Ok, paint\panel experts. What did I do wrong?

[Guest tonyc]

I edited one of the posts with a paint program. After the conversion from pbm to bmp, the background screen appeared red. I edited the post, left the background color untouched, saved the new image, converted it to a pbm. When I load the aircraft with the new edited post, the red background color shows up. This, of course, hides the scenery and part of the panel. I've changed the color of the background( to black), and, still, it gets in the way. What did I do wrong? I am using a freeeware paint program, Image Forge, and can't seem to figure out th trick. It does not always do with other bmp images, since I had tried another image and everything looked fine. This one is from the "Acdefaultfix.pod" and it's for the Hawker. It's called 'perpost' in the pod. I've been playing with the panel editor a little, and I thought that editing panel graphics would be a good starting point.thanks.tony

[Guest WilliamD]

No expert here, but whenever you load a BMP into a paint program the color values may change. For example, I load a 256 color BMP into Photoshop, it may immediately convert it to RGB 16 million colors. If I were to edit the file, and save it back as a 256 color image, many of the colors would have different values than the original.Paintshop Pro is a good program to use because it is easy to work with 256 color images and indexed color palettes. Not sure about Image Forge.Areas that you want to be transparent in Fly!II must be pure black. The easiest way to insure that all of your transparent areas are black, is to set up one color index (usually 0) to be your black with RGB values of (0, 0, 0). Because there will be some areas in the image that will be black, but not transparent, it is best while you are working to use a unique color for transparent areas, eg. magenta. Set your color 0 to magenta, and paint all of your transparent areas. For other black areas, use a black with higher values (16, 16, 16) or (8,8,8). Don't use values too close to (0,0,0) or you may find Fly!2 will mistake them for transparent areas. Just before saving, change color index 0 back to (0,0,0) and save.

[Guest tonyc]

You're right. If the rgb values aren't zero, FLY2 does not see the background as transparent. thanks.tony