Making and importing organized custom Palettes.

Ever wanted to include seasons or day/night effects in a game without having to recolour all your sprites? Have you ever simply wanted to change the default Palette? This has been a big challenge for me for a while now. So now that I've finally figured out an easy way of doing this I thought it only fair that I share it!


Step 1:
Download and install the free trial version of Pro Motion. This is a 30 day trial, but gives you plenty of time to make heaps of Palettes

You can get it here: http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php?Downloads


Step 2:
Create a new file in Pro Motion and untick the second box on the Settings Tab (this will ensure no colours are removed from your palette when saving for MMF). Click OK

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Step 3:
Go to 'Colors > Load Palette' Load defpal.bmp from the DATA folder in your MMF installation. If you don't have this or can't find it, I've conveniently uploaded it here: http://www.roxflame.com/images/defpal.bmp

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Step 4:
Now that you have loaded up the Default MMF Palette you can start editing it! Simply enlarge the palette window and you have a bunch of tools at your disposal. From here you can select colour ranges and individual colours and adjust as needed. When editing the Palette, be sure to leave the basic colours in the top and bottom lines of the default MMF palette intact (or the palette will not import perfectly into your game)

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Step 5:
Now that you've made a sweet sweet custom Palette for your game, simply save your new file as the first option in the list (BMP - Windows Bitmap indexed) with whatever name you want (feel free to draw whatever you want in this image to remind you of what it is). Because we unticked that box earlier on, it will automatically include all the colours of your Palette in the image colour table!



Step 6:
Open TGF/MMF/MMF2. In the frame properties, go to the settings tab and find the Palette importing option. Import your newly saved image and you will see your custom palette appear (in all its neatly organized glory!) Now the animation editor for this frame will use your imported palette. You can import separate palettes on a frame by frame basis to create sweet night/seasonal effects

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Take note that to make palette changes to your game for the purpose of recolouring your sprites you will need to first set your game to 256 colour mode and when importing palettes into frames do NOT choose the remap option when prompted.

If you make any custom palettes that you think might be useful to others, then uploading them and posting links to the BMP files here as comments would be awesome!