1           C                                                                                                         Editing and creating graphics for The Atlantean Enquirer V.3

    Editing the graphics is a wee bit fiddly, but quite easy once you
get the hang of it.  Editing and creating new graphics for the Enquirer
lets you - The User - customize this app to YOUR needs.  

    Please feel free to pass around new graphics for his program.


hmmm, where to begin?
OK

About the Image Files.
   The Enquirer uses 3 types of Images, all are in the Bitmap or DIB format.
They are the Background Terrain Images, drawn as hexes (.ter)
The Flag Images, with the extension .flg 
and the Mask Images with the extension .msk

All files must be exactly 512 pixels wide, and a multiple of 32 pixels high.
The maximum number of images is 256 for Terrain and 255 for Flags.
This gives a Picture size of 512 x 512 pixels.  Or 16 x 16 images.
In this editing package are 2 Templates you can use, a gif and a bmp.
With the .flg file, the last 256th image cannot be used, the REAL first
image is NO image, (everything's offset by one).

Each file contains many images, a whole set, stored in rows of 16.
The size of each picture is 32 x 32 pixels and they can be upto (and
except for the Mask file, usually are..) 256 colours.  
White is used as a transparent colour, in the Terrain file, everything 
should be inside the hex shape, white is the transparent colour used for
the overlapping bits.   In the Flags and Mask it's a bit different, the Mask is
a monochrome inverse of the Flags, (all white pixels become black, and all
the others become white), the mask is used to speed up Screen redraws.

Included in the Editing package is a windows program called negative, this is 
to speed up the creation of Masks.  Load up the .flg or .bmp file containing the
flags, then click on the Picture (This starts the process), when the converting is
finished (Beep!), press atl-PrintScreen, (to save the result in the ClipBoard).

White can still be used as a drawing colour though; in the Mask, edit any black 
pixels that are not meant to be Transparent by making them white.

There are several good graphics packages available, PaintShop Pro is good 
for converting Formats and tweaking palettes, MS Paintbrush makes a 
very efficient Mask when saving it as a monochrome bitmap.  Neopaint is 
a good all-round paint program, tho' you'll need to convert the images to and 
from .GIFs.  These files can be found on the internet, see the Enquirer Help for
a list of good FTP sites, (note, some of these programs are BIG!)

If using a 256 colour screen display, it's a good idea to have both the Terrain and
the Flags use the same Palette, otherwise things can look a bit odd.

I save the images (except for .msk) as 256 colour DIBs, as i suspect (without
much evidence) that DIBs display slighty faster than Bitmaps. But they can 
be just as usefully saved as bitmaps.

Because the masks are the evil-twins of Flags, they need to have the same
name, otherwise the Enquirer will crash.

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      V          A  C  E      Arial    must be exactly 512 pixels wide, and a multiple of 32 pixels high.
The maximum number of images is 256 for Terrai