Making a PIE screen for theater

[ccc]

Thanx to Olric, I learn something about PIE-making. As his part 3 article on FlightSim Cafe not available, I manage to build one for Vnam.

Here I post a pic, so you interested can do one yourself.


key points here:
1. the pie screen is done with GIF format, indexed 256 colors.
2.five small picture will lighten up and darken while loading., they are labeled A, B, C, D, E. the background wont change, F.
3. look at the color palette, small pic A use A1, A2 row colors. when lighten up, the whole A pic use A2 row colors instead of A1 colors. so it got brighter.
4. the program run the darken-lighten-darken sequence by switching A(A1 to A2 to A1), B(B1 to B2 to B1), and so on.
5. the background use limited colors in F box, total 16 x 6=96 colors.
6.You can use more colors for new PIE. but,
>>**** the final palette should be arranged like this default one, colors assigned for each small pic should in the right place, A1,A2, B1, B2... ****
>> ****dont use same colors for differnet small pics or background, or you'll got unwanted extra-light dots elsewhere when one small pic lighten up.****
>>of course a more colorful pie is doable, but the process of re-organizing new palette could take some effort.
>> check OLRIC's part III article on Flightsim Cafe for details.


[This message has been edited by ccc (edited January 10, 2001).]

[This message has been edited by ccc (edited March 30, 2001).]

[komis]

I wrote a tutorial for this on the 20th of July with the intention to post, but never got around to doing it... Anyway, for whoever may be interested, here you go!

Pie screen tutorial
By Komis

Tools:
PaintShop Pro
Notepad
Word(pad)

The palette:
This is comprised of six sections: Five sections of 32 colours and one section (at the bottom) of 96 colours.
The first five sections are the colours of the parts of the image that are going to be highlighted. The rest are for the background, i.e. the static part.
It’s important to note that the first five sections MUST CONTAIN DIFFERENT COLOURS! That means that the first 160 colour entries have to be unique.

Creating the background image:
First thing you need to do is to create the background image. That means the parts of the screen that are not going to be highlighted during the loading.
Once you have this ready, you have to reduce the palette to 96 colours. I use error diffusion to attain a good result, but you can experiment with all the options. Once you have done this, save the palette as a JASC palette file (bg.pal). Don’t use the Microsoft palette format.

Creating the highlighting parts:
As I said before, you have to ensure that the parts contain all different colours. You can have up to 32 colours for each part, but I think it’s best to use 16 colours only as I’m getting strange results with 32 colours.
To ensure that the colours in all parts are different, you can use the following technique:
1. Take five images that you want to make as highlighting parts. Fix them to the size and shape that you like, making sure you use 16 million colours during these operations.
2. Once you have them fixed, turn them into grayscale (black and white).
3. Increase the colour depth again to 16 million colours.
4. Adjust the RGB in the image to get a different colour tint for each image. You can have five different colours or perhaps five shades of the same colour. If you do the latter, make sure there is at least a 20% difference between each image.
5. Reduce the colour palette to 16 colours. Again experiment with the options to find the solution that you like the most. Now increase the palette to 32 colours.
6. For each image, save the palette file (e.g. for the first image, save it as 1.pal)
7. By now you should have 6 images open (the background + 5 parts)

Fixing the final palette:
This is assuming that you use PaintShop Pro 7. Each .pal file can be opened with a text editor, such as notepad. Open the palette of the first highlighted part (1.pal).
You will see the first three lines, which are the header of the file. Change the 3rd line from 16 to 256. The rest of the lines are made up of three space-separated values, which are the RGB values of the colours. Don’t close the file just yet!
Now open the palette of the 2nd highlighted part, copy everything except the first 3 lines and paste it right at the end of the text of 1.pal.
Repeat the process for all the palettes you have saved, including that of the background image, which goes last. When you have finished, you should have a palette of 256 colours.
Save this file as final.pal
NOTE: Leave a blank line at the end of the file, else Paintshop will not recognise the file.

Fixing the final image:
Bring up the background image and load the final palette (final.pal). Make sure you select the Match Nearest Colour option at the load dialogue. SAVE THE BACKGROUND AS A SEPARATE .GIF IMAGE.
Now, copy the first highlighting part and paste it into the background image. Place into position and repeat for the rest.
Once you are finished, save the image as loadX.gif, into the \art\splash folder. The X can be 6, 8 or 10, depending on the resolution your graphics are set.
6-> 640x480
8-> 800x600
10-> 1024x768
Go and try it in Falcon. Use Instant Action over water, as it’s faster. If you are experiencing strange colours during the loading, that’s probably because you are not using unique colours for the highlighted parts… You have to go back and do it all over again J
I never said it’s going to be easy….

[ccc]

hehe...your post got a TEN MONTH lag!!