Loading maps saved with DeluxePaint or Personal Paint "Stencil" feature active crashes the game
From Worms Knowledge Base
Contents
DeluxePaint / Personal Paint
DeluxePaint, or DPaint, was a very popular graphics editing tool developed by Electronic Arts for the Amiga (and, up until DPaint II, for MS-DOS). It was used to create the graphics for many games on the Amiga, SNES, MegaDrive and MS-DOS. In fact some of the maps created for use in Worms United were made in DeluxePaint. It's not as powerful as, say, PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro, but it is very good for pixel-specific work as opposed to touching up photos.
DPaint's popularity was likely because of an Amiga 500 entertainment bundle, "Cartoon Capers", that included DeluxePaint III alongside a variety of cartoon-themed games. The most popular version of DPaint is DeluxePaint IV AGA, which is optimized for working with the AGA chipset included in the A1200, A4000, A4000T and CD32 systems. The last version of the application, DeluxePaint V, was Electronic Arts' last non-game release, published nine years after the first DPaint.
Personal Paint is a DPaint clone of sorts, with many of the same features but improved support for non-standard screen resolutions. It was initially developed by Cloanto, the same team who produced the emulation package Amiga Forever, though development moved over to A-EON Technology. Personal Paint 7.2, the last version developed by Cloanto, is included in the Amiga Forever package, and accessible within the Workbench 3.X system configuration.
The Stencil Feature
The stencil feature allows you to create a basic stencil using palette references. You can use the Stencil feature to ensure that any changes you make to the image you are working on are only applied to pixels of particular colours.
So if, for example, you have a 4-colour image, you can set up a stencil to allow you to make changes to pixels of colours 00, 01 and 03, but leave pixels of colour 02 intact.
Conflict with Worms / WormsDC
DPaint and Personal Paint both leave a flag in an IFF file to store whether or not a Stencil is in use when the file was saved. Unfortunately this causes a conflict within both Worms and WormsDC when they try to open the files. With colour maps (and Graffiti maps in WormsDC) this causes the game to crash when the corresponding map is loaded. WormsDC is also unable to read Mountain sets and DIY landscapes that were created from source files where the Stencil feature was activated, resulting in garbled graphics.
How to Repair Broken Maps
Fortunately, if a map is saved with the Stencil feature enabled, it can be edited in Deluxe Paint or Personal Paint to remove the stencil and then save the map again. Doing this will make Worms and Worms: The Director's Cut able to read the map correctly. Note that if you compiled the map using WormPrefs you will need to repeat this step.
