My way of creating .ICO files
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/My way of creating .ICO files
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| I took windows bitmap program mspaint or pbrush and made up a image of my own and shrinked to 32X32 and saved as either 256 or 24 bit bitmap file um anyway I went to dos prompt in windows xp sp2 and I wrote ren or rename untitles.bmp new.ico and hit enter it worked so I went to my search option in the start button and typed .ico and it poped up with mine as well as the other icons from other programs |
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| Although It seems to mess up the colors a little bit I used visual c++ icon maker witch comes with visual c++ |
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| See, I just click the bmp once, wait a second, then click again. The name flashes. Now, i rename the file from there! Basically, if you right-click, you can rename it there. if you cant see the extension, go into your folder>options and untick "Hide extensions for known file types". |
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| ICO files are basically just a collection of bitmaps, which is presumably why this is working. I thought an ICO file needed a header to tell the system what images were inside it, but clearly your version of windows manages to deal with it - it may be the case that other software won't. Generally, an icon (for displaying in a file system as opposed to on a toolbar or other gadget) is supposed to have a standard set of images (32x32 and 16x16 in 256 colours I think, although it can have more) in order to ensure it displays correctly, although if they're not there it will pick the nearest one and interpolate to produce a mangled mess. For example, try changing your file view from / to list and large icons, and you'll see that one of them doesn't look so good. |
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| Actually, ive used this technique extensively in a few versions of windows.... |
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| Doesn't work in win98. :( What happens for masked/transparent icons? How does windows know which color is to be considered transparent when doing the conversion? |
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| You are trying to do thing I a way more difficult way than what it can be done. Last versions of The Gimp save files as .ico, even xnview (I use it instead of acdsee, basically because it's freeware and very good) |
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| You can also use IrfanView. It has batch-conversion built-in to convert an entire directory, containing files of different filetypes to a .ICO file (and other formats as well). IrfanView can scale all your images, reduce the colors from 24-bit to 256 colors and save every file as a .ICO file. Above all, IrfanView is completely free. |
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| Thank you PowerPC603 for that suggestion I too the liberty of downloading and trying it out and it's amazing thanks :) |
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