I've always thought the standard palettes used with M&M VII (just finished M&M VI for the fifth(?) time--what a hoot!) were "washed out" in comparison with the normal M&M6 palettes, but I always attributed it to the game's adoption of D3d--a somewhat poor adoption--when moving from VI's 2d engine. However, I've *finally* noticed that with the palette adjustments possible in GF's patch that I can adjust the color palette of the game dramatically and have it look much better. Problem is, I'm not sure what I'm doing when making adjustments to the palette controls (m7m.ini) and am reduced to guessing and experimenting to get the balance where I like it.

Anyone have a more detailed explanation of what each of these palette tools does? Thanks!

Edit: Specifically, it's the following controls as found in m7m.ini:

PaletteSMul=1.00
PaletteVMul=0.9

(The values presently assigned to these settings are my own and not GF's--I think they make the game look much better than the game's own default values for these settings.)

It'd be great, though, to discover what I'm actually *doing* when I adjust these, other than playing it by ear--uh, eye, that is...;)

I'm going to completely guess at this, but I'm not basing this on any evidence so I could be very wrong :P.

If these values are changing colours, and there's PaletteSMul and PaletteVMul, I would assume that's using some form of HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value) colour representation and that you're adjusting the Saturation and Value properties of this by multiplying with the value you're setting, while keeping the same Hue for the same base colour.

I don't have the game installed at the moment to tweak and check if I'm right, but I would presume that increasing PeletteVMul will make things much "brighter" while increasing PaletteSMul will make things more colourful (saturated).

Also, if it turns out that I am right, you can read up more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV to help you tweak the colours to your liking

[Edit] Tweaked the formatting

Thanks very much! I had kind of a half-baked thought along those lines, myself, but wasn't really sure! I've noticed that raising the values seems to deepen/saturate the screen palette, while lowering them seems to regress back to that washed out, sort of faded screen palette the game ships with. IIRC, these adjustments don't show up in mm7.ini until GF's patch is applied. Thanks again!...;)