{"id":11592,"date":"2010-08-03T18:20:25","date_gmt":"2010-08-03T16:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mono-1en-2323"},"modified":"2010-08-03T18:20:25","modified_gmt":"2010-08-03T16:20:25","slug":"old-school-color-cycling-with-html5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/2010\/08\/03\/old-school-color-cycling-with-html5\/","title":{"rendered":"Old School Color Cycling with HTML5"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAnyone remember Color cycling<\/a> from the 90s? This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors
\n\tat a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer
\n\tcould change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would
\n\tinstantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory.
\n\tThus began the era of color cycling.<\/p>\n

\tMost games used the technique to animate
\n\twater, fire or other environmental effects. Unfortunately, more often
\n\tthan not this looked terrible, because the artist simply drew the scene
\n\tonce, picked some colors to be animated and set them to cycle. While
\n\tthis technically qualified as “color cycling”, it looked more like a bad
\n\tacid trip. For an example, just look at the water in this game<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\tHowever, there was one graphic artist who took
\n\tthe technique to a whole new level, and produced absolutely
\n\tbreathtaking color cycling scenes. Mark J. Ferrari<\/a>, who also illustrated all the original backgrounds for LucasArts<\/a> Loom<\/a>, and some for The Secret of Monkey Island<\/a>,
\n\tinvented his own unique ways of using color cycling for envrironmental
\n\teffects that you really have to see to believe. These include rain,
\n\tsnow, ocean waves, moving fog, clouds, smoke, waterfalls, streams,
\n\tlakes, and more. And all these effects are achieved without any layers
\n\tor alpha channels — just one single flat image with one 256 color
\n\tpalette.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Link<\/a> (via Heather<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone remember Color cycling from the 90s? This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"koromo_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-blog","koromo-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/11592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/11592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}