So far we’ve covered adding graphics to the game that we see while playing. However, if we were to do the same thing for the main menu or other loading screens of the game, we would see that the colors are wrong. The reason for this is again the palettes, these graphics use different ones from the Standard_Graphics one.
The first help I got for this was in this page. However, I’m going to cover it so that you don’t need to download stuff, as the palettes we need are already stored in the game.
Select file 50089. You’ll see a bunch of lines, the first three say that this file affects file 50189, the main menu. Bellow there is a line mentioning the palette file, 50589.
Go to file 50589, it’s mostly made of sequences of three numbers, those are the colors of the palette written in RGB codes. Copy the text into a text file and save it as 50589.pal. Now take this new .pal file and place it into the “Palettes” folder in the Turtle Pack folder, alongside with other .pal files.
Now that you are seing the graphics properly, you can also export some of them as bmp files to edit them.
The first help I got for this was in this page. However, I’m going to cover it so that you don’t need to download stuff, as the palettes we need are already stored in the game.
Locating the interface data
All the information and files we need are stored in the file “interfac.drs”. This file is not shipped with the mods, it is stored in the root data folder of AoE II. When you open it with Turtle Pack, you’ll see it contains bina, slp and wav files. The slp files contain the interface graphics that you can take if you want to modify some, file 50189 is the main menu, extract it as an slp file to use as an example. What interests us now are the bina files.Select file 50089. You’ll see a bunch of lines, the first three say that this file affects file 50189, the main menu. Bellow there is a line mentioning the palette file, 50589.
Go to file 50589, it’s mostly made of sequences of three numbers, those are the colors of the palette written in RGB codes. Copy the text into a text file and save it as 50589.pal. Now take this new .pal file and place it into the “Palettes” folder in the Turtle Pack folder, alongside with other .pal files.
Using palettes in Turtle Pack
Now try to open the main menu slp file, 50189.slp with Turtle Pack. At first the colors will be all messed up but that’s because you don’t have the correct palette selected. On the left there is a drop down menu called “Palette”, select 50189 and the main menu will look ok.Now that you are seing the graphics properly, you can also export some of them as bmp files to edit them.
Using palettes in SLX Studio
Using palettes in SLX Studio is a bit simpler as most of them are already loaded into the program. The one for the main menu is called AoK_Menu_TC. Alternatively, there is the option to load other palettes, by giving the program a .pal file like the one we created.Known palettes
Here is a table of the files and palettes I’ve used in Wololo Kingdoms DE for the main menu and some other interfaces.slp file | Description | bina information | Palette number | SLX palettte |
|---|---|---|---|---|
50100 | Background 800×600 | 50051 | 50532 | AoK_Load_Screen |
50101 | Background 1024×768 | 50051 | 50532 | AoK_Load_Screen |
50102 | Background 1280×1024 | 50051 | 50532 | AoK_Load_Screen |
50104 | Civ selection menu | 50053 | 50533 (same as 50532) | AoK_Load_Screen |
50163 | Loading Screen | 50063 | 50563 | ———– |
50189 | Main menu | 50089 | 50589 | AoK_Menu_TC |