Creating and editing a P-Mode preset

When you save a cel with a P-Mode mask, the 3DO CelWriter offers several P-Mode presets in the P-Mode settings pop-up menu.

At times, the available P-Mode presets will not result in the effect you want. In that case, you can edit an existing P-Mode preset or create a new one.

This section helps you work with P-Mode presets and discusses:

Note: For more information on which cels allow P-Mode, see "Tools for 3DO Art Production," in "Introduction to 3DO Graphics" in this manual.

How to create a P-Mode preset

To create a new P-Mode Preset follow these steps:

  1. Start a save process to display the CelWriter dialog.

  2. Click New in the P-Mode Settings box in the bottom left of the dialog.

    The P-Mode Preset dialog appears.

    Graphic cannot be displayed

    Figure 1: P-Mode Preset dialog.

  3. Give the new P-Mode preset a name, then adjust the settings in the dialog that appears for the desired effect.

Which cels allow P-Mode

You can create a P-Mode channel for uncoded 16-bit cels and for coded 6-bit, 4-bit, 2-bit, and 1-bit cels. However, if there are a lot of colors where you place the mask in the original image, you may potentially lose a lot of color resolution since P-Mode for the listed coded cel types is effectively computed on a per-color basis.

For 8-bit coded cels, there is no special P-Mode bit. However, the P-Mode pop-up menus in the Coded-8 CelWriter are provided as a convenience for the programmer. The programmer may decide to flip between P-Mode 1 and P-Mode 0 for the whole cel as part of the program. For example, the program could alternate between an opaque ghost and a translucent ghost if the two P-Modes had previously been specified.

For more information

For more detail on how the hardware uses two data sources and uses multipliers and dividers, see Introduction to 3DO Graphics in this volume.