Daikatana alpha's palette...

[hogsy]

So the maps in the Daikatana alpha...



I've been scratching my head about this for a while but my knowledge of all this is severely limited. I had assumed that init.wad contained the correct palette for the maps but it seems that it does not. I also thought that perhaps the colormap and palette were saved into the maps themselves but once again it appears they are not.
I'm hoping I have not posted this into the wrong section but I'm pretty sure this is engine related.
I'd like to know if anyone has any ideas as to how this is being done as it would be a big help.

Here's a copy of e1m3.
http://www.oldtimes-software.com/files/OpenKatana/maps.rar

[qbism]

IF it's like Quake... Quake stores palette and colormap as separate files. Not stored with any textures or maps.

[daemonicky]

So the maps in the Daikatana alpha...

It is alpha of the Daikatana or is it Yours or someones remake?

[hogsy]

IF it's like Quake... Quake stores palette and colormap as separate files. Not stored with any textures or maps.

I know but that's the whole point, in the Daikatana alpha it seems the colormap and palette were saved in the init.wad however they're still not right for the map. There's no other palette or colormap.

[revelator]

hum try looking in data/init/colormap.bmp looks a bit like a palette to me though bmp format wtf Oo.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/856/colormap.png/

[revelator]

hmm imageshack converts it to png but its actually a bitmap.

[hogsy]

I think that's probably the same colormap that's in the init.wad
Either way it seems that the Daikatana alpha doesn't use it. In fact nothing in that folder seems to be required for the Daikatana alpha to function, the engine loads the init.wad from the maps directory.

[revelator]

maybe they load the palette from the game data like Q2's pcx palette thing without the source of the alpha its kinda guesswork :/ i doubt we will ever get to see that though.

[hogsy]

Worth looking into I guess.

[revelator]

hmm maybe need to pester romero for the source allthough i think he would rather forget that it ever existed heh. kinda a shame the game has some good points but the sidekick AI was at best annoying as hell

[revelator]

surfed around looking for whats known about the pre alpha and a few things popped up. much of the stuff in the data dir is not used at all like the palette thing and several dll functions.

the data in init was to be a menu system for daikatana but was newer completed as they moved onto quake2 before development got that far.

no insight on how it handled its internal palette though but i guess im not far of with my previous assumption.

could be interresting to have a look at the source code even if its largely unfinished.

[hogsy]

I actually think the init folder was from work they did earlier in the games development. It turns out that there was in fact another wad inside that folder (the file extension had just been changed) which seems to use an earlier version of the background from back when it was called "Dai Katana".



This still doesn't help me much though as the palette and colormap seem to be just red.

[revelator]

might be hard figuring out where exactly to look.

the one in the init dir seems to have been a palette entry for the menu.

not sure which tools to use but one could try opening the bsp's in a quake tool capable of reading compiled bsp's (wally ? been a while since i played with it so cant remember if it could).

the palette could even be hardcoded in the engine (quite easy actually quake2xp has a hardcoded palette loaded for entries not normally in quake2).

[hogsy]

I said in my first post that neither the colormap nor palette are stored in the maps themselves. I've also concluded that everything in the init folder seems to be just the left over bits and bobs for creating the init.wad so that folder is completely useless to me really. I'm somewhat curious as to what the file rgb.dat is however (even though it's not used by the engine itself).

Edit:
Nevermind rgb.dat isn't worth looking into

Edit:
I think I have an idea what's going on. I'll keep you updated.

Edit:
Nope all out of ideas really...

[revelator]

ill try and run the exe through a decompiler might turn up some usefull entry

guess i slept a bit when i commented on trying to look in the bsp's.

argh my old decompiler cannot run in win7 64 :s thank god for XP mode hang in there, might take a while.