help with vdungeon palletes

[shadowandtheflame12bottle]

I just started editing prince of persia about half a year ago, and I only recently found out that you can edit the actual colors, and animations in the game, using pr and prm.exe, anyway, after exporting all of the .dat files, I read the faq about changing the color pallette for the dungeon, except I don't understand any of it. I have Microsoft paint and Paint shop pro, although I do not know of what use they are, If anyone knows how to change the pallette of the colors used in the dungeon, please feel free to respond, it would be much appreciated.

[poirot]

It is Jasc Paint Shop Pro. I think prm.exe is a bit old; you should try the original console program PR 1.0 beta. This program allows you to extract all DAT files (is the program prm.exe is based on, but prm is based on PR 0.6).
The FAQ's I've written applies only to PR 0.9 and higher, perhaps that's why you couldn't make it work.

All bmp's uses the same palette (sorry, that's a dat format limitation), so as an advise: just draw all the bitmaps with 24-bit colours and after that put all images in one big image and reduce the color mode to 16 colour-palette, make sure black is the first one. Save this palette as a Jasc format .pal (Not microsoft format that is much different) and replace the original extracted .pal file. Apply this palette to the nearest colour to each bitmap you have and all your images will be imported right.

[darthmarsden]

Also, I recommend using Paint Shop Pro 7 to edit the palletes, if you need to. I've found it's the best program to do so, although you may have a bit of trouble getting hold of it nowadays. Sadly, the more available Paint Shop Pro 9 just isn't quite as user-friendly when it comes to this sort of thing

[Rick]

I think I've found a palette-related bug in PR with prince 1.4 exporting/importing.

The following sequence causes levels to load in obviously wrong colors:

Code: Select all

PR -etest
PR -itest

On the import, I choose "all" as the "overwrite" option. Levels with the default palette (both dungeon and palace levels) render just fine. Levels with modified palettes come out in bright shades of red and green, or even pitch black. I'm not sure why this is, but I discovered it while trying to get the "SNES Level 11" texture set recolored to the standard palette so it would work with later levels. I was worried that I broke something, so I reverted to a fresh install of 1.4 and eventually found that just exporting and then importing causes this behavior. Does anyone know why this would happen or if there's a known workaround? Thanks!

By the way, I just checked the version and it's PR 1.1 Win32.

EDIT: I should add that PR 1.2 crashes when importing or exporting with the code above. This is with Prince of Persia 1.4.

EDIT 2: PR Version 1.1 works fine if I remove some of the directories. Right now I have everything except VDungeon deleted and it's fine...so I'm guessing it's the "Palletes" directory, but in any case it's apparently some other directory that it exports that it can't re-import.

[Rick]

Continuing on this, it looks like there are palette issues with PR 1.1 and PoP 1.4. The "extended" palettes can be ruined by importing DAT files like Prince.DAT which contain palettes. For example, Brain's SNES guards will mess up the backgrounds if their palettes are imported, but not on levels like level 1 or 2 where the default palette is loaded. If their palettes are not included, of course, the levels will be fine but the guards will be miscolored.

EDIT: Further information...Prince.DAT definitely doesn't like to be imported by PR 1.1. If I do anything with it, even export from it and then import just the "prince" directory, it somehow messes up the file. Specifically, it causes the palette issue where levels with nonstandard palettes (such as level 3 in Prince Of Persia 1.4) show up wrong. I suspect that the additional resources that correspond to the extra palettes are not listed in the XML file and are therefore being left out or otherwise trashed. I don't know for sure yet.

[poirot]

that's because you are using a resources.xml optimized for prince 1.0. We should create one optimized for 1.4, if you would like to do it and share with the community it'll be welcome, it is really simple, just use the unknown.xml files and mix them all together.

[Rick]

that's because you are using a resources.xml optimized for prince 1.0. We should create one optimized for 1.4, if you would like to do it and share with the community it'll be welcome, it is really simple, just use the unknown.xml files and mix them all together.

Yes, I would like to do that. I'd like to do it with PR 1.1, since that program works best for me. Is there any advice you could give about how to proceed?

EDIT: I see, remove the prince.dat section from the XML file, then run PR with the "--unknown" option.

EDIT 2: Looks like there's one line different, but I also found two messed up lines in vdungeon, so I'll try to get a file out soon. Until then, here's the line, it should go in with the "binary" folder in the Prince.DAT section:

Code: Select all

   <item value="20" path="extended palettes.bin" itemtype="binary">Unknown binary 4</item>