Dave Carter
27th April 2001 10:10 UTC

Hi all,

This sounds like a really basic problem, but about 5 of us spend at least an hour trying to figure it out with no results, so here goes.

I'm trying to make an icon for an NSIS installer, and because NSIS is restricted to 16 colours, the icon needs a custom palette so it doesn't look really bad. We've tried just doing a 32x32x16 colour bitmap and saving t as a .ico, NSIS doesn't like it. We've used two different icon editing packages, but we can't seem to get custom palettes working properly. We've actually got an icon from an old project that works fine, and gets accepted into NSIS, but we can't remember how it was made!

If anyone's got the ABC of NSIS icon creation (and I'm talking press this button, choose this menu type depth) I'd be very grateful if you could get in touch! Cheers.

arune
27th April 2001 11:09 UTC

I don´t think there is a way to use custom palettes...
You can only use the 16 standard colors.
The reason that you are limited to 16 is that then the icon doesn´t consume as much space,
the icon doesn´t have to contain information about which colors that are used.
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/arune

Dave Carter
27th April 2001 11:23 UTC

I don't know, the icon I said works definitely has a custom palette (about 16 shades of green ;) and NSIS accepts that fine.

arune
27th April 2001 11:52 UTC

Ok, I was wrong. I´ve jsut tried IconForge v4.7 and it worked, I created an icon in custom 16 colors and tested it as an icon in NSIS, no problem.
Here´s how to do it:

Create a new 16 color icon (not animated!)
On the bottom toolbar, dubbleclick on the palette(any of the colors)
Here you are able to change any of the colors

/arune

[Edited by arune on 04-27-2001 at 07:16 AM]

arune
28th April 2001 22:19 UTC

Did you get it to work Dave?
/arune

Deep-Trouble
29th April 2001 12:23 UTC

hi,
I use VC++ to create my Icons... u can choose 32x32 16 color i.e., the standard icon and easily draw one., or use Irfan view to change any picture into an icon., and it works fine...!
-Deep

Dave Carter
30th April 2001 10:19 UTC

Thanks arune, that worked first time! I downloaded IconForge 5.2 I think, just imported the .bmp we wanted to use, saved it out again as a .ico and NSIS took it no problems, custom palette and all. :)

Thanks for the suggestion DT, I think we tried it and couldn't get the custom palette thing to work though? I may be wrong though, I didn't try it myself!