Has anyone managed to get a new race portrait into the game and if so how? |
As the title suggests, I am having extreme difficulties when trying to get a new race portrait working. My custom race with existing portraits works fine but when I try to save a new one, alter an existing one or even just re-save an existing one I get the following error when I try to go to add a new empire. (when the portrait is first displayed)
A gray screen with an error box saying, 'Stream read error'.
Then I get several access violations.
What I need to know is, how is the bmp being altered? I am using photshop cs and it has several save options, I have of course tried all of them: 16,24,32 bit. As I say, even if I just load up the bmp file then re-save it as a bmp file I get this odd error, so its not due to me editing the image in anyway or it being to big. The filesize is even the same as the originals, as is the color depth, canvas size etc.
Are there any programs that will save this bmp file correctly for me?
This is the basic race_portrait, I would appreciate anyone else trying if you have a graphics program that can re-save files. (back up the portrait first of course 
)
Thanks in advance.
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Okay I have finally managed
Okay I have finally managed to do it and keep the images at a reasonable quality using paint.
Now you can just use paint and convert the images to 256 colors but you lose a lot of detail, photoshop doesn't do this directly.
As far as I can see the best way to keep high quality images, at a decent level, is to go into photoshop and convert to a gif, using the 'save for the web' option; then go into paint, load up the file and save as a gif again. (Don't ask me why you have to save it again but I had to for it to work)
Load the file again in paint and the detail is okay at this point, so you can convert to a 256 color bmp without too much bother.
Hope it helps someone, as it sure had me annoyed.
-EDIT
As always my findings go into the wiki, i've done a small section on portraits now.
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Consult the great SEV Wiki