SneakyGuy101 on 31/7/2013 at 19:44
So I'm making a mission and I want it to be in black and white, so I was wondering how do you change the textures into black and white textures?
ZylonBane on 31/7/2013 at 20:06
One at a time.
For terrain textures you can change the family palette to greyscale. I think that's still supported under NewDark.
Yandros on 31/7/2013 at 22:37
It does as long as the textures in the family are all paletted (GIF or PCX). As to the actual how, Saturation 0 is preferable to going to greyscale, which is 8bit. Assuming your source image is 32bit and you want to keep it that way.
EmperorSteele on 31/7/2013 at 22:44
There are a couple missions which have done that. But yeah, you'd have to manually edit every texture you want to use.
Sliptip on 31/7/2013 at 23:14
If you're using Photoshop to desaturate, I'd definitely look at using the batch processing. You can easily desaturate the entire contents of a folder in a few button clicks:thumb:
ZylonBane on 31/7/2013 at 23:41
Quote Posted by Yandros
As to the actual how, Saturation 0 is preferable to going to greyscale, which is 8bit.
How do you figure? An 8-bit greyscale bitmap should be visually identical to a 24-bit bitmap with zero saturation.
Yandros on 1/8/2013 at 11:54
I'll take your word for that, you're more knowledgeable about it than I am.
The Watcher on 1/8/2013 at 12:44
Well, look at it this way Russ: when you have a 24 bit image, you have 8 bits of red (0-255), 8 bits of green, and 8 bits of blue. For an image with zero saturation, the values in all three channels will be the same. So black will be 0,0,0; white will be 255,255,255; and a mid-grey colour will be 128,128,128. Effectively, you have one 8 bit channel that is copied into the remaining two channels in the 24 bit image, but those two extra copies are redundant and only needed because you're using a 24 bit image.
If you use something like a palletised GIF or PNG, with a colour palette set to 256 shades of grey (as opposed to 50, thankfully), you effectively get the same quality of greyscale image as a 0 saturation 24 bit image in less space*.
Some image formats like PNG have a specific (
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter08.html#png.ch08.div.5.3) greyscale format, where it only stores that single channel of brightness information**, and that can result in smaller files (even more so than a palettised image, as you don't need the 768 bytes of palette data)
* uncompressed, a 256x256 24 bit image requires 256*256*3 = 196608 bytes of storage, while a 256x256 8 bit palettised image takes (256*256) + (256 * 3) = 66304 bytes of storage. A 'true' 8 bit greyscale image without the need for a palette only needs 65536 bytes
** I don't actually know if the PNG loader code in newdark supports greyscale PNGs, I guess I should try it when I'm not supposed to be working. I also wonder if it supports PNG's 16 bit greyscale format - that allows for much less banding in greyscale images.
ZylonBane on 1/8/2013 at 14:55
Also, greyscale images look much nicer in NewDark, since it apparently stores textures 24-bit internally. Original Dark reduced textures to RGB565, which meant ugly banding and greenish color casts on grey gradients.
Yandros on 2/8/2013 at 02:52
Thanks guys, that makes sense.
