Palette swaps within sprites

[philsov]

Notably generic sprites.

I'm about to start brewing up a custom sprite or two... and I've got my little custom 16-color palette to play with.  And so no matter what color goes where --palette wise--, the base sprite will look absolutely kickass because I did it.

Buuuut, if this sprite is used under a different palette as an enemy or something, which colors within the palette change?  I'd hate to give someone a blue face in palette2 if I can avoid it.

[Cheetah]

I'm not sure I'm understanding your question. The colors in the different palettes are always in the same order and each palette is 16 colors. So make whatever changes to palette 1 and it wont affect the others.

[Vanya]

Your custom sprites should have a 256 color palette, too; not 16.
All you have to do is duplicate you custom palette and then change the colors in the new copy.

[philsov]

it's more than just changing palette 1... it's more from a design perspective.

Let's say one arm uses 3 colors:  blue (color6), dark blue (color7), and light blue(color8).  Well, I want to add color to another portion of the body, and to do so I consolidate the arm to just dark blue (7) and light blue ( 8 ), make the original blue (6) into green (6), and then add green (6) onto the legs.  This has the potential to look awful on anything else other than the base palette, right?  

This is most poignant with skin tones -- they stay relatively constant between palettes in that sort of peachy flesh color(s), so tampering with those can lead to a bad ripple effect, no?  Are any other colors (or, color positions) which I simply shouldn't mess with?

Edit:  Buh @ Vanya.  I'll fiddle some more with Gimp tonight and come back once I have a slightly larger understanding.

[philsov]

ok, IS there a way to view palette in GIMP?  I'm really enjoying the open as layers function for overlay and tracing purposes, but I do enjoy graphic gale's palette window.

Edit:  Or should I just rig one up for use with the eyedrop selector? =\

[Smash]

Go to dialogs > Colormap.

This shows all the 256 colors of the file.

Then stretch the colormap window vertically a bit so it shows the colors in rows of 16, clearly showing all the palletes. Then click on any of the colors to edit them.

[Vanya]

Most sprites don't have designated color assignments within their palettes. The skin tones are fairly consistent colors, but their exact location within the palette can vary, though not often with human sprites.

I wouldn't bother worrying about all that anyway. Each sprite has a max of 8 palettes it can use (only the first 5 can be used in a battle) and they only use the ones from within their own file. Palettes aren't shared from sprite to sprite, not even in generics.

In other words, you can organize them however you want as long as the palettes within each sprite file have the same format.