colorize active objects

hi,
at moment i stuck on the following problem:

in my rts-game, you should have 6 different soldiers, with different colors of pants, shirt, hair, skin

i made a figure with 4 different colors to replace: red, green, blue and pink
it looks like this:
http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/7072/lonelygp2.jpg
i already made 30 different animations for him (crouch, lie, shoot with pistol/machine gun, walk etc)

okay now i want to replace the simple/"ugly" colors to new colors

- the "replace rgb" action is too slow:

i changed graficmode to 32thsd colors, made an app which creates a colormap out of the sprites and saves them as an single image
so i can replace the "old"-ones with the "new" ones... but i take a hours (no joke) to replace these colors for 6 soldiers

- the colorize-object doesnt seem to work with active objects... for such troubles :[

- making the animation for different colors is no solution because there are too many pictures i would need to render

- hwa doesnt support some things i need in my game

- 256 colors are too ugly

any suggestions, ideas... ?

Try Rendering it White and then separate it in to several objects, one for head, one for body one for legs etc and then use HWA to set RGB coeffeciency for it's colour.

is this fast enough?
at the beginning of the game it has to change the colors of 6 units for each player (i dont know really how many players i can realise... but i hope at least 4- = 24 objects)

Using the RGB coefficient should be an instantaneous thing, since it it only renders the object in a different way ;)
Make your character divided into different parts, as dragonguy stated, also make sure you only use grayscale...

a solution without rendering the unit again would save a lot of work... are there no possibilities to replace colors e.g. R:50-130 G:20-40 B:70-120 ?

because the units got 30 animations and i wanted to add some more for special moves, every animation 5-25 pictures in 16 directions -> 2000-3000 pictures (i already rendered them and put them in an active object (changed the hot spots etc... lot of work) but i added some details and shadow so i have to rerender them) , multiplied with 4 for each part would be 8000-12000 pictures... a bit too many and it would take a lot of time to place all the hot spots...

i already thought about decreasing the number of frames for each unit, so i reduced it already to 16 directions, because i think 8 are definitivly not enough
another step i made was decreasing the colors of the game to 32ths... now i could reduce the number of frames for every animation...

Colorizer object seems to work fine with actives.
http://rapidshare.com/files/155005764/app2.mfa

So what you want may be possible. This is interesting problem.
I will try to look into this tomorrow.

oh jeah, but this object isnt animated
i think it has to
always -> "mask from overlay"
and the overlay has always to take the frame of the unit and has to delete the pixels which are not to change... maybe with the "change old color to new color"... so i could use my colortables...
or maybe it will work with the "get red, blue, green" to replace

[edit] hmmm the colorizer object crashes as i load mask from overlay...

yes, using overlay to load different mask for animation was something i had in mind. But first i need to make some animation :)
I will try my best but no promises.

does it crash for you too?

http://rapidshare.com/files/155184715/animRGB.zip

I was unable to separate different masks for each bodypart so colorizer work only for whole body.

very cool thx algul! : )

okay... BUT i dont need masks now :p

if you only use Red Green and Blue for the a grafic, you can create all color-combinations avaible (i dont know if its new for you)
i.e. i will use blue for skin and hair (hair = dark blue), green for shirt, red for pants

thats great, i think this will help many clickers

i can post an example if you dont trust me

I am not sure what do you mean. But I'm interested. Please post an example.

here algul:
http://rapidshare.com/files/155936963/colorme.mfa.html

i dont know why there are white colored borders around the unit... thats bad
the animation was rendered wrong... he shoulnd spin at aiming ^.^

That white border around unit may be alpha channel which mess up overlay mask.

okay fixed it, all fine now... looks damn nice :)
lets see if it works with many units

btw, you dont need the second grey animation
you only need: overlay, colorizer, active object