Quake Skins Tutorial

Carl Kidwell
Chapter 11:
HighColor Mode
Page 1

WARNING: If you are not viewing this tutorial section in HighColor mode (millions of colors) you are not going to see the examples display properly!

Hopefully you have read the previous sections of this tutorial and realize that I have up to this point been favoring that you use the 256 color Quake Palette in which to do all your editing. I did mention that it was possible to go outside of this boundary, but did not provide any further help if you chose to do that.

The reasons for that are many, some of which follow:

High Color mode is NOT used by Quake. It is also known (depending on your art program and the type of computer you have) in several different ways. As far as Quake is concerned the difference between all of these colors modes is the same. They are not the Quake palette and I will refer to them hereafter as "highcolor mode" for simplicity. Here is a list of some of the modes that you may see on your computer that fall in this category:

16 Million Colors
24 Bit color
16 Bit Color
Millions of Colors
RGB Mode (not indexed)

Your Skin will NOT look right if you submit it in highcolor

If you convert your skin from highcolor to the Quake Palette you can often lose quality.

It is more difficult to work with the transition between these two modes, something I would recommend to only those who are comfortable with art programs and manipulating images.

Well the time has come to go beyond that. Take some risks in the hope of greater gains. Working in highcolor mode can gain you a lot of room to work with. Your skin can look much better by doing this. But only if you are very carefull to make sure that its going to convert well back into the Quake palette.

This section of the tutorial will help you deal with those difficulties.

First off lets take a look at the difficulties I'm talking about.


HighColor Image	Quake Palette

We see here that the image on the left hand side above contains
a band of 4 vibrant colors. On the right hand side we see what happens
when we load the Quake palette onto them.
(if your viewing this in 256 color mode you wont be able to see what I am referring to).
The right hand side is "washed out". This is partly
due to the dark nature of Quake's palette. And party due to
the fact that Quake's palette has only 256 colors.
In any case it is neccesary to take into account when we make
a skin what is going to happen when we load the Quake palette onto it.