Talk:Petit Computer 3/@comment-15296152-20140716205141

Back on the subject of color palettes (I know, I just won't let go of this), I read something interesting about the development of Shovel Knight (skip to the part about Multiple Color Palettes Simultaneously).

I read it, and thought "This could be how they could implement color palettes into PTC3." What they did for Shovel Knight is that each sprite/tile was an 8-bit indexed texture cel (PTC uses 4-bit for sprites/tiles and 8-bit for GRPs), and the color palettes were full 32-bit color textures that the 8-bit textures referred to for the coloring. With PTC3, if they are using full 32-bit color graphic cels for everything, then they could use a single color component (like red) to reference up to 256 colors. They did say graphic cels would be 16x16 minimum, right? Well, 16 * 16 = 256! Plus, this could allow mixing of the two while editing since they would all be using the same format.

If they were using 16-bit color graphic cels (5bits for each color component + 1 bit for transparency), they could still get up to 32 colors via one component, which is double what PTC offers.

But how to access them for sprites, tiles, etc? Simple. How do you choose which graphic cel for tiles and sprites in PTC. Now imagine the slot for palettes refers to the same graphic blocks. Viola! Perhaps even to distinguish an indexed sprite/tile vs one using the full color mode, they could assign this by placing -1 in the palette slot.

What do you all think? I figured this would be something worth talking about, especially since Shovel Knight uses it and is available on the 3DS, the same platform PTC3 will be on.