How to interpret luminance/saturation values from a lightmap

[subspark]

Brilliant work Snarky and GarageGothic. You guys certainly impress with your mathematical wizardry! I can't wait for the day when I simply create a smooth scale and light map in photoshop and load it into AGS for use with the finished module. Truly intuitive guys.

Keep up the good work.
Cheers,
Paul.

[GarageGothic]

It should be quite soon. There's just an AGS bug holding be back from finishing the in-game toolset at the moment, so I hope it'll be fixed in the next beta.

I found a McGyver'ish way to circumvent the engine's 64-tone grayscale range and paint in 256 tonal values (I think, at least I've measured up to 252 unique grayscale values when indexing the palette of a screendump in Photoshop). You will still need to save the file to BMP and use Snarky's conversion app to make use of the full spectrum in-game, but it can be previewed while editing using scaling interpolation.

The current in-game editing tools are:

Pencil (line tool, used freehand or with single clicks)
Brush (paints a color, uses a pre-defined sprite as alpha mask - allows transparency, even when using alpha channel mask)
Flood fill (fill area or outline with a plain color)
Gradient flood fill (fill area or outline with gradient between two colors, either radial or linear)
Smoothing tool (Blurs edges between colors)
Eraser (erases to RGB(100,100,100) for grayscale or background color for color map)
Color picker (gets color beneath cursor)
Undo (skip back one of 10 undo levels)
Redo (skip forward again if you just pressed Undo)
Zoom function (shows area currently edited enlarged in a 64x64 window)
Change view (show lightmap transparent over background, shows walkable areas)
RGB sliders and color picking from tonal map (would a palette function be of use for anyone?)

Any wishes for further functionality? It should be easy to add a clone stamp, but I'm not sure how useful it would be.