If you want to make your own
alternate Portrait Set for Furcadia, you need to pay special attention
to the specific palette values you use. It is absolutely critically
imperative that you use a 256-color palette on the
SPECITAG.PCX image. And it has to be the original
palette used by SPECITAG.PCX. If you alter the palette
in any way, it's not going to work.
In designing a new portrait set, you should understand that some of the palette colors will appear exactly as they do in your image, while others will change depending on the Furre being viewed. If you start counting the palette indices from 1 (such that you have colors 1 through 256), the customizable colors are as follows:
| Badge | 12 |
| Boots | 17-24 |
| Cape | 33-40 |
| Eyes | 51 |
| Vest | 73-80 |
| Bracers | 81-88 |
| Hair | 129-136 |
| Markings | 137-144 |
| Fur | 200-207 |
| Trousers | 225-232 |
These colors should be only be used for the specific, customizable sections of the portraits. If you use one of these colors for the backdrop or something else, that part of your portrait will change when you look at different Furres. In other words, while color index 130 might look pink in your image, it won't necessarily be pink in actual use and will, in fact, be blue or green or yellow or red, depending on who you're looking at.
For the backdrop or anything else which you wish to remain a static, unchanging color, use any color not listed here. Well, you should probably avoid the colors which are set to pure green since I believe they may be reserved for special system functions or else they just aren't used. Behavior on the pure green palette indices should be considered unpredictable.
Incidentally, if you get it into your head to design new player images for the appearance of Furres in the main action window, you should refer to this same list of color palette indices for customizable colors.