Comments, suggestions, ...

[Shadowcat]

The launcher is in 256 colors mainly to save some spacetime. Incidentally it also makes it easy to use the mod selector banners on the web (as .gif) so modmakers will only need to make one banner for their mod.

I'm awfully surprised to read that. It is more time consuming to deal with custom 8-bit palettes than it is to simply work in 24-bit colour; the web has not been an 8-bit landscape for many many years (colour jpegs); and the extra space taken by a 24-bit banner is negligable, IMO.

If that's really the reason, I'd quite like to see it patched to utilise 24-bit colour before people start completing mods.

[Fingers]

However there is a definite difference between writing 24-bit software graphics code from scratch and using 8-bit code you already have. That's the "time" part of spacetime.

[Pfhoenix]

Doesn't SDL have methods for loading 24bit images from file? I've used SDL before (an old version, even), and I don't recall ever being limited to 8bit palettized textures. If not, there is an SDLImage lib, if I remember the name correctly.

I agree with Shadowcat here; I can't think of a single reason to not be using 24/32bit images for everything (well, I suppose to avoid loading 300MB of textures to the video card, but if you aren't really hurting on texture memory usage, this isn't an issue).

[Shadowcat]

Fingers: Oh I see! A slight misinterpretation there on my part.

From the outside it does seem like something that shouldn't be a major hassle to change, but I realise that's easy to say when you don't have to write the code.

If you get the time to change it, it sure would be nice. Not really a priority, though.