Duck and Cover

Hello, I'm new to the forums and to modding Fallout 2. I did a search but couldn't find any topic covering this.

I'd like to use custom palettes. I realize that master.dat has custom.pal (or something like that) that is a global palette. In fact I even discovered that the Photoshop Color Table file (*.ACT) files are actually the same format (probably just 255 RGB entries if I had to venture a guess). Anyhow, I wish to use custom palettes for my FRMs.

I know I can create .PAL files and include them in my DAT, but my question is could I somehow link the FRM to that specific PAL? FRM2CON has the ability to display custom palettes and I reasoned that why include that ability if you have to use the default palette? (I suppose someone could change the global palette, but wouldn't that through off the color scheme for every single FRM? That'd be a lot of work to recolorize the entire FRM library if that's the case)

Thank you in advance for any help and sorry for the long post.

Well, the first part is the same, but the palettes in Fallout are actually 32k+768bytes long.

We know the 768bytes (which as you mentioned are the same as the ACT palette in photoshop), but the rest we don't really know about.

I'm personally guessing it's a precalc table for the ltransparancy effect used to make the halo (and fade ins/outs), but that could very well be wrong, though I'm often rigth about this kind of stuff.

Anyway, given you change a palette, you'd need to change the palette FOR THE WHOLE GAME.

I don't think you want to go through this process (though you might just want to colorize the palette which would work but I doubt that's what you want to do and it's mostly pointless anyway))

Oh well, that's what I was afraid of. Man, I'm not sure how I'm going to do this since I was trying to use real photos of items and then shrink and palettize them.

I guess I could create a program that finds the colors in the source photo and attempts to match them as best as possible to the Fallout 2 palette. I wonder how that'd turn out. Hmmm....guess I'll just have to try it and find out. I'll let you know if the results are any good and if so I may post such a program.

Thanks!

Um... just take the Fallout palette and use that palette as reference for the original image... I'm sure Photoshop supports that... Why s that a big problem?