Palace rooms have background pictures that are 512 x 384 GIF or JPEG files. They can come from any graphic source at all: photographs, scanned drawings, computer generated pictures, "snapshots" of rooms developed in Virtus VR programs, etc. They all need to be converted to the standard size, and there is a standard color palette that makes them look their best. Props can be developed in a couple of different ways.

If you scan materials, use photos, etc. be sure to consider copyright implications. The good Palace rooms might become part of the College of Education palace, and we will need to be careful! If you have doubts, talk to me; we might want to keep those rooms to ourselves.

I will add the rooms from this class to my personal Palace server for viewing by the class members. You should submit them to me as email attachments or on Windows-compatible diskettes in the correct formats and with the correct filenames.

Creating Palace Environments

If you want to create your own Palace environment, you need to take a number of steps. First, you will need access to a Palace server. There aren't many that are likely to give outsiders access to authoring capabilities, so you might have to set up your own. (An exception might be Kent State's College of Education; if you have a good set of educational rooms, we might be willing to host them.) Palace servers range from low-end inexpensive ones to costly servers that can handle hundreds or thousands of people at a time. They run on Windows, Macs, and Unix. For this course, I will be giving you access to my Palace server.

Once on a Palace server, you need God or Wizard powers (these terms have changed since Palace has moved toward a more business-like orientation). If it is your own server, then you are the "God." Otherwise, the server administrator must be persuaded to give you the Wizard password. This allows you to link to new rooms, write scripts, and so on. I will give you my Wizard password at the appropriate time.

Palace Rooms

You probably won't want to use the rooms that come with the Palace server, since they won't fit whatever themes and goals you have in mind for your educational site. Therefore, you will need to develop your own set of rooms. The first step in this process is often to draw a rough map of the overall set of rooms that you envision. This will help later when you are figuring out how to link the rooms together.

All Palace rooms are simply .GIF images (Graphic Interchange Format) or JPEG (joint Photographic Experts Group) pictures. These are the same formats used extensively for images on the World Wide Web. Palace rooms must be 512 x 384 pixels in size and, if they are GIFs, use the basic Palace color palette (gifs can have only 256 colors, so it's important to choose the right set).

Create a Palace background using these steps:

Start with your image. This can be a digital photograph, a still captured from video, a snapshot scanned into the computer, a computer generated image (from a graphics program, a VR program, whatever), or almost anything else. As long as it is an image that can be converted to a gif, it will work.

Convert your image to a gif or jpg. Many graphics programs (e.g. Photoshop) will convert images from one format to another). HiJack is a program that will convert almost any graphic format to almost any other.

Use a graphics program to make the image exactly 512 x 384 pixels in size. This might be done either by cropping or resizing it or some combination. If you are resizing, be careful to keep the aspect ratio the same as the original image; otherwise your picture will be distorted.

If it is a gif, convert the image to the correct color palette. This requires some knowledge of a good graphics program. You can extract the palette from the Palace Entrance gif supplied with your server. If you don't know how to do this, ask me. Dealing with the color problems of converting to 256 colors.

Download the Palace palette for PaintShop Pro

Put the image into the correct folder on the server where the Palace program can find it. You might have to send the images to whoever runs the server to do this. For this course, you will definitely have to send me the pictures to place onto the server.

Enter the Palace as usual and become a Wizard.

Wizards have an extra menu on their client program, which allows them to create rooms and doors, write scripts, and so forth. We will at least look at this process in class.

Now go and learn how to be a wizard