Icon Colour Distortion + GUI issue OS 3.1.4

[rabidgerry]

Does anyone know the reason why my icons are all f--ked up for my brand new OS 3.1.4 build?

As I gradually do things on workbench the colours of icons start to go all messed up. No matter how many times I change the icons back to brand new fresh ones this keeps happening.

Also the GUI settings never seem to hold, or don't do as I select and basically seem to have a mind of their own. So if I select a fill colour for active window it may change, then again it may not change, or then again it might change but to a colour that I didn't pick. The same seems to happen for all these options with GUI prefs. I installed something called Visual prefs but I don't know if that is the issue or not.

Any ideas? Or am I going to have to start this build all over again?

[daxb]

Just switch VisualPrefs off and reboot to see it that makes any change.

[rabidgerry]

no change when I disable visualprefs from my startup-sequence then reboot.

[gulliver]

You are probably using an application/setting that uses most of the pens you have available so then icons and everything else end up fighting for whatever is left.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by gulliver

You are probably using an application/setting that uses most of the pens you have available so then icons and everything else end up fighting for whatever is left.

I have never altered anything like that, sorta fumbling my way through but I've never knowlingly adjusted stuff other than the active fill and inactive fill colour. How would I know if I've run out of pens? I just began with plane old OS 3.1.4 install and just started adding to it as I needed to.

All I want to do is make the workbench look a little nicer

[daxb]

Make a screenshot about the problem with FullPalette open. How many colours are used for WB screen? Does OS 3.1.4 has a icon/image quality setting? If yes, what setting? Do you use different icon types (newicon, glowicon, mwbicon, oldicon, ...) and background images?

[rabidgerry]

Ok so I have colours set to 128

I also did not choose that colour for inactive windows, it changed to blue all by itself. And the prefs icon changed to the older style icon as well. And you can distorted programs drawer icon.

I installed glowicons from the storage 3.1.4 disk btw. I hate them actually and would like to refer back to the old ones if possible. But still wondering why I have these issues with distortion and messed up colours.



also you can see for yourself the messed icons on my main WB screen



Answering your questions, it's a very fresh build, the only icons I have installed are the glowicons that came with 3.1.4. I want rid of these now. As for new/old/mwbicon, I have ticked and unticked these options and still the same shit.

I had a background image but removing it doesn't do anything. Why that makes a different I do not know. I have one in ClassicWB 3.1 and no issues at 128mb.

So far I have not used this build on real Amiga only WINUAE.

[gulliver]

Make sure you go to Prefs/Workbench and verify that both "No Color Icons" and "No NewIcons" are unchecked.

[daxb]

I don't know much about OS 3.1.4 but I've read that there is a setting (see Preferences) for NewIcons and/or MWB Icons. The changes might only apply after a reboot or refresh WB (menu). With a fresh OS 3.1.4 install this should do the trick. 128 colours should be enough. However, gulliver can tell you more about this. Edit: I was too late.

The pens of a colour palette can be free or locked. Locked means that they never change and free means that they can be everything and will change (depends on pen allocation by programs. First comes first until all free pens are allocated). Usually only the system pens (first 4 or 8 and maybe last 4) are locked by the OS. With FullPalette the user can set it. VisualPrefs can/will also manipulate this.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by gulliver

Make sure you go to Prefs/Workbench and verify that both "No Color Icons" and "No NewIcons" are unchecked.

So I did this and some of the icons returned to normal. So the ones that were still messed up I replaced them with brand new non messed up ones using the Mr Icon program to copy normal looking ones. This last about 5 mins before that started getting all messed up again colour wise.

The Dopus icon changed back to a real basic looking one for somereason.

Originally Posted by daxb

I don't know much about OS 3.1.4 but I've read that there is a setting (see Preferences) for NewIcons and/or MWB Icons. The changes might only apply after a reboot or refresh WB (menu). With a fresh OS 3.1.4 install this should do the trick. 128 colours should be enough. However, gulliver can tell you more about this. Edit: I was too late.

The pens of a colour palette can be free or locked. Locked means that they never change and free means that they can be everything and will change (depends on pen allocation by programs. First comes first until all free pens are allocated). Usually only the system pens (first 4 or 8 and maybe last 4) are locked by the OS. With FullPalette the user can set it. VisualPrefs can/will also manipulate this.

I installed full palette at the same time I installed visual prefs as I heard they were a good pairing.

