Ask the Experts / Alternate color palette

Can anyone explain how an alternative color palette can be created and used in-game? I would love to play around with it, as there seem to be endless new possibilities, but I have no idea how to do it and I believe there is no tutorial yet... I, and I think many more members, would be really grateful if someone could explain it step by step.

No one? The whole community could progress so much when these secrets are public.

There is Trigger's water palette creator - though it seems more limited than necessary (I thought water files could change the whole palette, but this tool looks like it only allows a subset of that). That said, I have not actually looked at the water palette files nor used that tool, so I am not sure what can and can't be done with them, but if you're interested then the source code to Trigger's tool and of course the OpenRCT2 source code are likely your best bet - tid.rctspace.com doesn't seem to have much on this.

 

I suspect there is probably another tool out there somewhere for creating these, as the one I linked is fairly recent and most of the water palettes I've seen predate it.

Actually it's quite easy with this BAT-file. I don't know where I got this palmaker, it is from an RCT Utility box I downloaded somewhere.
I wrote a small readme and included it in the ZIP.

This is great. Thanks a lot! The .BMP file's name is 'WTRHIP', but I guess it is not the hipster palette, but the standard palette that comes with the game, right?

 

Edit: So I tried to make a palette and the BAT file said it made a new file, but I can not find it. Where does it place the new .DAT file?

 

Nevermind, found it already.  The .BMP in the zip is the hipster palette, though. Do you have the original one?