Palettes and Remaps

OpenRA loads native ra/cnc palettes which are a list of 256 colors in a custom format (TODO: explain the color format).

Certain color indices have hard-coded meanings as transparent or shadow colors. Index 0 is mapped to transparent. If the Transparent flag (explained below) is true, indices 1 and 3 will be mapped to a light shadow color and index 4 to a darker shadow color.

Palettes must be defined with a trait before they can be used ingame. The Name field is used both by internal palette lookups, and by custom palette overrides on unit Render* traits.

The following traits can be added to the World actor:

PaletteFromFile@chrome:
	Name: <string>                    # Internal palette name
	Filename: <string>                # Filename to load
	Tileset: <string, default null>   # If defined, load the palette only for this tileset
	Transparent: <bool, default true> # Map indices 1,3,4 to shadow if true

This is the most basic palette definition.

PaletteFromCurrentTileset:
	Name: <string>                    # Internal palette name
	Transparent: <bool, default true> # Map indices 1,3,4 to shadow if true

This trait loads the palette specified in the current tileset definition.

PaletteFromRGBA:
	Name: <string> # Internal palette name
	R: <0-255>     # Red color component
	G: <0-255>     # Green color component
	B: <0-255>     # Blue color component
	A: <0-255>     # Alpha color component

This trait creates a single color palette without any base palette file. This is used to define the palettes for iron curtain and low-power.

ShroudPalette:
	Name: <string> # Internal palette name
	IsFog: <bool>  # True for for, false for shroud

This trait adds the hard-coded fog and shroud palettes to the game.

Player palettes work slightly differently to the other palette definitions. The PlayerColorPalette trait is added to the Player actor definition.

PlayerColorPalette:
	BasePalette: <string>                # The Name of the palette to base off
	BaseName: <string, default `player'> # The prefix for the resulting player palettes
	PaletteFormat: <enum: ra|cnc|d2k>    # Remap style, see below

This trait takes the specified base palette and remap style, and creates a palette for each player in the game using the color they chose in the lobby.