Grey:
Well I'm not positive that it doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure. I'm getting some odd results with an image with a large translucent region when I have the background color set to black. The translucent region is darkened somewhat. When it's set to use the origin background it looks fine. But the program doesn't seem to read any colors other than white on areas with 0 alpha if you have origin background on. At least with 8bit. It doesn't give you color readings with 24bit so I couldn't say for sure with that.
As for your question about automatic color reduction, if you want to get your size down you'll want to reduce the colors. And even if it did detect if the image has fewer than 256 colors and then use 8bit automaitcally (it does not), 99% of the time you're not gonna find your image has less than 256 colors.
If you're concerned about file size then you should be willing to take a small but nealry unnoticable loss in quality. Otherwise you're just wasting your time to shave off maybe 100K off a game that's probably gonna end up being 10-15 megs. I'm doing all my shaving because I have some very large animated sprites for bosses and each one would be about 500K if I didn't reduce the colors to get them down to around 100-150K. With 10 bosses, and 10 planet backgrounds of the same size, without this compression, I'd be looking at 15 to 20 megs for that artwork alone. This way I'm looking at a more realistic 4 megs. For casual games, you really don't want to go over 10 megs for the shareware version if at all possible. If I'm lucky, my shareware version will be more like 8 megs and the full one no more than 20.
Well I'm not positive that it doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure. I'm getting some odd results with an image with a large translucent region when I have the background color set to black. The translucent region is darkened somewhat. When it's set to use the origin background it looks fine. But the program doesn't seem to read any colors other than white on areas with 0 alpha if you have origin background on. At least with 8bit. It doesn't give you color readings with 24bit so I couldn't say for sure with that.
As for your question about automatic color reduction, if you want to get your size down you'll want to reduce the colors. And even if it did detect if the image has fewer than 256 colors and then use 8bit automaitcally (it does not), 99% of the time you're not gonna find your image has less than 256 colors.
If you're concerned about file size then you should be willing to take a small but nealry unnoticable loss in quality. Otherwise you're just wasting your time to shave off maybe 100K off a game that's probably gonna end up being 10-15 megs. I'm doing all my shaving because I have some very large animated sprites for bosses and each one would be about 500K if I didn't reduce the colors to get them down to around 100-150K. With 10 bosses, and 10 planet backgrounds of the same size, without this compression, I'd be looking at 15 to 20 megs for that artwork alone. This way I'm looking at a more realistic 4 megs. For casual games, you really don't want to go over 10 megs for the shareware version if at all possible. If I'm lucky, my shareware version will be more like 8 megs and the full one no more than 20.