Rivers keep changing colour

Conn · May 2012

Hello,

I don't know what I'm doing wrong here...

I drew out a lot of rivers, making them all a nice light blue (the same colour as the sea), then when I switched to view a different catalogue of icons/images, they all changed to a horrible dark blue... I didn't save it at that point, just closed, but when i re-opened it it has saved them all dark blue..

So I went through them all again changing them all to light blue again, saved it, switched to mountain icons and they all turned green and it saved itself automatically again!

I have done them all on the correct "Rivers" sheet, and I changed the colour next to "S: RIVERS" to the light blue, but it is constantly switching itself back to green and I have no idea why...

Help!

Thanks.

Monsen · May 2012

That sounds absolutely weird. I have never heard of anything similar happening.

What tools did you use to draw these rivers? What where the steps you took?

If you can post your map (fcw) file here, it might also help us try to puzzle out what has happened here.

Conn · May 2012

I drew them with the normal river tool, I right clicked it, chose a river from something like CC3 or one of those one, the one with "default river", "wide river", "small river", etc... I think I changed the colour in there initially with advanced settings/options or something like that.

Here is an example of what happens:

http://v6.tinypic.com/player.swf?file=o20z4&s=6

Monsen · May 2012

The problem is related to the definition of custom colors. CC3 itself only supports 256 colors, so when you define a custom color, it is added to a specific index in the color palette. If that same color later changes, all entities that were drawn using that color will change to the new color defined in that position.

What happens is that the palette is reset to default when you load those mountains (why, I do not know). The same happens when you load a map, it will use the default palette.

Fortunately, there is an easy fix. Go to File --> Drawing Properties and click the Attach to Drawing button. This will attach the palette to the drawing, and any changes will now be stored with the drawing. This also prevents the palette from being reset when you load the mountain symbols, and keep the correct palette when you load the map. Note that the map will no longer react to changes to the default CC3 palette, but I have never been in a situation where that is an issue.

Conn · May 2012

Hi,

I just tried that and whilst it kept the correct colour when switching between icon things, when i closed the map and opened it again, they had once again reset the colour

Monsen · May 2012

Yea, It seems to only keep the palette as it was when you clicked the attach to drawing button, any palette changes after that is not included in the file.

The workaround here should be to hit the "Attach to drawing" button each time you define a custom color, to update the palette stored in the map, before saving the file. You don't have to do it for each individual color defined if you do many palette changes, but you need at least to do it before closing down the program (then save the file afterwards to actually store this change on disk).
Do NOT click the "Remove from drawing" button, as this will reset the map back to the default palette.

Also, if you wish to save your custom palette in a separate file (for example to use with other maps later, you can always hit the "Save custom Pal" button in the palette dialog. (Use the reload custom PAL to load this palette file into the map)

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Rivers keep changing colour

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