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Hello,
I'm hoping someone has experienced this before and can point me in the right direction. I've painted a space image and am trying to load it as a background in Dark GDK. The image loads and displays as a sprite (will be moved around), however, it seems that at least one of the colors has been replaced with blue. (Image excerpt attached)

The picture loads fine in any paint program or viewer. Also, if I replace this picture in my program with any other photo, it displays fine.

Try setting the colorkey before you load the image to a color you aren't using (such as magenta). I think the command would be dbSetImageColorkey or something similar. I believe the default is black = transparent.

Alternatively, I believe if you save your background as a png, that should fix it as well.

(I would go for converting it to png, it would probably be a smaller file anyway)

Might I ask, in your original image, (the now blue), did it used to be black, with and RGB value of 0, 0, 0? If so, here is a little explination.

When you load images that don't have an alpha channel (transparency) built into them, DarkGDK treats one color as something known as a color key.

What happens is that this color key (the default is RGB 0, 0, 0, a.k.a pure black) then becomes transparent when loading images.

This is because in the older days of creating games, they understood the concept of transparency, but the images they had didn't have an alpha channel. So game creator designated a certain RGB value to become the transparent color (a common one was RGB (255, 0, 255) a.k.a. pink).

But now because of new and better file formats, they have built in alpha channel support (like PNG, seriously, try it).

And you may ask "Why is that blue appearing in there?" Well, you see, DarkGDK loads all images into the 3D plain, and in DirectX (I think it is DirectX, if not, someone please correct me), by default, the background color is blue.

Of course, you can change this and get it black if you want.

All you need need to do is add this code to your game loop:


You might also want to get rid of that "dbDisableEscapeKey()", and that if statement in the game loop.

Thank you very much for the responses. They were very helpful. I thought the same, and did try to add a color key of bright pink, but the image still loaded the same way. However, after loading the picture up in a paint program, and changing all of the 0,0,0 values to a different shade, it loaded just fine. Maybe I used the colorkey incorrectly, I'll take another look.

Thanks for taking the time to give such helpful/generous answers

Dave

If you color is brownish.

I mess with bitmaps all the time sometimes. I get bgr in that order instead of rgb if I use memblocks. So if you are useing a memblock try and put blue first. Sounds kinda stupid but I acually thought that I was recieving no blue on my images also tell i fliped red with blue.

If this is not the case post a picture of the display.

vent:
lead.typefrag.com
16020

@DavidD,

Remember that the color key you set in your code (ex. "dbSetImageColorKey(255, 0, 255);"), has to match up EXACTLY with the colors in your image.

But this method is a bit old and outdated. Nowadays we use .png with transparency.

Best free PNG editor:
http://www.getpaint.net/

(It's magical, though I'm forced to use an older version because I can't update to XP SP3, which intern I can't update Paint.NET. Still great software!)