How to apply colors ?

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Antonio
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Joined: Fri Aug 06, 2010 2:12 pm

How to apply colors ?

Post by Antonio »

I'm trying to figure out how colors must be applied when parsing a BDCFF-file.

I've seen the documentation which says :

Code: Select all

Colors=[border background] foreground1 foreground2 foreground3 [amoeba slime]

but frankly, I find this a bit vague, what does that mean exactly ?

So far, (with some experimenting with the maps-convertor), I've come up with this :

- When 3 colors are present, then :

color 1 = dirt
color 2 = steelwall & boulders
color 3 = wall & flies


- When 4 colors are present, then :

color 1 = space
color 2 = dirt
color 3 = steelwall & boulders
color 4 = wall & flies


- When 5 colors are present, then :

color 1 = border
color 2 = space
color 3 = dirt
color 4 = steelwall & boulders
color 5 = wall & flies


- When 6 colors are present, then :

color 1 = border
color 2 = space
color 3 = dirt
color 4 = steelwall & boulders
color 5 = wall & flies
color 6 = amoeba & slime


- When 7 colors are present, then :

color 1 = border
color 2 = space
color 3 = dirt
color 4 = steelwall & boulders
color 5 = wall & flies
color 6 = amoeba
color 7 = slime

Is this correct ?
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LogicDeLuxe
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Re: How to apply colors ?

Post by LogicDeLuxe »

Antonio wrote:Is this correct ?
More or less.
For one thing, there are no caves with 4 or 6 colors. It's always 3, 5 or 7. (You can tell by the way the brackets are placed.)

The dirt mod may be in place which makes foreground 2 the Dirt's main color. BD2 uses it for Amoeba caves (and Slime too in the EA release). Also most fan games of the 80's use this for any Slime or Amoeba caves, as this was the way No One and Knibble Packer worked. I made this behavior optional in the Deluxe Packer, an enhanced version of the No One Packer.

Amoeba and Slime usually are foreground 3 if not specified otherwise, but there are quite a few games which have foreground 1 for that, mainly the games using the dirt mod. CrLi has foreground 1 for Slime and foreground 3 for Amoeba.

The Atari version has a 4th color for Amoeba/Slime. Technically, they share the same, but they were made individual in BDCFF to be more versatile for new caves which are not meant to be played on the original hardware.

The C64 version has individual colors for background and border while the Atari doesn't. To keep things simple, there are always either 0 or 2 colors for this.

Nothing of this should be considered a sure bet, though, since it pretty much depends on the used character set anyway. Though your item assignments should fit most of the time.

The strange definition of the colors-attribute is the way it is, because it was meant to represent what early 8-bit implementations did.
Antonio
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Posts: 20
Joined: Fri Aug 06, 2010 2:12 pm

Post by Antonio »

Thank you for this thorough explanation. :)
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