What are those black dots on my tiles?

[Ok_i_register]

Hi, i'm making a custom map for GTA 2 and whenever i import a tile, these black dots appear. Does anyone know why that happens and how do i get rid of them?

[trubetz]

My guess would be that you saved this yellow tile as a PNG or a GIF with transparent color enabled, resulting in the dots of that color displaying like this. Does this sound like something that could have happened?

[Ok_i_register]

My guess would be that you saved this yellow tile as a PNG or a GIF with transparent color enabled, resulting in the dots of that color displaying like this. Does this sound like something that could have happened?

Nah, i converted them to 8 bit bmp before importing, and the original tile didn't have any black dots on it.

[valps]

My guess is that when you imported the tile, you probably changed the palette which supports the image. The problem is that the game always uses the first color of the palette as the transparent one. Therefore the original devs always reserved the first color of each palette as black, as you can see for the original palettes.

To check if these black dots are the transparent colour, turn on "flat" on the block with the tiles and see if these black dots become transparent. Or alternatively, check if the first color of the palette you used for this tile is the one missing in the tile (which I presume to be some yellow color)

[Ok_i_register]

To check if these black dots are the transparent colour, turn on "flat" on the block with the tiles and see if these black dots become transparent.

So, i did that, and it turns out that these black dots became transparent.

[Ok_i_register]

So what do i do now?

[JernejL]

pallete index 0 will be black & transparent. you need to be careful on how you convert / export to bmp and how palette is applied.

[Ok_i_register]

pallete index 0 will be black & transparent. you need to be careful on how you convert / export to bmp and how palette is applied.

I know, but is there a way to fix this?

[JernejL]

pallete index 0 will be black & transparent. you need to be careful on how you convert / export to bmp and how palette is applied.

I know, but is there a way to fix this?

Do not set transparent / "flat" flag on the tile in editor on it.

[Ok_i_register]

pallete index 0 will be black & transparent. you need to be careful on how you convert / export to bmp and how palette is applied.

I know, but is there a way to fix this?

Do not set transparent / "flat" flag on the tile in editor on it.

But I'm not trying to make them flat, I'm trying to get rid of these black dots on them.

[JernejL]

FLAT in gta1, gta2 means transparent.

It means color in palette index 0 becomes transparent.

Usually that color in index 0 is black.

Check map in editor.

[Rick]

But I'm not trying to make them flat, I'm trying to get rid of these black dots on them.

You want to reimport the tile(s) using a better palette.
You can do this by choosing a similar palette in STY-Tool, but that will almost certainly corrupt your colors.

A better-functioning approach is as follows:

• Export a tile with very similar colors from a .STY file.

• open the exported tile bmp with a graphics editing program—e.g., GIMP (these handle palette remapping better than STY Tool does). this one has a working indexed palette. keep it open.

• open your tile in GIMP, too. (open your unindexed 16-bit bitmap, or at least one without visible black dots).

• copy-paste your tile to the exported tile you opened first. color remapping should now look way better than in STY Editor. The way your tile looks now is exactly how it will look in GTA2

• export this as your new tile (including the indexed color palette, that we know works well in GTA2)

• in STY-Editor import your tile and import the palette (or choose the palette number the exported tile uses in step 1 if it's also in the same sty file). if you import a palette that already exists you will get an individual copy of that palette in your sty file. You have to decide for yourself whether you need that. Reusing existing palettes saves sty file size