Treasures of the Savage Frontiers conversion for FRUA

[manikus]

At the request of Ben J, I thought to convert all of the walls from Treasures of the Savage Frontier for use in FRUA. Then I thought, why not convert all the rest (not counting the images found in FRUA) as well.

Some of these images may appear on Corhub or in other designs, but some certainly do not.

Please note that all the walls are in the wall format, whether they be a door or an overlay, because this was the way it was done in TotSF.

[Ben J]

Great work, manikus!   


Not sure what you mean by "wall format", but I think I'll find out while looking through the pcx files.

[manikus]

Not sure what you mean by "wall format", but I think I'll find out while looking through the pcx files.

The "wall" is made up of 10 images and fits in slots 0 and 1, while the door/overlay is made up of 9 images and fits in slots 2-4. (By images, I mean the particular views in the one single file.)

I was glad to do this little project. I will be working on Pool of Darkness, next.

[Ben J]

The "wall" is made up of 10 images and fits in slots 0 and 1, while the door/overlay is made up of 9 images and fits in slots 2-4. (By images, I mean the particular views in the one single file.)

Does that mean that each wallset has only two walls (a wall & a door)?

I haven't tested the walls in FRUA yet. Most of the TSF walls may not be spectacular, but nevertheless they can add a lot of variety to FRUA's endless sucession of WOOD B and ROCK A walls.

You did a great job on this pic-pack, manikus. 


I think w_TSF10.pcx is lacking some of the side- and faraway views.

I was glad to do this little project. I will be working on Pool of Darkness, next.

Yay! 

[Ben J]

Ummm... Having problems importing the walls into FRUA (see screenshot). 

(that's walls 01 and 02, originally supposed to be blueish-grey)

[manikus]

Hi Ben,

Each FRUA 'slot' is made up of 5 walls as you know, the first two use the "wall" (the 10 image deal) and the second three are the "door/overlay" (the 9 image deal).
But some of the Goldbox games (at least this one and Pool of Darkness) do it differently...I can explain more but I think that's where I start confusing you.

As to the display problem, :] I did not test every wall in FRUA, but I did test some of them and based on what the templates said, assumed that the way I was manipulating the palette was adequate for all the walls. I think that it may be, but as I mentioned I didn't try and make sets of walls, but I obviously wasn't as clear as I ought to have been. I converted each wall to FRUA format, but did nothing to try and match up palettes. As far as I know, each wall has it's own unique palette (I do know that some of them do share palettes, but not the blue walls).

What you need is to convert palettes of like walls (or at least walls that you want to use together).

[Ben J]

As to the display problem, :] I did not test every wall in FRUA, but I did test some of them and based on what the templates said, assumed that the way I was manipulating the palette was adequate for all the walls. I think that it may be, but as I mentioned I didn't try and make sets of walls, but I obviously wasn't as clear as I ought to have been. I converted each wall to FRUA format, but did nothing to try and match up palettes. As far as I know, each wall has it's own unique palette (I do know that some of them do share palettes, but not the blue walls).

What you need is to convert palettes of like walls (or at least walls that you want to use together).

Okay, I'll see if I can match up the palettes. Maybe I can make some TLBs for the collection.

As far as I can see, the TSF walls only work in the first two slots of a wall set, using the templates from your zip file. The other threee produce weird results (see the screenshot).
 

[Ben J]

Hmm, even if I use the same picture (w_TSF01.pcx) for all five walls of a set, the colors are all wrong. 

If you used the default wall template, shouldn't the colors be correct at least for each individual wall?

[manikus]

Hi Ben.

You can only use these walls in slots 0 and 1. 2-4 require a different format.

As to the palette issues, beats me. There are others here steeped in the mysteries of FRUA that can probably help, though.

Also, yesterday I forgot to metnion that walls missing some things were because I could not find those views anywhere in the game. I could make art to fill in the blanks, but that is beyond the scope of a conversion, which is what I wanted to do. With that said, I did cheat in at least three instances - two of the light blue window door walls -> the far away angled were for the other set, so I corrected BeyondSoft's error; and the grey walls were missing one of the far away angled walls, but since BeyondSoft was just mirroring this from the other far away angled, I did the same.

[Ben J]

As to the palette issues, beats me. There are others here steeped in the mysteries of FRUA that can probably help, though.

I'll try correcting the palettes with PSP where they don't work.

But I remember that getting the wall palettes right for "The Sect" was a real pain in the ass. Sometimes walls would look right in TOOLBOX and wrong in the game... and I didn't even manipulate that many walls. The fence walls for Roersa and Eddamissen nearly drove me nuts.

[manikus]

As to the palette issues, beats me. There are others here steeped in the mysteries of FRUA that can probably help, though.

I'll try correcting the palettes with PSP where they don't work.

But I remember that getting the wall palettes right for "The Sect" was a real pain in the ass. Sometimes walls would look right in TOOLBOX and wrong in the game... and I didn't even manipulate that many walls. The fence walls for Roersa and Eddamissen nearly drove me nuts.

This might explain why I think it's all good, since I only tested in Toolbox, but not in FRUA...
I'll try and look at some of the other tools for walls to see if I can find palette info. It did/does seem kind of odd that you can change 37 color slots for Toolbox (not counting the ones you can use but not change). 37 just seems like such an un-computer number.

[manikus]

Okay, first off, thanks Ben for continuing to ask questions about the walls.

I discovered that I have three sets of wall templates in my FRUA/Art folder (2 in the templates subfolder), and all three have different palette information.

The palette information I used for these walls, is quite wrong I think. I think this because it is telling me that I can change the same colors as I can for the backdrops...which doesn't seem correct to me.

So, I'm now going by a different set that says I can change colors 32 through 68. In hopes that this is right, I have redone the walls for 20 of the walls so far.
I also thought that since I was redoing the palettes, I might as well group the walls so that they can be used together as was likely designed in TSF.
So, in the attachments for this post are one set (per archive) of walls each, numbered for the slots they should go into in Toolbox. All 5 walls in the set use the same palette, of course.

If it doesn't work this time, I think I'm through with FRUA walls. Hmmm, I bet my palettes for the Hut walls are wrong too....

[Ben J]

If it doesn't work this time, I think I'm through with FRUA walls. Hmmm, I bet my palettes for the Hut walls are wrong too....

The Hut walls are looking perfectly fine.


Did you test the redone walls?

[manikus]

If it doesn't work this time, I think I'm through with FRUA walls. Hmmm, I bet my palettes for the Hut walls are wrong too....

The Hut walls are looking perfectly fine.


Did you test the redone walls?

Are you having any problems? Perhaps with the red walls? You should redownload that one, Ben. It turns out 7-Zip and PSP don't play together too well....

I have tried all of these in Tollbox only, as I just got FRUA working about two minutes ago...Kind of funny I could get running on Linux just fine, but under XP was having some problems.

[Ben J]

Are you having any problems? Perhaps with the red walls? You should redownload that one, Ben. It turns out 7-Zip and PSP don't play together too well....

I haven't tested the walls in FRUA yet. If there's seomething wrong, I'll be back. 

I have tried all of these in Tollbox only, as I just got FRUA working about two minutes ago...Kind of funny I could get running on Linux just fine, but under XP was having some problems.

I'm using FRUA with DOSBox under XP, and I never experienced any problems.