OKAY SO this is what Heroes of Might and Magic 3 looks like.
but how do they do the dialogue boxes?
well H3BITMAP.LOD contains DiBoxBck.PCX which is the background, which is simply tiled across it.
But the borders... those are tricky.
so it turns out h3sprite.lod (which contains things like in-game sprites and buildings) also has an animation, which looks like this when you unroll the frames.
BUT it's only in blue.
So this game only runs in 16-bit color mode, BUT this image is paletted.
And what does the palette look like?
This! All the blue is in the last 32 colors.
And the H3BITMAP.LOD file also contains PLAYERS.PAL:
This palette is never applied directly. Instead, 32-color long chunks get overwritten over the dialogbox animation's last 32 colors. Then it can show dialog boxes for each of the 8 players.
