming the overwritten bmps as .bif. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[vs the world]

Hmm, makes sense. Guess I'll have to get PaintShop then (since I abhor MSpaint, no real reason, I just do http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif ). I tried saving over the bmp to bif in readbif but after that it doesn't get recognized by either readbif or Photoshop/Mspaint. Stupid Windows... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif