And also you can't use this colours if you need them in the actual image (especially black). But wait, there's still the alpha channel and it's not used at all your proposal. So maybe transparent pixels for transparency and magenta for bg colour?
That would work just fine too. The reason I suggested pure black (#000000) is because many pixel artists avoid that color. It is discouraged because it looks
much better if you use other colors. So...how about magenta for the background and transparency for the transparency? I think that would fix the problem Meph is describing.
That, or we could just ditch the background color entirely like you said.
Isn't this very limited because you can't specify tile numbers >255 in raws, so you won't be able to use different images for different plants? I was thinking I could make use of the colours that are specified for growth/plant tiles as well in raws to expand the tile number range. It becomes more difficult to configure so just in case people really want different tiles for different plants.
Let's see here.....Yup. There are about 455 instances of [GROWTH:PRINT] in the vanilla raws, so it would be impossible to fit everything in one tileset. Another idea would be to have a new set of overrides. You could specify a plant override like this:
[OVERRIDE:P:Plant:Subtype:Tileset:NewTile]
Plant would be something like ARTICHOKE and the subtypes would be the growths (in order). If you want to override a growth
on the plant, you would just give a number. If you wanted to override a
picked growth, you would add 100 to that number. So to override the picked flowers of an artichoke, you would try:
[OVERRIDE:P:ARTICHOKE:102:Tileset:NewTile]
If you leave the Subtype parameter blank it would override the [PICKED_TILE], how the plant looks if there are no visible growths on it.