Angelina For Governor, obviously was very difficult to do in 256 colors. Ha ha. My God it took me forever. Luckily I had some of the best material in the world to work with. I had to use three differant image software programs on each image. And that was after finding a method that would suffice. I also kind of doubt everyone has my three specific graphics programs.
24 bit would help all the others that will be uploading race images for Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc. I suspect this is why we haven't seen any yet.
I hope this is more than wishful thinking, for I do a lot of that too.
The person who wrote the codecs for the pcx and tga files that we use for our games no longer works here and I'm still pretty clueless about anything involving graphics. I've added it to my wish list but I can't promise that it'll come any time soon.
Actually any main stream graphics program - Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro... heck even ACDSee.. will convert a picture down to 256 colors with minimal loss (well as minimal as 256 colors allows!).
Be sure to always use "perceptual" color sampling when lowering colors. I've had little problem with any pcx or tga conversions working in GalCiv and most are not too "grainy" looking.
Yes that did the trick! I was making a more family friendly version of the Angelina MOD. Working with the image as TGA resizing, that is, then converting it to PCX. I achieved excellent results. It made a world of differance. I used Photo Shop Pro 8 for the editing and then Power Desk's coversion feature to make the final 8 bit 256 color PCX. It looks great. I will be experimenting more with this as I will be trying to build some frames for my first BIK video sumbission in the next couple days.
Actually it turns out that it was that I used a more busy image with more flesh filling the image so the tga didn't really make the differance. Anyhow until or when high color is available the Rad Tools will do all the coverting at the best quality I have found so far. And its not bad. I posted a lengthy post early this morning detailing just how versitile it is. And Bill sent me an event editor to try today. The mod forum is developing as per my expectations.