Ring Racers Custom Characters Sprite Sheet Confusion

I have some questions about sprite coloring and the palette:

When determining the paintable regions of a sprite, I usually convert any shade belonging to the other 16-color rows of the palette (like the 32-47 or 144-159 ranges) to the corresponding shade of green sharing the same column. But what if the non-paintable shade belongs to an 8-color row like 64-71 or 208-215? Or either of the two 4-color rows and the two 12-color ones? Should I still change it to the shade of green below or above it on the palette, or is there another method/rule of thumb I'm missing for this case?

Kaleb_Advent said:

Well, if there wasn't before, there is now! I made this myself by copying parts of the picture Zipper sent and pasting/editing them over parts of the asymmetrical template.

View attachment 118930

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I want to point out that the reference sprites for the glance/drift rows are in the wrong order. They should not be arranged like this:

View attachment 150070

Because otherwise your character will look at the camera like a moron every time you drift. Instead, they should be arranged like this:

View attachment 150074

If I'm understanding this correctly...
If you have SLADE installed, you can do this:

From the popup that appears, you can select any matrix of colors to be the correct shade of green, no matter how many colors are in that range. (The tool does not account for color value, and only looks for the position of the colors.)
(To clarify, "Origin Range" can be any set of colors, not just the 6 I have selected.)
Do note that this will recolor any part of the sprite that uses the colors you have selected, so be careful with using this method!

Don't tell me you've been doing this manually this whole time...

PlatterTheFinch said:

If I'm understanding this correctly...
If you have SLADE installed, you can do this:
View attachment 150119
From the popup that appears, you can select any matrix of colors to be the correct shade of green, no matter how many colors are in that range. (The tool does not account for color value, and only looks for the position of the colors.)
(To clarify, "Origin Range" can be any set of colors, not just the 6 I have selected.)
Do note that this will recolor any part of the sprite that uses the colors you have selected, so be careful with using this method!
View attachment 150120
Don't tell me you've been doing this manually this whole time...

Click to expand...

Yes, I have been doing it manually this whole time. Had to prepare and arrange an entire colormap matching the SRB2 palette on GIMP just to find (what i thought were) the correct shades of green. I'm genuinely insane.

That's actually really useful. The palette translation string helped me learn how, exactly, any range of colors is converted to another. Unfortunately, my process of making pre-rendered sprites via GIMP (by converting images to index mode using the SRB2 palette) tends to result in pixels of the same color being scattered around, so I still have to do manual corrections. But still, thanks for bringing this to my attention!

View attachment 118333

Bifiankin said:

For the sign, it’s only the image inside, however you might be able to edit the sign itself, since the sprite is transparent, such as that in my attempt of drawing this yesterday, your character can pop out of the sign a bit. Hope this helps!

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Is it necessary to blank out the example sprites? Especially the death ones

CatOnline said:

View attachment 118333

Is it necessary to blank out the example sprites? Especially the death ones

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If you mean the silhouettes, They use the opposite transparency color so you don't need to. They are mostly there to tell you where the sprite should be placed to line them up right.

Halkel Thundslash said:

If you mean the silhouettes, They use the opposite transparency color so you don't need to. They are mostly there to tell you where the sprite should be placed to line them up right.

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Thanks

Talking about transparency, in the example the transparency colors don't match, am i getting the wrong color sheet or something? (look at attachments)

CatOnline said:

Thanks

Post automatically merged: Jan 24, 2025

Talking about transparency, in the example the transparency colors don't match, am i getting the wrong color sheet or something? (look at attachments)

Click to expand...

The numbers shown there are RGB values rather than palette values. Or in hex, #7373ff, #5252ff. They are the color values for the colors you see in the sheet that represent each sprite's background individually so when converted into a wad those colors become transparent.

You don't want to use a palette color to make a transparent color. So its a color that doesn't exist there otherwise the sprite that uses that color will be affected.

Best way to show this is to go to a color picker and then put those numbers into their red, green and blue boxes. In this case, red and green are 115 or 82 with blue being 255.