HACKING TEAM COLORS
Note: there are several programs that exist that can do this technique for you pain free. See the Staredit section of the Programs page.
Since ReaperOfSouls brought out the one method of permanently changing team colors, I thought I'd mention the less intrusive scx-based method which allows you to alter the colors of players only in a specific map. You'll see that this can be pretty cool, as you can use colors like green on non-ice/desert maps and other colors like cyan and grey. Another interesting thing is that you can make more than one player the same color. =)
O.K., this isn't exactly a new trick, and Quantum should probably get the credit for presenting it in his CHK specs (I learned about this from King Arthur back when Broodwar came out). Number one, you must know how to hex edit because this requires that you manually modify parts of the *.chk file (uncompressed map data). Number 2, your map must be an scx because this section of the chk is not present in non-broodwar maps (it is usually used for the green color in ice and desert maps).
O.K., after you completely finish your map (it must be completely finished before you do this because if you open your map in Staredit again the colors will revert to normal) extract the scenario.chk file with an MPQ Viewer. Then open it up in a hex editor.
Do a search in the ASCII for the tag COLR. It should be near the end of the file. After that tag there is a long (8 bytes) that holds the value 8. This means that there are 8 bytes in this section (just an FYI). After those 8 bytes, there are 8 more bytes that represent the section. They probably look something like this:
00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07
08 might be in the place of one of the bytes if you have green on your map. Basically, each byte represents the color of a particular player (player 1 to 8 in order). The value of the byte determines what color that player is. Here is a list:
Note: More than one player can use a single color. This hint is more useful than it may appear at first Another Note: The colors 12 and above are used in the tileset, so the color changes with tileset. Hint: Try color 12 on a Desert level, and color 14 on an Ice level! One Final Note: Although colors above 15 can and do work, they are undefined, so you will be directly indexing the colors in the main palette. Thanks to WingedHydralisk for a complete listing through color index 200+ something. Click here for the full list. |
So, just change the player bytes to correspond to the color values you want and you're set. Easy huh?
O.K. Not that easy. Now you have to turn your CHK file back into a scx -- but you can't just open it in Staredit since that will cause all of the colors to revert to normal again. The easiet way to get past this is to recall (or learn now if you never knew) that SCM/SCX files are just MPQ files. So all you really have to do is get your modified CHK file back into a SCM/SCX. To easy add/replace files in any mpq, you can use Quantam's MPQ2k program.
If you think about it, you can do some very cool stuff with this. Here are a couple examples:
- Units don't have to change colors when "given" to particular players so cutscenes can be more realistic.
- You could have cool effects like mutinies and such. =)
For more info on the CHK format (there are a bunch of other tid-bits you can make use of) see Quantum's spec sheet.
DI
September 5, 1999
