Returning to FINISH the project

[Stazi]

This is an important and useful discovery!

Question: To a bif which size is 512x512, in the ActionPage file, 1 represent 2 pixels. Now, if a bif is 1024x1024, is it means that in the ActionPage file, 1 will represent 4 pixels?

Yes.

And I am thinking of another disadvantage of this method: there are only 256 colours in one BIF file, if you put 4 units into one BIF, that mean the colour quality need to be reduce.

Unfortunately, yes but it's not a big issue. Here, check the camel comparison.

On the left original camel bif using about 240 colors, on the right camel using exactly 50 colors (including background and shadow). While difference is noticeable (especially zoomed), during a battle and from a distance, its really hard to see those differences. Additionally, it's quite a big frame (110x110) so it contains relatively lot of pixels. Human soldier frames are smaller and need even less pixels and colors. So, we can easily put 4 units, 50 colors each, into one texture and we'll still have 56 colors reserve for faction coloring (31 colors), shadow, background, etc. If we use faction coloring (those pinks and greens) it even further reduce the amount of normal colors needed for the image. And, on the top of that, you can choose units using similar colors (for a single 1012x1024 texture) to effectively nullify the problem.