I should punch myself in the face

256 color limitation

One of the tricky aspect of working with Arena textures is that they are only 256 colors AND that color information is indexed from a palette file. That means the image doesn’t have the color info in the file, it has a reference point to a master color file (this saved valuable space in the old timey 3 1/2 floppy days). Colors in an image have to be one of those exact colors in the palette file. To work around this, I have been only using colors in whatever image I was working on. It worked, but it can limit in being creative. I did most of the project this way.

DOH!

Now, but a scant mere 9 years later, I realized to import the color palette in as a raw image similar to how I first did early in my hobby working on another project. Once imported, I could create a Photoshop swatch of all the working colors and boom. I’m blond, what can I say.

More progress on actual files next update, although you can see a preview in the image above 🙂

– Martin