Custom Palette for FS98

[Guest]

Hello All,I am creating scenery for Puerto Rico (Isla Culebra) and I am using satellite photo for texture. I am colorizing the satellite image using photoshop. I want to create a custom palette for the scenery and have FS98 use that palette. Can any of you tell me how I can have FS use this custom palette?I am using airphoto to place the texture in Flight Simulator.RegardsJohn

[Guest gorchi]

Hi John!This is rather problematic that FS98 has fixed pallete. Maybe You can try it this way:Make 256x256 bitmap then convert it to r8 file using convr8.exe software written by Martin Wright. You can download this program using this link: http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/programs/convr8.htm. With this program You'll get r8 file which You can convert it back to bmp and then open it with PSP, PhotoShop etc.. This way You'll get the palette.Anyway it is weird that in the days of FS2002 somebody wants to insert photoreal sceenry in FS98. If You will use FS2000 You have freedom with 8bit color palette but You can even use 16bit colors...Hope it helps. Best regards,Goran BrumenFS Slovenija 2002 teamhttp://slovenia.avsim.net

[Guest PaulL01]

Wow, this has been awhile, actually FS98 does make use of 256 color Bmp files, though this was not widely known, (check with Tim Dickens who tipped me off on this when I was working on Upstate NY Photoreal project) you will have to edit your scasm code to ID the extention of your bmps, you can even use *.bmp just make sure your scasm code and the bmps are named the same, I would recommend Martin Wrights BmpCrop utilitie. If you want to use Airphoto it at least can give you a custom color pallet based on your image , the first 140 indexed colors in the FS pallet are fixed but the the last 120 or so can be anything you like, just read the Airphoto docs carefully or like I said just use 256 color Bmps.

[Guest]

Hey Paul,Thanks for the tip. I seem to be beating a dead horse with this FS98 design. Not many people out there still using it, so I have to ask veterans like yourself for some top notch advice. Hey are you really good with Airphoto? I have been using it and I have some questions.RegardsJohn

[arno 1]

That's indeed a long time ago :D. I tried to use Airphoto when I started scenery design. I think if you read the manual it should work rather straight forward.I don't know if it is still relevant, but when our NL2000 team started making our first scenery (for Fs98) we noticed that the performance of the sim really went down if we used a custom pallete. When we used the default there was no problem (if I remember correct we were talking about 5 compared to 20 frames).Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]

[Guest PaulL01]

>That's indeed a long time ago :D. I tried to use Airphoto >when I started scenery design. I think if you read the >manual it should work rather straight forward. >>I don't know if it is still relevant, but when our NL2000 >team started making our first scenery (for Fs98) we noticed >that the performance of the sim really went down if we used >a custom pallete. When we used the default there was no >problem (if I remember correct we were talking about 5 >compared to 20 frames). >>Arno >

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team >[a >href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]I think you had some other code issues as a custom pallet would not cause this unless there was some conflict, BAO employed the use of the custom pallete in all of their photorealistic addons -Sanfransisco, Washigton DC, NYC and LesVegas. I benched FS98 with each new version of my scenery and used a custom pallet and the only frame killer for me was when I used very detailed Texmap instructions. My final Fingerlakes scenery version for FS98 covered 6000Sq miles that was completly visible from one end to the other (80 miles) this was way beyond the normal design limits of FS as I was employing the use of custom made software built excusivly for me by Konstintine Kakushkin that calculated transform calls to draw "big" textures out at the extremes while the in "near" view was covered in the high resolution texture, this is the same technique that was employed by BAO in the first photorealistic addon- SanFransisco.There are many tricks to get the most out of your custom pallet, as I made full use of the last 112(?) custom indexed colors as well as just certain colors of the first 128(?) as these first 128 are just to saturated, some of the mid section index could not be used as these were reserved for clouds and sunset effects.One of the great tools to get is HAZER as this will help you setup and edit the haze pallet as well, it also has some other neat functions. Do a search for "hazer" and you should be able to find it.