A ZTAM member wanted to know why user made buildings can't be made to have the options of changing to different colors as some of the original zt buildings do. She sites the uca/ai setting option "cIsColorReplaced=0" as a key to being able to have this option. I told her that if it were possible, then scenery makers probably would have been doing this for user-made buildings. Can Fern or Jay explain why user-made buildings can't be made to change different colors? i.e. roofs, trim on buildings, etc.
There is more than just the cIsColorReplaced setting, but the problem is not in the configuration. The problem is that we do not have any tools that allow us to make ZT image files where the colors can be changed in-game. Neither Zoot nor APE can create the proper files. And we do not know what the proper format should be for the files. For example, ZT probably looks for certain color numbers inside the image files to know they are ones that can be changed. But we do not know what color numbers it looks for. We also do not know how many ".pal" files it uses to accomplish color changes. Based on what I see, ZT might use as many as 6 ".pal" files to accomplish color changes for a single object. But Zoot and APE look in only 1 ".pal" file for each image view. I never experimented to see if I could figure out the proper ZT image file format.
Thank you for that information Jay. I will relay your knowledge of ZT on color changes to my member.