I originally intended to keep this secret until the revealing of my next scenario, but it's not só useful after all
. So I decided to reveal my "secret" to the scenario community so they can enjoy too making nicely coloured radar maps.
Observating an extremely shitty scenario (no offense to its author, if any) from the Apolyton archives, one "Biowar", I finally found the solution to a mystery that has haunted me all too long.
This scenario's author took the big step of including his own units.bmp, but used a strange palette (not the standard one). Obviously, all game colours were now messed up and the whole game looked like ****. It surprises me that he didn't notice it during playtesting, but perhaps he did not playtest it.
Anyway, the colours of the radar map were also changed to this strange palette and this enabled me to realize that the radar map colours were changeable (not hardcoded as I always thought) and how they were to be changed.
Apparently, as I found out the colour palette of UNITS.GIF determines the palettes of all other .GIF files too. If colour at palette no 0 is black, it supposes it is too in ICONS.GIF. If you turn this palette colour into white, it will also change the black colours in ICONS.GIF into white when playing. Therefore, if you change the palette to your liking in UNITS.GIF, save that palette and apply it to all the other files too.
The radar map has land (normal=green) and sea (normal=blue) colours. They are paletter no 38 (land) and 83 (sea) in UNITS.GIF and changing these will change the colours of the radar map. (be sure to check if all units still look good and be sure to apply the palette to the other gifs and check their colours).
This is not very handy in most scenarios, but can be useful in desert scenarios, such as Stefan's Pharaon, or Afrika Corps when you turn palette 38 into yellow.
As I went further experimenting, I found out that all colours in the game were actually determined by this palette, so also: the background colour behind the civ2 logo (palette no 148) (nice for something different, or for changing back all of ToT to civ2
), a large (if not all) number of in-game text colours and so on.
For example: Normal text colour has pixel number 6 with a shadow of pixel colour 23. Text in the title border of pop-up boxes have pixel number 16 with background 0 (also used for shadow of city names). A number of other texts have 31 and also 0 for their shadow.
Anyway, these are just a few of the things you can do. Basically every single colour in the game is determined by the palette of UNITS.GIF.
