Palette cycling webpage

[troflip]

Wow, how a look at what this artist can accomplish!

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5.html

Does anyone know of any tutorials on how to accomplish stuff like this? I've been able to get some nice, but fairly basic, effects with SCI1.1, but nothing like this.

[Kawa]

GrafX2, the modern pseudo-Deluxe Paint, has a gradient preview thing not unlike SCI Companion. I'm given to understand Deluxe Paint itself had a similar feature. I used it to design and preview a Sierra Logo-style cycle before I decided to go with a static image.

[MusicallyInspired]

That's a great site. Beautiful work. It's definitely an artform in itself. I wouldn't know where to begin to develop dynamic artwork like that. Yes, Grafx 2 and Deluxe Paint both have palette cycle previewing. I like Grafx 2's ability to deal with modern formats, but Deluxe Paint actually has square/rectangular aspect ratio toggles for its tools (except for radial gradient fill, oddly) and a a few more features like gradient flood fills of a dozen or so different styles. Grafx 2 just has circle/rect gradient filled tools with a couple settings and that's it, but it does have capability to work in layers or GIF animation frames. I use both quite a bit for SCI work, though. They're the only good 8-bit image editors with palette tools out there that I've found.

Incidentally, Mark Ferrari, the one who created those cycling images, is the one who worked on some early LucasArts games (made with Deluxe Paint) and is currently working on Ron Gilbert's Thimbleweed old-school styled adventure game that was Kickstarter a little while ago.

[troflip]

I'd like to provide any functionality in SCI Companion that could help with producing/supporting artwork like that, but yeah, I don't know where to begin. There's some sample code to download on the page, but it doesn't work for me. It comes with a sample image (which presumably would be interesting to study), but it's in json.

Support for creating gradients and specifying palette ranges when importing images gets us partway there, but I'm sure there's more that can be done.

[Kawa]

It comes with a sample image (which presumably would be interesting to study), but it's in json.

I actually once wrote a thing that turned cache-ripped json images into a more usable format.

[MusicallyInspired]

At the very least, the idea behind his new "blend-shifting" palette cycling is to blend "frames" of the palette cycle together which utilizes 32-bit colour, really. I wonder if there's such a way to combine the functions of palANIMATE and palVARY to transition colour palettes while cycling at the same time to simulate the blend-shifting technique? I suppose it would require an awful lot of palettes for a single image and it may not look as smooth as the 32-bit examples, but it might be smoother than the regular 8-bit method....just thinking out loud.

[lskovlun]

It may be possible to emulate the BlendShift effect with PalVary if you generate the rotated palettes (all of them) manually. On each Room::doit, you'd check whether the current transition has ended and start the next one. It will probably be slow and it will stress the SCI resource system, but it just might work.

[MusicallyInspired]

As far as implementing new features, one of the biggest ways Ferrari created these effects (especially dithered) was with stencil tools. That is, what I suspect he did (and he explains it a little in the Q&A on that site you linked to, troflip, I just haven't read all of it) was use single solid colours to represent different gradients and using the stencil tool to affect changes for only that colour so that when you use a gradient tool or any tool that one colour alone becomes the gradient canvas...am I making sense? Basically, the point is that to create images like this you'd have to duplicate the tools and functions of a major 8-bit image editor. Grafx 2 is free and Deluxe Paint II as well, it's easy to find around the net.

[troflip]

Yeah, that makes sense. I've been doing a similar thing in photoshop, basically.

- I use solid colors as a "stencil" to represent different palette cycling regions. This lets me easily select all pixels that correspond to that color
- Then I draw gradients across the selected pixels in a layer
- I export that  layer as a png and import into SCI Companion, map it to a section of palette that has a gradient applied.
- Then I can replace the gradient with the actual colors I want cycled

I guess the rest is just artistry (lacking on my part).

[MusicallyInspired]

Here's another example of palette shifting for more creative day/night cycling. Check it out.

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

[troflip]

Nice. You can hover over the palette colors to see which index maps to which pixel. That's kind of useful.

I think one of the keys to the flexibility he's got going on in this pics is that he's using dithering extensively. If you have 32 colors, say, to define a smooth region in your image, that leaves you very few options for how to cycle that section of the image. But if you have just 6 dithered colors that cover the same range, you've got a lot more flexibility.

[Kawa]

And here's a fresh take on converting these things. My tool takes scene.php output with the little bit of JS at the ends removed, and produces a BMP file which I then pass to PNGOUT with the /KP switch, resulting in...

[troflip]

Nice :-)
I was able to crop the png in photoshop and import it into SCI Companion with the palette intact :-)

[Kawa]

I was able to crop the png in photoshop and import it into SCI Companion with the palette intact :-)

In that case:

Code: [Select]

cycles: [
{ reverse:2, rate:0, low:59, high:61 },
{ reverse:2, rate:0, low:62, high:64 },
{ reverse:2, rate:0, low:65, high:67 }
]
And about 25 time of day variations below the fold.

Edit: better picture.
http://i.imgur.com/U9hF4mN.png

Code: [Select]

cycles: [
{ reverse: 0, rate: 0, low: 232, high: 237 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 0, low: 167, high: 174 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 1536, low: 135, high: 143 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 1380, low: 127, high: 134 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 2304, low: 119, high: 126 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 1536, low: 217, high: 223 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 2841, low: 210, high: 216 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 2841, low: 203, high: 209 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 2841, low: 196, high: 202 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 2841, low: 189, high: 195 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 2841, low: 182, high: 188 },
{ reverse: 0, rate: 2841, low: 175, high: 181 }
]

[Collector]

Both of those sites have been around for years. It would be great if some kind of similar functionality could be added to Companion. Anyway, for the day night cycles it might be nice to track down where this was done in the QfG VGA games, those those only shifted by entering a screen, not while ego is already in that room.