After some fiddling, I have finally been able to import walkbehind masks, but I found that every other walkbehind slot is empty.Ã, To be more specific, I imported a mask that had three distinct walkbehind areas (each a different colour).Ã, When I imported, I have in the slots:
Slot 1: empty (all walkbehind areas are grey)
Slot 2: walkbehind #1
Slot 3: empty
Slot 4: walkbehind #2
Slot 5: empty
Slot 6: walkbehind #3
Why is this happening?Ã, For walkbehinds, it's not a big deal since I'm not going to reach the maximum number anyway, but if I'm making a mistake I would like to know what I'm doing wrong before I start trying to import hotspot masks.
Thanks ^_^
Importing a mask imports a 256 colour images, which areas will be used is determined by the colour slot numbers (not actually the colours, as in the mask image you can set the colour of each index to anything else), I expect you might be making the mask in true colour and then save it as 256 colours right? In that case, it's the graphics programme's responsibility to assign the slots for each colours, this can be fuzzy sometimes.
Yes, I have been colouring the mask on a new layer in the original image (in Photoshop), then copying and pasting that layer in Paint to save as a 16-colour bitmap.Ã, (I was having a lot of trouble importing straight from Photoshop, I couldn't figure it out ^_^;; )
Is there a way to work around this so that each slot will be filled up consecutively?Ã, I must admit I'm confused by all this palette stuff ^_^
EDIT: I just reread your post, and I'm wondering if we're talking about the same thing. To make myself clearer, the slots I am referring to are the area slots in AGS
The area slots will be determined by the slot indeces of the mask image when you import it.
M$ Pain often (always) does a very bad job in decreasing colour depth.
If you use PS, try copying that layer to a new image, and then decrease its colour depth to 256 colours, I think by default PS might push all the used colours to the first slot indices (maybe there're some options, I'm not sure since I don't use PS), which is what you need.
Thanks for your help, Gilbot ^_^. I tried it, and the slots are now consecutive. However, I have a new problem: I had coloured in the walkbehinds in different colours, and filled in the rest of the area with black... now when I import it, it takes black as one of the walkbehind areas, and one of my walkbehind areas (blue) as the transparent colour. I guess I'll have to figure out how to reorder the colour slots in Photoshop, since it appears that blue is the first in the palette in my image, and therefore is assigned slot 0 in AGS (if I'm understanding things correctly). I'm still a bit confused, but I'll keep trying ^_^
I'm not quite sure if it's PS's behaviour, but you may try to use transparent for the non-area (area 0), I think when decreasing colour depth, the default option might set colour slot 0 to be the transparent, thus the desired non-area when you import it.
Strangely enough, the transparent area does not go in the first slot (at least, not the way I have been doing it. It really should!).Ã, To work around it, I changed the colours after decreasing the colour depth such that the area I want to be transparent is switched to the one that was put in the first slot by Photoshop.Ã, That works ^_^
Thanks for the help!
Here's my photoshop procedure for creating masks.
Set swatches pane to Windows, bottom right colour (white) is transparent then moving from right to left, bottom to top, colours correspond to mask slots. To export the mask, Image->Mode->Indexed color. Select Palette -> System(Windows), Matte -> none, Dither ->None. Then save as a .tga. Import mask into AGS.
This does start to lose some slots after 7 or so different mask colours but is useable.
Thanks for the alternate method, Wretched ^_^. I'll try it your way, and see which one I'm more comfortable with.