[malko]

You can check this FR video at the end of the article (start time ~30min) : http://obligement.free.fr/articles/amigaos314.php . He also had issue with the icons and fixed it quite in a simple way.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by malko

You can check this FR video at the end of the article (start time ~30min) : http://obligement.free.fr/articles/amigaos314.php . He also had issue with the icons and fixed it quite in a simple way.

I read through the entire page (translated of course) and I didn't really pickup anything relating to my problem. I also watched the video and it was a little hard to follow. I think he was doing what I have already tried (I think) which was to create a new icon out of a non distorted one. I'm not sure as I can't understand French but I was trying to follow his actions as best I could.

[apex]

Use Peters icon.library, delete palette.prefs to get default back, change settings to 32 colors, set chechmark for set MagicWB color and allow color icons...

[PeterK]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

So I did this and some of the icons returned to normal. So the ones that were still messed up I replaced them with brand new non messed up ones using the Mr Icon program to copy normal looking ones. This last about 5 mins before that started getting all messed up again colour wise.

"Mr Icon" is probably the culprit for all your problems, although I don't know that tool yet.

It seems to be an icon copy program that can only handle old icons with planar images or the NewIcon images which are appended as 7-bit data strings to the tooltypes of an icon.

I guess, that Mr Icon was written long before the first OS 3.5 ColorIcons appeared, as they are used now by OS 3.1.4, too. Therefore, copying ColorIcons with Mr Icon will most likely ignore the palette based images of OS 3.5 icons, and it will write only the temporary planar images without a corresponding palette, creating old icons again, and destroying the ColorIcons.

The temporary planar images in a window are looking correct as long as you don't close the drawer and reopen it later which changes the allocation of pens and colors. The icon.library would automatically remap ColorIcons to the currently available screen palette and can also allocate new pens, but this is never done for old icons with planar images, so they will appear in wrong colors when they are reloaded or after a reboot.

Instead of Mr Icon you can use the Workbench Icon Information and drag icons into its window or try tools like CopyIcon by Stephan Rupprecht which comes with a nice GUI for icon image copying, too.

Another possible solution is it to replace the original newicon.library in Libs: by the emulated version from Stephan Rupprecht as provided in his NewIconEmu package. His library translates between the OS 3.5 ColorIcon and the NewIcon format and lets Mr Icon work again. (unfortunately, my own icon.library displays no ColorIcons in Mr Icon, but copying nevertheless works )

https://www.stephan-rupprecht.de/

Btw, which version of Mr Icon are you using? Is that 1.6 from Aminet?

[rabidgerry]

Well the icons seem to be better now. I downloaded CopyIcon after I run into a road block trying to look for my main Workbench partitions .info file to copy over to the second partition which I had labelled Storage. So I just used the CopyIcon44 as recommended. So now that is sorted I still need to prevent these colours from having a life of their own regarding GUI.


I will try what you suggest apex

[PeterK]

Prefs/GUI belongs to VisualPrefs and I won't change too many pen colors there, especially when you have a screenmode with a small number of available colors like 32 or 16 only. (Maybe, you could upload a screenshot again.)

In that case, it's better to reduce the color precision settings in Prefs/Workbench and in Prefs/WBPattern too. If you always use "Best" or "Good" quality then not enough free pens are remaining for a balanced palette. You can avoid that by using a fixed 16 color palette which is locked with FullPalette and loaded by FPPrefs in the startup-sequence after IPrefs. In my icon.library package are some 16-color fullpalette.prefs files among the ThirdParty tools. Of course, only one tool can set and lock these colors.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by apex

Use Peters icon.library, delete palette.prefs to get default back, change settings to 32 colors, set chechmark for set MagicWB color and allow color icons...

I tried this and the colours didn't return to default. I actually deleted GUI.prefs, Fullpallette.prefs and palette.prefs and the colours still were not default. Would MUI clash with this possibly? I installed that for iGamev2.

Not quite ready for PeterK icons just yet. Still looking around at which icons I like the look off. I prefer more oldschool look.

[rabidgerry]

[PeterK]

I cannot see that anything is going wrong with the colors on your screenshot.

[rabidgerry]

I didn't pick those colours!

That's what's going wrong. I chose completely different colours. And then they changed by themselves.

Icon wise I think we are over that issue, I haven't seen anymore corruption of colour within any of them. The last to get fixed was the iGame one which was one of the first to get messed up.

I just wanted to make a more custom looking workbench since I can't have my ClassicWB in 3.1.4 since all the automated things seem flawed, hence the build from scratch.

I think what you are mentioning locking down a pallette is a good idea. Perhaps I should take inspiration from my ClassicWb 3.1 builds and look how they are setup. They use scalos of course which is a no, no with 3.1.4.