Swapped palette colors for ground tiles texture in Illien (original game)?

[Hexaae]

Looking more carefully at my own screenshot at #66 (comment) I just realized this ground texture looks a bit strange: why dark stone tiles (with green grass around) on white color??
Shouldn't stone tiles be white on muddy (dark) background instead?

Originally bugged texture palette with swapped colors?

Wondering how would it be like with swapped colors (white stones on dark soil)...
I bet it would look more natural than this strange "swamp/plasma-like" effect.

[Hexaae]

Mmmh, seems a convincing theory: just by swapping 4 colors position in the ground texture palette it suddenly makes much more sense:
https://imgsli.com/NDMwMTM1

or maybe like this (again, just by swapping the 6 colors texture in a different combination):

alt3 (probably the best 6 colors re-shuffle, resulting in a better bump-mapping effect):

[Pyrdacor]

I always felt that this looks more like green liquid than grass but never thought about this as a potential palette bug. Not sure how much this would affect the game's feeling, especially for hardcore fans.

[Hexaae]

Maybe in the form of an extra small patch for those who agree there was something wrong?
To me always looked weird giving me a swamp/liquid effect as you said, which makes little sense for a town ground... but just by swapping colors position it immediately looks suspiciously better.

If you pass me this texture (and/or teach me how to mod it == extract/reinsert changed texture) I'll try a pair of alternatives editing it with PPaint as I did in the examples above 😊 Need to see it in game.

Normally I would call this "modding", but looking at HOW MUCH better it appears just by swapping colors position, it rises a serious doubt it could have been another little bug indeed.

Something like this, but the original texture had incorrectly swapped colors... that's the idea behind. And honestly makes much more sense than the vanilla out of place liquid-like ground... Everything changes and makes sense just by swapping colors, a suspicious coincidence.

I'd say at 70-80% of confidence it was a texture palette error. I would provide an extra optional patch at least.

[Pyrdacor]

Well something which speaks against this is the fact that there are trees growing on that ground. Especially in the park. They won't grow out of stones. If you disable the texture, the color is full green, which matches more the current version of the texture.

[Pyrdacor]

I assume they had to make a compromise between grass and stones as it was not possible to have different floor textures on the same map. If it looks too much as stone, the park and other grassy areas might look odd.

[Hexaae]

Well something which speaks against this is the fact that there are trees growing on that ground. Especially in the park. They won't grow out of stones. If you disable the texture, the color is full green, which matches more the current version of the texture.

It's a game from the nineties, not detailed as today's gfx... There is some soil too anyway. I would have chosen green myself on non-textured ground option, but...

I assume they had to make a compromise between grass and stones as it was not possible to have different floor textures on the same map. If it looks too much as stone, the park and other grassy areas might look odd.

the biggest clue is the shape itself, and the messed up colors for those dark (?) splotches... If they wanted to create a green carpet of grass, they would have drawn that way also the textured version (with more details). White gaps between tiles is also "unusual"... asphalt? Concrete? Little sense... Definitely looks like incorrectly inverted colors if you think about it.
This game had many little bugs; I wouldn't be surprised of another minor one...

Is there a way to extract and reinsert a modified texture with swapped palette colors only? Need to test for real in game, and then I could make an optional patch for this. Users will be free to use this additional fix in case...

[a1exh]

I don't think this is a bug. I think this could have been an memory/storage saving method of producing a grass texture from an existing texture. Only the original Thalion team know for sure. Don't go changing anything as fundamental as this.

In their next video game, Albion, grass is made using a similar technique changing the palette from the stones texture

[Pyrdacor]

You also have to keep in mind that the colors were pretty limited. You only have 16 colors to choose from for the entire map. And a city needs walls, doors, NPCs and always 1 sky color. So you only have room for maybe 1 or 2 greenish colors at all.

[Hexaae]

How is this ground texture saved, which format? Something totally custom... or can it be exported (in a usable format) and reimported for testing? I have no idea how colors are assigned in-game... maybe there's a shared palette and no way to change even just colors position in this case? I wonder if it can even be done.
Have just made a proof of concept isolating that texture pattern and reducing colors to minimum (6 colors), then re-arranged them, but I don't know how colors are assigned by the game.
This one seems not a recycled texture anyway. It's been used for towns ground only as far as I can remember in game, with that weird color scheme looking more like a green liquid swamp than a walkable ground.

[a1exh]

If you turn off floor textures, the floor in these sections is flat green. If it had been intended to be stone then surely it would have been grey? I think this is all the definitive proof needed this isn't a bug

[Hexaae]

... and textured version has very little amount of green, just around dark splotches (?), on white "gaps" which seems the background main color... So, there is no visible connection between the textured and non-textured versions in any case. Textured version doesn't look like green grass field with more details like added bushes, flowers, or tufts of grass. It's a wrong direction.
It's just an aesthetic choice (I like BTW). It's like: "Ok, we can't draw tiles or an adequate flooring as in the textured version... what color do we use then? Better nice green at least to recall the surrounding forests."... something like this probably happened I suppose...
Already replied above.
If there's a way to achieve that I'd like to realize an optional patch anyway, nothing mandatory for anyone, but I need some help with the texture/palette format to just swap colors to do this simple magic and give more sense to that floor... Some then will call it just "modding", others "a fix". I don't care.