(A lot of this post is going to be me rambling about palette analysis and sprite colour reduction. If Sprite Recolouring for the Terminally Bewildered doesn't interest you, skip to the end, where the sample altered sprites are.)
I was skimming through a completely unrelated thread over in Polling when V_Translanka mentioned that he thought Magus spritesheets matching the alternative colour schemes shown in some of the official artwork--that is, Magus with a red cape and the infamous Magus-Goldpants--might be nice things to have. I've been wanting to contribute something actually
useful here for a while now, but I'm also a lazy bugger and I thought this would be an easy task, so I took it on.
I should have known that things that look easy generally aren't.
The problem, as one might expect, lies in the colour limitations imposed on the spritesheets and the way the official spriters reduced the number of colours used in each sprite down to 12 + transparency (+ 2 for the weapon). An analysis of Magus' sprites (I like analyzing things--guess I'm a bit warped
) shows that the "real" number of colours used is a great deal larger than twelve. That number has been reduced by creating incestuous and sometimes rather odd relationships between what should be separate colours.
Magus' sprites use:
-4 colours for the hair
-5(!) fleshtone colours (including 2 shadow colours where only 1 is needed)
-4 colours for the armour and other leather bits
-4 colours for the cape (of which 2 are rarely seen)
-2 for the pants
-3(!) general shadow colours
That's twenty-two actual colours, folks. Now, some of the extras are easy to get rid of (the highlights on the leather, hair, and fleshtone are all the same shade of near-white in the actual sprites, and that's fine), but some of the other relationships are really weird. For instance, one of the colours used in the pants doubles as a cape highlight
and as shadow in the hair, and the other is used as a shadow in the hair, leather and fleshtone. And the shadow colour in the cape doubles as a general shadow colour elsewhere, making it a...real nuisance...to change.
That selection of sprites contains almost all of the twenty-two "initial" colours--I think the only one missing is the bright cape highlight, which only appears in a couple of the combat frames anyway.
Breaking the oddest of the internal colour relationships give us this (with much purpler pants, since the pants colours are no longer used elsewhere):
That version of the sprites has sixteen colours in it: 2 hair, 3 fleshtone, 3 leather, 3 cape, 2 pants, 1 general highlight as described above, and 2 (still) general shadow. And it's actually workable for straightforward colour swaps. Now to analyze the colours from the official art.
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Image:Magus2.jpg.html shows that the red cape is quite a bright red--#bc2337, to be exact. Swapping this into the sprites with an appropriate shadow colour (somewhere in between the two shadow colours used in the original image) gives:
Getting a good colour reading on Magus-Goldpants is a little more difficult, because I'm not sure just how good the existing images on the Compendium are in terms of colour--the ones I found both look a bit iffy to me. I used
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Image:Magus-battle.jpg.html , since the flesh tones in that one at least look right, indicating it's probably a bit closer to the artist's original intent. However, sampling it gives a pale green(!) and a gold very similar to the sprite's primary leatherwork colour for the pants, and a very unsaturated (that is, greyish) purple for Magus' hair. None of those colours looked right when swapped into the sprite, so I had to fall back on guesswork, which produced:
That's maybe a little more yellow than gold, but with the armour dulled down it doesn't look too bad.
Just one problem: these are still 16-colour + transparency sprites. Combining the two general shadow colours for both images gets them down to 15--three more to go. For the red-caped sprites, I merged the leather shadow with the darker fleshtone shadow, the hair-shadow with the pants-shadow, and the cape highlight with the main colour of the leather (not ideal, but the cape highlight colours are rarely used, so some liberties can safely be taken). For Magus-Goldpants, I merged both fleshtone shadows into the leather colours, and the cape highlight back into the hair shadow, making these the final sprites:
Looks like the reason they went with a blue cape for the sprites was that red didn't look ominous enough.
Three down and only 215 to go. Oh, well, it'll give me something to do for the next little while...
