Sprite modifications - color palettes?

[Quinch]

I'm doing some basic recoloring work for the FMP and I'm a little confused - what are the restrictions, if any, when it comes to color palettes? The original Xcom had some pretty tight rules to accommodate the tight hardware, but I'm seeing PNGs being liberally used, not to mention the leaps and bounds technology has made. Thus, my question is, are battlescape sprites restricted to battlescape color palette, or do I have the full range of colors to choose from?

[Falko]

battlescape sprites are restricted to battlescape color palette

[Quinch]

Gotcha. A followup question then - I have a sprite from the FMP and I'm trying to recolor it. However, there are colors it contains that don't seem to be present in the palette, yet the sprite appears to work fine within the mod itself. How is that?

[yrizoud]

A png file is not necessarily 24bit. I just checked ANTHROPOD.png from the FMP, and it is a 256-color image. The creature mostly uses colors 112 to 122, it's part of the 8th 'range' of colors.

[Falko]

pckview palette is wrong https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=1321.msg32646#msg32646
the colors are very similar but not the same
i have no idea how pckview transforms pck to bmp and back (i find the bmp concept very strange)
so i cant say anything about the "palview" colors you showed
i myself used bomblokes toolkit to convert PCK to gif and a pythonscript to fix the palette in the image
but now i have my own script for that
perhaps i will put it online during the weekend

[Quinch]

Eh, figures. Okay, another quick question, are there spritesheets for the vanilla races and/or a file containing all the colors in the battlescape palette {since PCKview is apparently a wash} somewhere accessible?

[Dioxine]

Creating a Photoshop macro to convert what PCKview delivers into a correct palette gifs worked for me, pretty much flawlessly, but as far as I know Falko's tools, it's better to wait till he puts it online to save yourself much of the work