Cycling colors FRM editor

F

Fallout1FTW

Still Mildly Glowing
After a couple of failures it seems to me that I can't use Frame Animator for scenery with cycling colors animation (the active pixels turn white).
I noticed that the FRMs have FPS set to 1 and Frame Animator supports this.

Does anyone know of a way to handle such FRMs, some other editor perhaps which can handle both the FPS and the cycling colors?
 
It's the 64 million dollar question...certain objects have the animated colors in them, but I don't know how to replicate it. :shrug:

This is the Fallout color palette, notice the missing colors at the bottom, well those suckers are the animated colors - Eg: Burning barrel, ocean, flaming torches, toxic goo, etc. It will be a happy day when someone can build new animated objects, because then they can explain to the rest of us how to do it...:wink:

002falloutpalette.jpg
 
It was a happy day yesterday, Pixote, because I managed to create a FRM with cycling colors animation :dance:

So here it is, the complete Fallout palette with all 256 colors (I just replaced their black/transparent with our blue/transparent at index 0).

noy2z6.png


http://www.easy-share.com/1914565831/FalloutAnimated.act

I created a new animation from the scratch and I successfully edited an existing animation.

There's a catch in editing existing scenery. Since no FRM program I have can handle the animated colors, you'll have to load the FRM into Frame Animator (with this palette), take a screenshot, and load it into your Photoshop. That way you'll preserve the original animated colors.

You can use the animated colors in your static art but remember that if you ever set FPS to more than 0, those colors will become animated.

Happy animating!
 
Thanks Fallout1FTW...this is great news, I'll give it a try, if I have any problems I'll drop a message here on the thread. :D

EDIT - I just checked your animated colors and compared them to the colors describes at the Wikia site. Some didn't match exactly, so I fixed the color palette, and used the order and the exact colors indicated at the Wikia site. The strange thing is they have 26 animated colors, but there was 27 empty tabs...so what is meant to be the last color...I made it the Fallout black (R-12.G-12.B-12). :shrug:

Yours.....................................................................Wikia
noy2z6.png
034falloutanimatedcolor.png

All I can do is see one frame of the animated colors on the animated object...is it possible to see all of the animated frames. See below. Looks like we need a new version of the Frame Animator.

035frameanimatoranimate.gif
 
You can use the animated colors in your static art but remember that if you ever set FPS to more than 0, those colors will become animated.
Click to expand...

UPDATE: It seems I was wrong here. I had color_cycling set to 0 when I tested this. :oops:
So regardless of the FPS, the colors will be animated. This means we have to use two palettes - one for static FRMs without the animated colors and one for animated FRMs with all the colors. This is so that any non-animated FRMs don't get accidentally animated during mode conversion in Photoshop.

.Pixote. said:
EDIT - I just checked your animated colors and compared them to the colors describes at the Wikia site.
Click to expand...

Something's not right with that palette. This is the one posted at Wikia (I believe it belongs to the FIFE team).
http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/Color.pal

ras2mc.png
Click to expand...

Look how the colors at index 1-3 are wrong. Also, the animated colors are off. TeamX's FRM2BMP also produced an erroneous palette when I converted an animated FRM

.Pixote. said:
Some didn't match exactly, so I fixed the color palette, and used the order and the exact colors indicated at the Wikia site.
Click to expand...

Changing the index colors will affect the transition speed between the colors. (Eg. there's a slow fire and a fast fire cyclic animation)

I know my palette doesn't match the one at Wikia. But there's a catch ;) I acquired my palette from the Fallout 2 Mapper (it was there all this time, I feel so stupid) and I successfully converted an existing FRM from the game and back to the game. That's why I believe it is the correct one.

I'll test everything extensively this weekend so I could use your fixed palette to see if it's the right one or not. Could you post it?

The best test would be to compare original scenery items side by side inside the game with the same scenery converted from Index->RGB->Our palettes and see if the animation colors and speed are the same. They have to match 100% with the right palette. I'll post my results at Monday.

.Pixote. said:
The strange thing is they have 26 animated colors, but there was 27 empty tabs...so what is meant to be the last color...I made it the Fallout black (R-12.G-12.B-12). :shrug:
Click to expand...

In my (F2 Mapper) palette the last color was pure black. Because I'm now certain original developers used pure black as their transparent, we should set it to our blue/transparent.

.Pixote. said:
All I can do is see one frame of the animated colors on the animated object...is it possible to see all of the animated frames. See below. Looks like we need a new version of the Frame Animator.
Click to expand...

