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[Moogie]

I've been picking apart some different tilesets to create a personal mixture, but I've run into a problem. If I make the letter tiles with a transparent background, then all of the text on the menu screen and in various locations has an ugly coloured background. But if I make the letter tiles with an opaque black background, then certain menus such as the embark preparation screen (adding 'n'ew items) have no visual way to discern which item you currently have selected, which makes navigating those lists impossible.

How should I colour the letter tiles, so that they only have an opaque background when needed for selecting from lists? I started with the Ironhand set and customised the tiles from there, if that helps.

Thank you for any advice.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Moogie]

Maybe I haven't explained this very well...

I changed some things and managed to get some of the lists to highlight, but I still can't see what I'm selecting in the stocks/animals ('z' status) screens.

Current tileset:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Colours:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[BLACK_R:0]
[BLACK_G:0]
[BLACK_B:0]
[BLUE_R:0]
[BLUE_G:106]
[BLUE_B:255]
[GREEN_R:68]
[GREEN_G:184]
[GREEN_B:57]
[CYAN_R:114]
[CYAN_G:156]
[CYAN_B:251]
[RED_R:212]
[RED_G:54]
[RED_B:85]
[MAGENTA_R:176]
[MAGENTA_G:50]
[MAGENTA_B:255]
[BROWN_R:217]
[BROWN_G:118]
[BROWN_B:65]
[LGRAY_R:170]
[LGRAY_G:196]
[LGRAY_B:178]
[DGRAY_R:128]
[DGRAY_G:151]
[DGRAY_B:156]
[LBLUE_R:48]
[LBLUE_G:165]
[LBLUE_B:255]
[LGREEN_R:144]
[LGREEN_G:255]
[LGREEN_B:79]
[LCYAN_R:168]
[LCYAN_G:212]
[LCYAN_B:255]
[LRED_R:255]
[LRED_G:82]
[LRED_B:82]
[LMAGENTA_R:255]
[LMAGENTA_G:107]
[LMAGENTA_B:255]
[YELLOW_R:255]
[YELLOW_G:255]
[YELLOW_B:102]
[WHITE_R:255]
[WHITE_G:250]
[WHITE_B:232]

How it looks in-game:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://i.imgur.com/Nqnm0Nn.png

What am I doing wrong? Should I even be using transparency at all?

[Wannabehero]

One thing you can try is to change the background color on the letter tiles to solid magenta (R:255 / G:0 / B:255).

DF will render alpha layers against a black background to come up with the display color.  Solid colors are displayed as is.  But magenta is rendered by the game into the colors is wants, usually black, but it might fix your highlighting issue.

Worth a try I think

[Moogie]

Thank you, I tried it but...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

...It didn't quite work out that way.

I made absolutely sure that the background was 255/0/255 and 100% opaque. Did I misunderstand something? Does having Truetype enabled have any effect on how this works?

Sorry about this, I do very little modding and haven't really touched tilesets before. I underestimated how complicated this would be. I just really liked jollybastion's letters and phoebus' walls and wanted to merge them into ironhand's graphics.

I keep studying their tilesets and try to figure out how it all fits, but I can't see any similarities. The ONLY thing I managed to figure out was the first and third tiles on the far left column should be the same colour as the background of the letter tiles, otherwise weirdness tends to happen.

[Wannabehero]

Oops.  Well thats wierd.  I could have sworn magenta was masked out by DF.

I'm out of ideas.  Sorry mate 

[Wannabehero]

Ah, I found the problem with the magenta thing.  It doesn't work if you have any transparency in your image.  You get that wierd hueing effect.  Well poo.


Edit:  Sidebar.  I loaded your tileset image you posted and fired up DF.  All of my menu highlighting worked fine.  I have no clue why you are experiencing this fluke.

Sidenote: I like your tileset mashup.

[Moogie]

Edit: Ugh, nevermind... thought I'd made progress, but it didn't work at all.

I made the main menu selections work, but stocks screens are still blind. This is frustrating, I'd rather just be playing the game at this point.

[Deon]

You must have transparency on your letters' background.

[Moogie]

That was the first thing I tried, having started with jollybastion's partially transparent letter tiles.

Transparency just makes any backgrounds that I can make appear, harder to see. So they essentially do the exact opposite of what I need.

Edit: Heh, I just tried loading the game with a completely unaltered ironhand tileset, and the stocks screen selection is blind. So whatever the problem is, it either already exists in ironhand, or something else is to blame.

[Deon]

Do you run it on SDL or Legacy version?