Hello.
I have been doing a little research into the campaign LBM files in paint shop pro. I have figured somethings out but have yet to get it working.
The LBM files used by MTW for the campaign use 235 colours. Compressed LBM's reduce the size of the LukMap2.Lbm to about 1.4meg but the original is roughly 700k.
Trying to use compressed LBM files just crashes the game out though. Uncompressed files dont but they are 12meg in size.
Also, whilst those files dont crash the game out they seem to loose boundry information and thus prevent the player from moving anywhere. Pressing shift doesnt bring up the owners of a regions colour nor anybody elses.
The game seems to load in anything from 16bit to 8bit uncompressed LBM's in without any problems. I dont know if PSP always saves the image as a 16bit image regardless of the colour settings I make in the problem.
If it does that would account for the extremely large LBM file that it creates (12meg instead of 700k).
I believe the file format MTW expects is 256 colour uncompressed LBM image. There may be some palette attributes I have yet to figure out.
First colour in the palette is used to determine the sea all boundies. In this case its a purpley Pink colour. The Sea regions do not seem to follow the same rules as land regions. They dont have any colours either side of them other than the regions own colour.
I dont believe there is any set pattern to the land/sea region colours. I think they just all have to be different so the game can pick out the regions. Only the first colour on the pallete is used more than once it would seem.
Now I just have to figure out why a simple load and save proceedure stops the LBM image from working.
It doesnt look like PSP's LBM plugin actually supports the correct LBM options for this game. I may be wrong but the file sizes are twice the size they should be when compressed and 200 times the size when uncompressed. So i believe its not saving them as 256 colours as it should be.
LBM and IFF between them support colour modes between 2 colours and 24bit. We dont seem to get the choice we usually get when saving off other image formats such as TGA.
Giskard
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