Color Cycling

I see allot of people really love Pixel Art games, so why not add features they can use?

Does Construct2 support color cycling? If not, it would be a great feature since the code is free. More on this here:

effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5

But to actually see what it can do with demos take a look here:

effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle

It really brings back my memories to some of this 8 bit adventure games from the past, in particular Monkey Island. <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Now I think I?m starting to understand why this games where actually so popular and I still remember them today.

Because it seems pixel art which I learned from this forums, has some strange effects on peoples imagination as opposed to trying to correlate real images to real objects in life in your brain, this type of games leaves your imagination to construct the ideas you want, that with added text instead of characters voice meant you imagined the voice of the character to your own imagination as well.

Just like a good book, where its pure text but your mind creates the puzzle in your head.

I?m new to all this and I found this type of games are completely ready for today browsers and they are just absolutely beautiful, regardless if some see them as outdated, they are art in every aspect.

wow, I remember colour cycling! That takes me back too - On some systems that was the only way to simulate animation! I haven't though about that in decades!

I used to do this in CC with the Color Replace shader and Image Manipulator Object. If there's a C2 plugin that can retrieve the color of a pixel + offset vars then it's definitely possible.

Well I think its a beautiful effect and cheap on processing resources to achieve, so it would be particular useful in mobile games.

Changing a few pixels colors should be way more efficient that doing the same with an animated sprite that needs multiple images to accomplish a similar effect.

For pixel art games this could do wonders not only on the beauty of the game but cutting also time on developing.

There are all type of things you could do by playing just with colors in a pixel art game.

Colour cycling isn't as cheap as it used to be. Back in the day when colour cycling came around; it was created around a colour and memory limination. The games in question usually had about 256 colours and used a pallatte array rather the current system of RGBA.

So with an array the colour cycling is by changing the colour value in the array and thus change the colour of all pixel with that array colour index. Nice, simple and cheap.

But today that's not really case. We don't use the pallette array; we use the RGBA in memory. So to colour cycling requires some for of pixel xy manipulation. So colour needs to change each RGBA pixel, offloading this on the GPU however at least takes a large load off of the valuable CPU.

So the best way is to use a WebGL shader. In C2 you can do this. It's an effect you can similar to a behaviour; except in teh effects list. So no new plugin is required.

Colour cycling isn't as cheap as it used to be. Back in the day when colour cycling came around; it was created around a colour and memory limination. The games in question usually had about 256 colours and used a pallatte array rather the current system of RGBA.

So with an array the colour cycling is by changing the colour value in the array and thus change the colour of all pixel with that array colour index. Nice, simple and cheap.

But today that's not really case. We don't use the pallette array; we use the RGBA in memory. So to colour cycling requires some for of pixel xy manipulation. So colour needs to change each RGBA pixel, offloading this on the GPU however at least takes a large load off of the valuable CPU.

So the best way is to use a WebGL shader. In C2 you can do this. It's an effect you can similar to a behaviour; except in teh effects list. So no new plugin is required.

That makes sense. Actually those demos are pretty intensive as I can imagine that changing each pixel is way more inefficient today.

I'm revamping this topic-- I am about to get started on a new project and wanted to see if Construct 2 had added this feature. It would be smashing to be able to replicate the 25 color max-out from an NES system.

Has anyone figured out any method of achieving this?

All you can do is use the color replace shader and change the parameters with code. Unless there's a 3rd party plugin that can retrieve the color of a pixel - then you can use a palette image and offset variables instead of typing them out.