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> Tinting Sprites Kids these days have forgotten all about palettized sprites! Where do ya think the term “palette swap” comes from? ;) http://www.effectgames

> Tinting Sprites Kids these days have forgotten all about palettized sprites! Where do ya think the term “palette swap” comes from? ;) http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ It fell out of favor because OG Xbox was bad at it and Photoshop doesn’t support it. But, modern hardware can totally handle palette swaps make in AESprite.

charcircuit 3y ago
>It fell out of favor because OG Xbox was bad at it It fell out of favor because hardware no longer needed to use palettes as they had enough memory to store the actual color.
bregma 3y ago
It fell out of favour when the move to 16-bit systems meant no more hardware sprites.
- reactordev 3y ago
  It fell out of favor when we could just store 1000x more sprites. It was memory, not instruction-set. Tinting then happened as a pre-build step until finally shaders replaced the practice entirely.
  - corysama 3y ago
    Instead of “fell out of favor” I shoulda said “artists stopped being informed of its existence and occasionally invented poor approximations to it from first principles”. Such as tinting sprites to approximate palette swaps of the retro style they are referencing. You can do so much more than tint with palettes. The animations in the link I posted each a composed of a single 8-bit image and a function to rotate specific sections of the palette.
    - reactordev 3y ago
      I’m intimately familiar with palette animations. You’re right though, it’s a technique that was lost due to hardware no longer limiting the artists. I still find it to be far superior to sprite tile replacement animations.
- corysama 3y ago
  The SNES and Genesis definitely had hardware sprites. The PS1 and PS2 worked with palettized textures 99% of the time and had hardware quads. The N64 could do palettized textures and quads. The same for the OG Xbox, but it was a big speed hit vs DXTC. With the Xbox360 and PS3 you could implement palettized textures as a shader. But, only the most special cases bothered.
- smolder 3y ago
  I assume you mean the move to 16 bit color framebuffers, not systems with 16 bit CPUs? That was about the point where palettes and sprite and tile based 2D acceleration stopped being relevant.

charcircuit 3y ago

>It fell out of favor because OG Xbox was bad at it It fell out of favor because hardware no longer needed to use palettes as they had enough memory to store the actual color.

bregma 3y ago

It fell out of favour when the move to 16-bit systems meant no more hardware sprites.

reactordev 3y ago
It fell out of favor when we could just store 1000x more sprites. It was memory, not instruction-set. Tinting then happened as a pre-build step until finally shaders replaced the practice entirely.
- corysama 3y ago
  Instead of “fell out of favor” I shoulda said “artists stopped being informed of its existence and occasionally invented poor approximations to it from first principles”. Such as tinting sprites to approximate palette swaps of the retro style they are referencing. You can do so much more than tint with palettes. The animations in the link I posted each a composed of a single 8-bit image and a function to rotate specific sections of the palette.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    I’m intimately familiar with palette animations. You’re right though, it’s a technique that was lost due to hardware no longer limiting the artists. I still find it to be far superior to sprite tile replacement animations.
corysama 3y ago
The SNES and Genesis definitely had hardware sprites. The PS1 and PS2 worked with palettized textures 99% of the time and had hardware quads. The N64 could do palettized textures and quads. The same for the OG Xbox, but it was a big speed hit vs DXTC. With the Xbox360 and PS3 you could implement palettized textures as a shader. But, only the most special cases bothered.
smolder 3y ago
I assume you mean the move to 16 bit color framebuffers, not systems with 16 bit CPUs? That was about the point where palettes and sprite and tile based 2D acceleration stopped being relevant.