Feature request:
In the palette editor, the ability to tint an entire palette a certain colour value with a variable degree of intensity (0% to 100% selectable). Actually three different methods of this action would be welcome:
1) Tint the entire palette (all 255 colours, exempting the last colour as it's never used(?))
2) Tint all the colours after the first default colours (64 to 254)
3) Select a custom range of colours to tint a certain colour, much like the current gradient creation function
...actually those last two could even just be the same thing. If one wants to convert all the colours from 64-254, they'd need only select them.
Purpose:
Making alternate tinted palettes of a regular background is useful for changing the atmosphere of an area. For instance, if you had alternate palettes tinted yellow, red, and blue, you could implement a visual day/night cycle system much like QFG1VGA. During daytime the palette would be normal. As the game timer approaches "dusk" it can slowly fade into the yellow tinted palette for a sunset-like aesthetic, and then eventually fade into a dark blue tinted palette for nighttime. Another example would be the cryofreeze machine on the Eureka in SQ5 where Roger much freeze Beatrice to slow the mutation process to buy him time to save her life. He can freeze her which show Beatrice changing from her normal palette into a blue-tinted palette or "cook" her which shifts her into a red-tinted palette. There are other examples all through SQ5 of palette shifting occurring between different tints like the introduction sequence when Roger's getting out of the bridge simulator and the shot of Roger's shuttle taking him to the Eureka for the first time (the screen flashes red and fades back to normal for an instant as the shuttle, with its engines facing the camera, comes from the camera and flies towards the ship. These are not palette cycling effects but palette transitioning effects. I'd love to work on a day/night cycle type system example if this functionality could be added. There's nothing like this that can be easily done with conventional image editors, even ones that use 8-bit palettes as a base like Deluxe Paint. At least I haven't figured out how. This would be just an easy quick thing you could in Companion without ever leaving it to quickly make alternate palettes.
EDIT: Actually, upon experimentation it's actually quite easy to do this in both Deluxe Paint and Grafx2. I could even do it in PSP, but it only works on the entire palette. Either way, it would still be nice to be able to do this quickly in Companion as it's a fairly simple step for something fairly necessary for some advanced palette usage to have to jump out into a third party program to accomplish.
Another feature that might be beneficial for playing with something like this is the ability to preview a Picture with other palettes (either from a selection of PAL resources, embedded palettes from other PICTURE resources, or importing a new palette). SCI Viewer can already do this natively, minus the imported palette option. I see that Companion can already preview in the editor with other palettes.
