The Savage Empire Remake: Sprite Dimensions and Palette
Scythifuge has posted a brief explanation/clarification to The Savage Empire Remake’s Facebook page:
To note, all of my sprites utilize the Ultima VII palette & are drawn within the common Ultima VII sprite dimensions with proper offsets applied when & where needed.
With that said, I question Origin’s use of certain gradients with regards to the reds, blues, bright greens & yellows. The differences between some of the colors are so subtle that after testing on 5 different monitors, from CRT to LCD, I have to zoom in very close to see a difference.
I feel that some of those barely different shades are wasted & limit the Ultima VII-esque pixel artist. I know that the palette can be altered & used in Exult Studio. Perhaps, when I am having artist block, I should play with the shades…
I’m going to ramble for a minute. I have an app on my phone, called DotEDITOR, that I occasionally flip open when I’m bored. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using it to craft a tileset, for which I have a couple of potential uses in mind. DotEDITOR allows me to define a palette of up to sixteen colours for each tile I draw…and I flip between palettes quite regularly, depending on what I want to draw.
All of which is to say that, speaking purely as myself, I encourage Scythifuge to have some fun with the palettes if the option to modify them exists. The potential that can be unlocked by doing so is…well, it would be kind of pedantic to say “limitless”, so let’s just say “significant” instead.
What say you, Ultima fans?
I don’t know what Origin did when MCGA was the equivalent of 1080p, but here’s what I did which might explain the odd palette with wastefully similar colors. I’d give you specifics like what software I used but it was so long ago I actually don’t remember. Probably some ancient version of Photoshop.
Anyway, I’d draw all the game graphics as separate images using 16-bit color. When finished they’d be copied to a single 16-bit tileset image. When I was ready to test in-game using an 8-bit palette I’d reduce the tileset image palette from 16-bit to 8-bit, then save the image for the game to read. The game would use the image’s 8-bit palette for everything, so basically it was the paint program that created the 8-bit palette and not a human manually. This technique allowed you to create the art using any colors you liked, yet still have the optimum 8-bit palette at the end.
Look at the 24-bit.png and 8-bit.png files here to see what it might look like (8-bit palette is using a GIMP dithering algorithm and the source image is photographic, so YMMV):
http://eightvirtues.com/misc