Inquiry: Possibility of replacing in-game art

[thebritwriter]

Hello, I currently been doing a lot of fan art in relation to ufo defence ( or ufo enemy unkown)

 I have been given a commission about creating artwork and style to replace some of the ingame base. (For example change the background art in the science menu to feature vahlen or solider list showing Bradford)

In short I've been tasked to try and replace some in-game art with the 2012 remake base personel.

Is this possible? and if so, what steps have to be taken? Such as finding the files, if it's jpg etc. As this is entirely a new field and will be asking a lot of questions.

Here is my xcom art work so far.

https://thebritwriter.deviantart.com/gallery/

regards

thebritwriter.

[Meridian]

Yes, it is possible to replace all graphics.

You need to create an image, and add some ruleset (text description).
There are many mods around you can take inspiration from.
I'm attaching one sample mod, which changes the background for research GUI (bgtest.zip).

Please note that most graphics in xcom are 256 colors or even less, for example the backgrounds you mentioned are only 16 colors (and you need to use very specific palette indexes for this to work... look at the palette of the sample image (Back_05.gif) to see what I mean).

PS: you can't use jpg... only gif and png... I recommend png

[tkzv]

Please note that most graphics in xcom are 256 colors or even less, for example the backgrounds you mentioned are only 16 colors (and you need to use very specific palette indexes for this to work... look at the palette of the sample image (Back_05.gif) to see what I mean).

PS: you can't use jpg... only gif and png... I recommend png

Why PNG is better than GIF?

[Meridian]

Because it works on Mac as well.

[Hobbes]

Please note that most graphics in xcom are 256 colors or even less, for example the backgrounds you mentioned are only 16 colors (and you need to use very specific palette indexes for this to work... look at the palette of the sample image (Back_05.gif) to see what I mean).

Elaborating a little further on Meridian's point, you'll need to convert your artwork to the specific XCom palette. There's an image editor called Grafx2 that will do this automatically and generally keeping the same colors, but the results will depend on what you're trying to convert.

As an example, here's the Main Menu of a mod I'm working on:



And here's the original image that I converted using Grafx2 to replace the vanilla background:



An an example of a fake mod whose image didn't convert very well and showing the limitations of the ingame resolution and palette:



Original image: