Setting Up Fog Palettes
Really basic guide made since I’ve been asked a few times and someone mentioned it on Discord earlier.
You guys may remember the previous expeditions I’ve gone on to ensure that fog palettes work with all of my tilesets (See below.)
Since starting and making many defunct palettes in mid/late 2019, I’ve made sure to keep everything as usable as I can, although I know that my tilesets aren’t everyone’s fancy. As such, this should be a quick guide to setting up fog palettes.
This guide uses FEBuilder, as it is my preferred tool and has extremely obvious numbers that just work out better for this type of post, but Usenti works as well. Divide numbers seen on FEBuilder by 8 to get the 0-31 values seen on Usenti and you’ll understand. I’ll also include numbers on the thingy below. yeah. words.
"Usenti example of tileset background color
First, make sure that the tileset you’re using doesn’t have a fog palette as it stands if raw importing someone else’s work. If there’s one, then we don’t even need to start this step, or any step, just use that.
Second, should it seem that the tileset (or specific palette) doesn’t have a fog palette, copy the palette over to the fog set. I’m unsure of how to do this in Usenti (I believe just raw number crunch to copy them), but in FEBuilder you can ‘Import Palette,’ letting you set fog and normal separately. Import both as the same, non-fog version.
Now, I just do a basic number increase. color intensity increase? yeah lets go with that.
Here I’ve got two separate images - one of my current Fields tileset’s Aquamarine Grass color, and the other of its fog version.
When doing bright fog, aka standard fog, increase each of the values outside of the background null color by:
- 64 Points (8 in Usenti) if the value is below 104 (12)
- 56 Points (7 in Usenti) if the value is 104-112 (13-14)
- 48 Points (6 in Usenti) if the value is 120-152 (15-19)
- 40 Points (5 in Usenti) if the value is 160 (20)
- 32 Points (4 in Usenti) if the value is 168-184 (21-23)
- 24 Points (3 in Usenti) if the value is 192-200 (24-25)
- 16 Points (2 in Usenti) if the value is 208-216 (26-27)
- 8 Points (1 in Usenti) if the value is 224-232 (28-29)
Values at 240 and 248 do not need increased, but if you want to be that guy you can increase 240 by 8 (1).
This system’s been consistent for all of my fog palettes since, uh, I started actually caring about fog palettes. It’s worked for every tileset I’ve worked on, including the village, fields and custom fort. Just keep in mind that you CAN exercise your own decision and make certain values a bit brighter/darker if you want to accentuate certain aspects, such as brightly colored floor tiles in a Temple tileset or to make the darkest colors for floors hugging walls a bit darker.
You’ll know if you’ve screwed up rather quickly, which is why i recommend saving the palette after every color if you’re new to it. I still wind up having to undo a disappointing amount of work thanks to this very frequently.
Finally, we can go ahead and export the map as a .png (FEBuilder only.). When exporting through FEBuilder, setting the file type to .png will produce both a standard version and a fog version in the same folder, with the name of XXX and XXX_fog. Compare both files, and if you like the results you have, stick with it. If you want it foggier, go add another 8 points (1) to each of those values. Darker, reduce it by 1.
Go do the funny fog.
I’m gonna go continue relaxing and, uh, not mapping.
I’ll make a ‘darkness’ fog one sometime if I feel like it.