HTML5 Canvas & Color Cycling

[JGadrow]

I was dropped this link earlier today and thought someone here might appreciate it being posted. Be sure to also check out the post that goes along with the link as this code is being provided under the LGPL license.

[shoespeak]

Yeah this is great, I saw it on Ajaxian a little while ago. I think the article was pretty cool, the comments had some other examples of this technique. My favorite comment on the ajaxian post is how much space this can save..great for mobile!

[Chris]

Very cute... Sigh, the old gfx in games back then was so totally awesome!


As for practical use of palete rotating technique it is near 0, except for some really rare cases.
- there are extremely few artists that know how to use this technique, even during 8bit era there were almost no artists that did it (take a note that the gfx on this example is 20 years or older).
- you can do it only with no more than 256 colours, also some of the colours will be used for animation, this leaves very few colours, the quality of gfx have to be inferior by default.
- animated gif provide similar effect (but with more colours available and animation converters widely available and the process of making gif animation from static images is trivial), for the price of bigger file.

[Barrikor]

Thanks for the link

Looking through the artist's post on the subject makes me appreciate how these images work/worked even more.

Apparently you could slowly change the time of day and trigger weather events that the artist created, just by switching between color palates in the game's code at whatever speed needed... All with one image...