1: http://www.alexfinch.com/alister/palsuite/ I haven't really given it much experimentation but what I have done with it is quite impressive, the gradient maker is reallllly nice.
2: There really isn't an ideal. I think I have like 30 colours for my characters but that's cause I've gone uberlow colour for my main character, those colours also go into my GUIs and that leaves me with about 200 colours for backgrounds which is a nice number but it's all up to you.
3: Remember that you can reuse colours from your backgrounds in your characters. 256 colours is a LOT of colours as long as you know what you're doing. If you want supersmooth gradients then you more than likely don't want to go 256 colours. The major thing you should make a palette for is your GUIs, main characters, and inventory objects. Because these items will appear in a variety of different rooms you want their colours to stay the same no matter what. Any object that will appear in more than one room either make sure that objects colours are in the palette or they're in the background images. Playing Monkey Island 2 I think if you have a large peice of meat and go into a certain room the meat's colour changes to grey this is cause the palette was all used up and the engine had to choose another colour for the meat.
make any sense?
eric
2: There really isn't an ideal. I think I have like 30 colours for my characters but that's cause I've gone uberlow colour for my main character, those colours also go into my GUIs and that leaves me with about 200 colours for backgrounds which is a nice number but it's all up to you.
3: Remember that you can reuse colours from your backgrounds in your characters. 256 colours is a LOT of colours as long as you know what you're doing. If you want supersmooth gradients then you more than likely don't want to go 256 colours. The major thing you should make a palette for is your GUIs, main characters, and inventory objects. Because these items will appear in a variety of different rooms you want their colours to stay the same no matter what. Any object that will appear in more than one room either make sure that objects colours are in the palette or they're in the background images. Playing Monkey Island 2 I think if you have a large peice of meat and go into a certain room the meat's colour changes to grey this is cause the palette was all used up and the engine had to choose another colour for the meat.
make any sense?
eric
