Map background question

[Grim]

Hey y'all, hoping someone with more knowledge than me can answer this. Basically I want to make a map where the background renders completely as black, like when you have the background turned off. (Because I want some walls to essentially be "invisible" by making them almost-but-not-quite black so they blend in, and of course this doesn't work if you can just have the background on.) Is this possible by being clever with the map's colour palette / some other means? Or am I out of luck?

Thanks for your time!

[TheWalrus]

Grim from otb?

[MeTonaTOR]

Hey y'all, hoping someone with more knowledge than me can answer this. Basically I want to make a map where the background renders completely as black, like when you have the background turned off. (Because I want some walls to essentially be "invisible" by making them almost-but-not-quite black so they blend in, and of course this doesn't work if you can just have the background on.) Is this possible by being clever with the map's colour palette / some other means? Or am I out of luck?

Thanks for your time!

I think best way is to edit pallette of map (113 colors and 2 blacks, not really black black, but for example #010101 onstead of #000000). Try This

[KoreanRedDragon]

Yep, just make sure your map is a 113 colour (including black as first colour in the palette) PNG and that will take up the part of the game palette normally reserved for the background gradient.

At least until our devs move forward with the plan of removing the game's 256 colour limitation, but that shouldn't be any time too soon, I think. By then, I guess we'll be using a different map format anyway.

[Grim]

Well, I tried setting my map to 113 colours with black as the first one as per your advice, but I'm still getting a background gradient. It's pretty grainy at full detail (And just flat out a sequence of coloured bars at lower detail) but it's very much still there. Any idea why that might be? I'm using GIMP to set the map's colour palette if that makes a difference.

Grim from otb?

Nah I don't think that's me, unless I'm being extremely dense and forgetting what that stands for.

[KoreanRedDragon]

Jeez, that's right, that was changed a whole bunch of updates ago, the game now tries to find whatever colours it can from the map palette to come up with an approximately accurate background gradient (which depends on the terrain texture the map was saved with)...

Sorry about the misinformation, I guess I just don't play on PNG maps very often anymore and forgot about the change. I'm also not really sure whether there might be a way around this other than forcing everyone to use an older version of WA for the duration of the game... I'm thinking probably not right now. Meh.

Edit: OTB was a WormNet clan that all the cool kids were in back in 2001 or so, by the way. One of the members was called GrIm, but he was American at the time.

[Grim]

Aw, okay then. That's alright, the attempt to help was appreciated.

Hmm...is there a command or something to make the game emulate an older version, or would I have to just search about for an old installer of that version?

[KoreanRedDragon]

Hm, well, there was a WormKit module floating around that allowed you to force emulation of any old version, but I don't think that would do you much good here, pretty sure the old background gradient functionality isn't emulated. On the bright side, all the old update installers are available on the wiki and you shouldn't even have to use them, just open them with 7-Zip and extract the WA.exe from them into your existing installation's main folder (preferably renaming it to WA-3.6.29.0.exe or whatever version it is beforehand). Then once you determine what the latest version is that still forces a black background on your map, just send that .exe over to the rest of the folks you want to play with and have them run that instead of their WA.exe for that game.

Here's all the update installers: http://worms2d.info/Updates

I'd start with 3.6.29.0 if I were you. If it turns out to force the black background on your map, try 3.6.30.0 and 3.6.31.0 to see if those still behave like you want them to behave. If 3.6.29.0 already has the PNG map background fix, I guess you then try 3.6.28.0 and 3.6.26.5, but those two are so old you might run into compatibility issues with modern hardware, unfortunately. Good luck if you decide to go through the trouble!

[Grim]

I did decide to go through the trouble! Unfortunately I did a quick search through the documentation and the change was introduced in 3.6.28.0, and no surprise, 3.6.26.5 doesn't work. I tried using RubberWorm to emulate it as well but you're right, it doesn't emulate the old background logic. Oh well, I guess that's that then.

Thanks a bunch for your help anyway though. Life goes on somehow I guess!

[Rogi]

Where is me !&#$ Xd sss aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa LOL