[Fry_Day]

Just to disabuse you fellows, PCX files DO support 24-bit colors. It's just that FS doesn't support loading 24-bit PCXes.
If someone wants to change that, it's pretty simple, though.
24-bit PCXes store first all the red values of pixels, then all the green values, and then (surprise) the blue values. Actually, it's just like 3 8-bit PCXes one after teh other, except that there's only a header in the beginning, and there's no palette at all. You can tell if it's a 24-bit image in two ways by the header. Firstly is BPP, which should be 3, and as a failsafe, NPlanes should be set to 3 also. After decompression you should have something like three arrays, say, red[], green[], blue[], and then you should do something like image= rgb(red,green,blue);

[CptWhite]

i'djust like to add that whatever reducer you use there is obviously a noticable drop in quality from 16m to 256 colours, especially with a large range of different hues.  Everyone should use "bright" to convert down

Bright Download

Bright Usage Instructions

It will convert 16m to 256 pcx files and is MUCH better than photoshop or paint shop pro.

[Bobboau]

that is correct!

[Sesquipedalian]

But not better than Corel Photopaint (see above).

Still, for those who use one of those... other... programs, do try out Bright.

Oh yeah, Fry_day, thanks, we know PCX can do 24-bit (or at least, I do).    The issue is whether it is really worthwhile to up FS2 to 24-bit, when a good graphics program can reduce the pallettes so well.

[CptWhite]

i doubt very much that photo paint is better than bright.