How to change or make your own Playercolors (easy) - Takes about 10 minutes.

[GodMe]

So with the help of blitz and Nyerguds I was able to create my own playercolors in Red Alert 1 Multiplayer.

These are some examples:

I replaced Brown with some chrome looking color (not yet perfected)

https://imgur.com/a/MXBA5Zc

I replaced Grey with a way darker (almost black) grey

https://imgur.com/a/7NJmgVJ

I replaced teal with Teal in Sunset

https://imgur.com/a/Gn40YMa

So here we go:

Download XCC Utilities

https://cnc-comm.com/command-and-conquer/downloads/modding-tools/XCC-utilities

Download GIMP (important to use this and not any other graphics programm. Explaining why would be way too complicated)

https://www.gimp24.de/

Use this file as a baseline. It already contains improved colors over the standard ones, so it's better to start with that. On top I have no actual idea right now of how to get the native one out of the game:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h-tEydlAHOcRcz2fhPFUzcsmKjReToc_/view?usp=sharing

Put that on your Desktop.

Now open XCC Mixer.exe, find "palette.cps" right click it and click "Copy as PNG".

You should now have Palette.png on your desktop.

Open that palette.png with GIMP and zoom in to the top left Panel:

It should look like this: (it will look different for you, as this is my edited version already)

https://imgur.com/a/0JNkvfS

https://imgur.com/a/bRvqeQb

So, as in the picture, NEVER touch the 2 right columns and the 3 bottom rows.

The 1st line/row of 16 colors represents yellow

The 2nd represents blue

3rd is red

4th is green

5th is orange

6th is grey

7th is teal

8th is brown

BE AWARE THAT YOU CAN ONLY PICK COLORS FROM THIS PANEL. USING CUSTOM COLORS WONT WORK AS THE GAME DOESN'T FEATURE THEM.

So you now need 2 tools in GIMP.

The Color Picker (Shortcut "O")

And the Standard Pixel Pen (Shortcut N) --> Set that to size 1.

All you do now is pick a color from that panel with color picker, switch over to the pen and click the field you want colored.

As you can see with the yellow or red color (unedited), it's normally a flow of gradients ranging from strong color to a darker version as you go further to thr right. You don't HAVE to do this. You could aswell paste the same color in every single pixel of that row. But that would mean you have no shading. So, the more gradient you do, the better it will look ingame.

So once you're done with your work and wanna see how it looks, you go (in GIMP) to File/Datei --> Export to

You can choose to overwrite the palette.png on the desktop (if you mess up, just redownload my baseline palette.cps and repeat) or save it somewhere else.

Then open XCC Mixer.exe again, find that newest palette.png, right click it and choose Copy as .cps

Now paste that new palette.cps in your RA1 main folder and you're done

The process when doing it the first time takes like 10 minutes. But if you did it 2-3 times you'll basically do it in 1 minute. So for me, I just leave GIMP open after exporting the PNG. So when I start the game and I don't like the outcome of that color, I just go to GIMP again with the image still open, change some stuff, export it as .png again, convert it to .cps using XCC Mixer and paste that in the Red Alert folder again.

If I left some questions unanswered, feel free to ask.

Edited December 27, 2022 by Nyerguds
colour was messed up.

[Nyerguds]

On 10/28/2022 at 11:17 AM, GodMe said:

You should now have Palette.png on your desktop.

Desktop? The Copy As function copies stuff to the second pane in XCC Mixer. By default that's set to the XCC folder.

 

And I think I told you the yellow fade represents the source colours it tries to change, so, don't change those or the existing units will simply stop remapping.