A friend sent me a link to this website with landscape pictures that are animated entirely through the use of palette cycling. I immediately thought of how the trick was used to animate the water and things in Sonic games. It strikes me that most modern game systems don't support this sort of thing, but it would be cool if they did. Apparently there's still plenty of mileage left in the ol' process.
This is great. Awesome. Giving me ideas for ambient music. Will have to see if I can make anything out of them tomorrow.
God, that is just awesome. It's amazing the way they do it and it looks well. God, I love HTML 5. I really wish newer consoles supported it.
Newer consoles do support it... don't they? All you need to do is assign something to a palette and rotate the palette... how else does this sort of thing work on a modern HTML5 compatible browser?
HTML5 implements its own paletted graphics system. Most newer graphics APIs typically don't support palettes. For instance, there's an extension for OpenGL called GL_EXT_paletted_texture. It was supported on plenty of older hardware (i810/i815, NV1x, NV2x, NV3x, probably some older ATIs, some S3 cards, and Voodoo cards), but newer cards dropped support for this extension. (My ATI FireGL V5200 using Mesa 7.9-devel with Gallium3D doesn't support the extension.) Interestingly, Windows XP's software OpenGL implementation (which only supports OpenGL 1.1) does support the GL_EXT_paletted_texture extension.
I saw this a looong while ago, and it hasn't become any less awesome. It's a damn shame that the artist who pixeled those scenes by hand is no longer doing graphical art, though.
The only reason modern games don't do this anymore is because we have crazy amounts of storage space and millions of colors to work with. Making palletized art, while generally more space-efficient, takes more effort and thought than just using the colors you want directly. And as mentioned earlier, palletized graphics are no longer 'fast' on modern hardware. As an example, those HTML5 samples have to use a bit of CPU time to emulate an 8-bit palette and translate it to 32-bit color. This takes away an important speed advantage palettes once had, thus making it a little less practical for use in modern games. But yeah, all that said, it doesn't take away from the fact that those samples are quite beautiful, in both looks and efficiency. These kinds of artists don't really exist anymore, other than maybe in mobile games or hobby projects (like Sonic hacking).
These illustrations look like old Magic the gathering cards. Nice to look at. However, like Delta said, I don't really see the point of using palettes in today games or in a web...Its cool to look at, and practical to storage, but we have freaking blu-rays right now. And internet connections are fast like hell... Also, even if its new on html5, we could do that on Actionscript long ago, I remember watching at this when Flash 8 came out: http://www.fumiononaka.com/Sample/Flash8/paletteMap.html , even if its a pretty random pallete, its the same exact thing, but on flash.
On the subject of modern game systems, it's trivial to create a palette cycling effect using pixel shaders now, and a lot more efficient too.
Well hot damn those are impressive, inb4 someone makes them into a level =P Also on the subject of it's usefulness, isn't palette cycling/swapping much faster than art swapping? I know this is the case for the Megadrive/Genesis, though I would've thought the same for advanced hardware/software too.
Holy shit, that is SNK quality right there. Reminds me of Metal Slug's backgrounds. This is even better than what I've seen of SNK's spritework for backgrounds, actually.
Newer games don't necessarily use palettes like this anymore. So doing things in this way is pretty much unfeasible. Like I said, however, it's much more efficient to use a pixel shader to create the same effect, if only because the work can be done entirely in the GPU.
