WinAPI? GRF Palette

[zypa]

For which porpose is the winAPI color (the pink one) in the GRF palette?
The color is used in some GRFs (In particular newbridges)

See this image (stolen and hotlinked from the ttdpatch wiki - I hope that's OK)

[eis_os]

They should not be used for compatibility reasons as windows manage these... (The Windows graphic subsystem decides if the colors will be something usefully or some random garbage or these days simple black...) *

Please note there is a dos palette too... (with 255 colors)


* History channel:
Windows was made so it could run on 256color systems too, every time you switched to a different windows application the palette was changed to the application specific one, this would result however that the windows borders, captions, buttons would change as well, so the Windows devs decided that Applications should not use the first colors and use some of windows standard colors in it when the display runs in 256 colors mode. **

A reason why there is a 256 color web safe palette, so you can view a web page in 256 colors too without distorted images

Nitpickers corner:
You can safely use the color index 0 because TTD never draws this color, it's transparent by design and will never end up (except some small places) in the composited image that the windows will draw on screen...
** Actually Windows has a hardcoded system palette with 20 colors, 10 below and 10 in the upper range, the red marked ones included white but TTDWindows doesn't use them so you shouldn't do it as well... (except well white)

[zypa]

OK, thank very much!

Does anybody know why these colors are used in the newbridges GRF?
See attached image.

[XeryusTC]

Maybe because you used the wrong palette?

[zypa]

Hmm,
I'm not really good at "graphic stuff".

I thought the palette is saved in the pcx file. I opened the pcx with irfan view.
Where did I use the wrong palette - or: How can I use the correct one?

I normally use paint.net. Unfortunately paint-net cannot open pcx files.
Shall I use the gimp instead?

[AndersI]

I normally use paint.net. Unfortunately paint-net cannot open pcx files.

It can, look here: http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopi ... &hilit=pcx

[Maedhros]

I thought the palette is saved in the pcx file. I opened the pcx with irfan view.
Where did I use the wrong palette - or: How can I use the correct one?

It is, but it isn't saved in the grf file. If you didn't decode it with the right options, grfcodec will insert the wrong palette into the pcx file it creates, which will give you the wrong colours when you open it in an image editor. By the looks of you it you've decoded a Windows grf file, but grfcodec thinks it has a DOS palette (which I think is the default if you didn't give it any options). You need to specify the right palette with grfcodec's -p switch.

[athanasios]

Use an old version of JASC Paint Shop Pro to get a correct palette. Please don't ask for links. Nevertheless Google can be your friend as well as some abandonware sites. Neopaint too, can prove usefull.

[richk67]

LOL, good old PaintShop Pro 4.2. They forgot to put in the "disable at end of trial period" call, so it used to report nice things like "Day 1256 of 30"

[eis_os]

If you do a full screen screenshot and use the pcx as base, you will get the windows default colors, if you do it in window mode you will get black except the mentioned white. The best would be to teach TTDWindows to put a windows 9x palette in the first 9(10) colors, but simply currently you shouldn't use them... (This may result in incompatibilities with old windows installations or old / broken vga drivers to change how TTD uses the palette.)

[zypa]

Thanks a lot for your replies!
I'll try to encode the grf with the correct options and I'll try some graphic tool you've suggested.
Thanks!