I think that's no error. The idea with cyclic animated FRMs is that you have one frame and then the engine animates the colors for you. The animation depends mostly on your knowledge of the color cycle and cyclic color position inside the animation than anything else. Let's say you have 4 slow fire colors in your FRM. By using all four, you will get 4 different cycles:

slow fire 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4
slow fire 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 1
slow fire 3 -> 4 -> 1 -> 2
slow fire 4 -> 1 -> 2 -> 3

They together will create the animation you want. :)
 
OK, I did some testing over the weekend and I have to say that this will be tough. The problem is in the fact that the engine moves cyclic colors inside the palette all the time! (even on the main menu) :crazy:
I can't determine their starting positions (indexes) at the moment.
If I set cyclic colors to 0 in CFG file the engine will reset them to 100% black.

I'll have to dig into the PAL file and see what's going on there. That's the only way to get the true palette.

Pixote, as far as your Wikia palette goes, the test showed that it correctly displays colors for active Stealth Boy but not for the Burning Barrel, for example.

The search continues...
 
The mystery of the Fallout color palette continues... :mrgreen: How are you accessing the information? Is it with a hex editor?
 
Actually, it was pretty trivial :look:
Just press F12 and open up the screenshot in Photoshop to access the palette. You'll see how the palette's cyclic colors move all the time (the engine is doing that). At one point I compared palettes from FO1, FO2, and Mapper and they were all different. At that time I didn't know the color cycling is literal so I thought that they used different palettes :lol:

But now it's time to fire up my hex editor

http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/Pal_files
http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/PAL_File_Format

I just hope the colors are inside the PAL file and not populated by the engine itself during the runtime

EDIT: Oh crap.

From Wikia

"The Fallout developers decided to hardcode the RGB values for these animated colors in the Fallout2.exe even though there was space for them in the color.pal. They set the RGB values for the color indexes 229-255 to FF(hex) / 255(dec) in the .pal file and read the real RGB values just from the Fallout2.exe. "
 
I'll check it out, thanks.
So far we know which colors get animated but we don't know their starting indexes. This can produce noticeable differences in animations (speed, direction, & overall feeling). We can all use animated colors right now, but without a correctly indexed palette we'll all get vastly different results.

For now we have the correct indexes for stealth boy (Pixote's Wikia palette) and correct indexes for the burning barrel (my Mapper palette).
With further tests we'll acquire the correct one, it will just take a bit more time.

Mash, can you dig up the cyclic colors starting positions (indexes) from Fallout2.exe ?
 
These are the palette offsets I get: (in hexadecimal)
Code: 
slime        E5, E6, E7, E8
blue         E9, EA, EB, EC, ED
fire1        EE, EF, F0, F1, F2
fire2        F3, F4, F5, F6, F7
brown        F8, F9, FA, FB, FC, FD
alarm red    FE
I also made this FRM which is a 16x16 grid of the fallout palette colours. Load it up in the mapper and you'll be able to see what sections are doing what.
 
Excellent work Mash - is there a way to fix the Titanium Frm Browser so it can display animated Fallout colors? At the moment it displays them as white inanimate areas.

12eMj.gif
 
Mash, thanks for your contribution. I'll test it today and post the results tomorrow.
You arranged the animated colors inside the FRM just as they appear in the Fallout2.exe?

Pixote, did you try replacing default.pal with the one from master.dat?
 
.Pixote. said:
Excellent work Mash - is there a way to fix the Titanium Frm Browser so it can display animated Fallout colors? At the moment it displays them as white inanimate areas.
Click to expand...
Very unlikely, time would probably be better spent making a new viewer/editor.
And before you ask the obvious :), I way to busy at the moment with the next hi-res patch that never seems to get finished.

Fallout1FTW said:
You arranged the animated colors inside the FRM just as they appear in the Fallout2.exe?
Click to expand...
Yep, all the colours should be in order (0 to FF).
 
Pixote: I just tried it. The download worked, I installed it, (needed to disable Avast antivirus :(, or wait for 20 minute scan) and ran, it works. BUT, since it's made in Java, and I am still learning the language, it has some drawbacks in deployment, like, I could only make a 64 bit version so far, and installer only. As soon as I figure out, how to deploy it for 32 bit and a simple exe, without installation, I will post it here again, until then, I only update the fodev.net thread.

I did not share the jar's yet, which you could run on any operating system, if you got java and some other req JRE libs installed, but it's open source and can be found github, if anyone wants to recompile it themselves, or change it.

Drobovik: Ty for making another link, this tool is in development, I'll try to publish changes, new features each week, so probably that link will go obsolete soonish, I suggest using the fodev thread or mirror it here. (If you guys try the editor out and like it, I could mirror the development thread here as well, it's a copy paste of BB code I hope)

Also, if you or anyone got some features you would like to see in it, tell me, maybe I can include it.
 
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