Hello,I am new to designing and I am trying to build a panel bitmap for my new plane. I have all these wonderful programs to paint including PSP7 which has some very nice lighting effects etc... The problem I am having is everytime I paint some with a gradient or sunburst, it looks great in PSP and then looks very GRAINEY in FS2002. I am using 24-bit bitmaps and run the game in 32 bit colour. I see many panels made by other people and they look great with very intricate shading on them. Someone please help as I am sitting very close to a sharp butter knife and I am not afraid to use it on myself!!!!Not yet buttered, Escafe

Hi Escafe,It's a well known subject. In fact you can use 24-bit colored Bitmaps but this doesn't mean that you also can define this large number of colors as you want. Remember back to FS98. There you could use 256 colors but you just can define 32 colors as you want. In FS2000 and FS2002 you can use 24-bit colors but here you just can define 256 colors. All others were used from the MS palette. In FS98 you had the possibility to name the Flightsimulator all 32 colors in the 8-bit section of the Panel.cfg. This also works in FS2000 and maybe also in FS2002. If you do not define those 32 colors because you want to use a 24-bit colored Bitmap the Flightsimulator takes the first 256 colors of the Bitmap which are not part of his own palette. All other colors were taken from the standard palette of MS. If you now have a very colorful Bitmap it could happen that some of the colors are not displayed as in the Paintprogramm. This happens especially where you have intensive color gradients in your Bitmap (shadows, light effects or other things). The allotment of the different gradient colors are too small so FS ignore those colors or replace them with FS own colors. It sounds funny but especially for such colorful Bitmaps it's the best to reduce your Bitmap to 256 colors. PSP uses some very good filters to reduce the colors without losing much of the visual quality.Best RegardsMatthias

How do you go about setting your colour palette?