DOS GCS creating assets with Gimp

[Mystery]

This is just something I made to make the process of creating textures, sprites etc. much easier.

Now GCS comes with a decent amount of premade and ready to use assets and they certainly are useful.
They have their own distinct look which really adds to the charme of most GCS games and they save a lot of time.

But using GCSpaint to create additional textures can be quite a lot of work.
Painting in that program is taking a lot of time and importing external images often results in low quality textures as well.

Especially if the file you want to import isn't scaled properly. Also assigning the standard palette to the image sometimes looks pretty decent, and sometimes it looks really bad.

So, what to do?
I use gimp to create most of the textures etc. for GCS.
For this I've recreated the standard $rp9a palette in gimp. Gimp does a much better job at scaling images and with the additional tools matching an image to look good with the GCS palette yields much better results.
So I can do all my work in gimp, even the conversion to the right palette and use gcspaint only to convert the files to VGA/VGR.



The gun sprite in this image was created that way and the result looks pretty good because I could easily convert my current work to the GCS palette without leaving gimp and optimize the image very quickly.

I believe with high quality textures and sprites, GCS DOS games can be brought to a whole new level.



I've attached the palette to this posting. To import it, just copy the file to the gimp palette folder and it should load automatically the next time gimp starts.

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[Saturdaynight]

Excelent post! I'll definitely use this!

[Saturdaynight]

Pinned and I will also upload this file to the downloads on the web page.

[Mystery]

Excellent.
I also made a modified version of that palette with the dark black color replaced by pink.

That color index is used by GCS for transparency, but it's somewhat difficult to work with in editing, so I made the transparent color a more traditional one that sticks out when working with transparent images.
In addition to that it'll be easier to stop gimp from using the transparency black when converting an image or at least it'll be easier to spot.



Anybody can do it by themselves easily with the standard palette, so this is more or less just an additional tip for working on GCS images with gimp

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[Saturdaynight]

Yeah, I get that it can be easily created. Sometimes, you have people who barely know enough to get by so having this done for them makes it easier.

[sherberttcat]

That's a pretty great idea. GCS/MVPPaint was always a pain in the ass to convert 3D renders with.

[Technopeasant]

My question is actually the opposite, how would one go about extracting the GCS assets into PNG or BMP files? Would be very useful for my new wiki.

[Mystery]

Hm, that's a tough one. I don't think the GCS uses a common image format, at least I wasn't able to make any program recognize the files.
The worst case scenario would be, that you have to program your own converter by analyzing the image format/header. I don't think the image format is too complex, since it's just a palette based bitmap without compression, but it would still be a challenge

[Saturdaynight]

I'm almost positive you can save as bmp files on MVP Paint.there are two ways to save files in MVP Paint. I could be thinking of another function but that's my input.

[Technopeasant]

Well, I am thinking of asking Kevin Stokes about whether or not he would consider releasing the GCS Mega Art Pack files under a public domain or Creative Commons license. Could make a very nice contribution to OpenGameArt.org.