Pixelation
General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Arne on April 30, 2009, 01:09:29 am
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Here's another palette project. First, the BBC micro palette. It's has the basic extreme colors.
(http://androidarts.com/palette/bbc_8_color_palette.gif)
Again, the idea is to do a palette which is less abstract/graphical and more useful for figurative game stuff. First, I brought down the saturation overall, and also warmed up some colors.
- Red -> A red-brown can work as blood, wood and earth. Games often have terrain and I think a dirt color is needed. The new red can work as a shadow color for the yellow.
- Green -> I think a warm green is more pleasant, so I threw some yellow into it.
- Blue -> An extreme blue is already kind of dark. It's not really useful as a solid color for character appearing against black. I could make it lighter, but I already have the cyan. I decided to go even darker and decrease saturation further. This gave me a shadow color which can be used with the gray, cyan, brown and green. I might have made it too dark, or not. A dark blue works as a background color for the underwater environments in Exile for example.
- Cyan -> Is this a sky color, or just a generic cyan? I didn't like the super cyan, so I pulled it towards blue a bit. This darkened it, but since I no longer have a plain blue, maybe I needed to shift the cyan towards blue.
- Magenta -> So, I'm not a fan of magenta. It's such an... abstract color. I turned it into gray. The magenta was really close to the red, so one option I had was turning it into something more purple/blue, or maybe a lighter pink. However, I felt a gray was overall more useful.
- Yellow -> A pure yellow is pretty bright, and almost too close to the white. I made a darker yellow skin tone of sorts instead.
- White -> No change.
- Black -> No change.
(http://androidarts.com/palette/generic_8_color_palette.gif)
The palette works pretty well on Sim City where you need a dirt color, as well as gray for the concrete and asphalt stuff. I can't find a good screenshot of the game to work on though. Exile is another game which has a lot of earth environments, and I think my palette might work there.
Edit: Only screen I could find. Made a sloppy edit. Certainly less graphical and striking, but also easier on the eyes I think.
(http://androidarts.com/palette/bbc_simcity_edit.gif)
Edit: The palette doesn't work that great with abstract/graphical games like Pacman, because of the lack of a blue for the mid-blue maze and pink for pinky.
Edit again: The colors were desaturated on a TV. I've seen screenshots where the magenta almost looks gray. My palette is made for modern monitors of course.
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Hey!
Glad to see you're back working on another palette.
I'm making something ATM, working with that palette; it's proving quite nice, though the yellow would serve as a highlight to the brown better if it were not so bright. However don't touch the blue, it's at the perfect level right now and shades all the colors quite well. Making a tree proves difficult as you use the blue to shade both; also the yellow is used to highlight both. Maybe replace the grey with a darker brown? The you would have warm and cold shading colors.
Just some thoughts. I'll post some work with it later. Keep it up!
Shrike
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I started playing majesty again so I did some buildings and units.
(http://www.lolipopsicle.com/art/dot/8x2.gif)
Only complaint is the red/brown is a bit powerful for dirt in comparison to the green for grass.
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That's neat. Since the brown has to double as a red, I'm not sure if I can touch it much... It needs to be saturated enough for explosions and stuff too. The yellow needs to work with the green too. Right now it's a bit too close, I think.
I need to do some mockups too. It's a lot easier to see how the palette works and how the colors relate when in use, if one has a number of images to test it on. I've been using screenshots so far.
I tried my hands on a 4 color palette. It's difficult to give it much range. I went for a value ramp and red, green blue. I can't seem to be able to produce more colors by dithering. The colors are too far apart. Blue and yellow makes a light gray on my LCD screen. Might be different on a CRT.
(http://androidarts.com/palette/4_color_palette.gif)
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I'm just nudged a few things here. The green was a bit too close to the yellow and white, so I darkened it. I'm not sure if it should be as dark as the red, but I like the value difference between the red and white. The yellow... I'm not sure here, but I felt like it needs to be more useful as an explosion color and yellow. Still, I like the less saturated version too, because it works better as a skintone and wood highlight. Perhaps it's better to use white for explosion then just nudge in some yellow at the edges before going to red. This might give the yellow a saturated feel because of the white.
(http://androidarts.com/palette/generic_8_color_palette_v2.gif)
Like I said, I really need to pixel some stuff up. Above are just some robots from Exile.
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Slightly related, I've uploaded some screenshots from the BBC Micro version of Exile (http://androidarts.com/exile/exile_bbc_micro.htm). You can see how close that magenta is to the red. Although like I said, I think the colors were much less saturated on a TV.
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A quick experiment for an alternative. Keeping the purple, but making it dark and desaturated. The cyan has also been desaturated, so it may function as a gray/silver. The blue is kept somewhat mid key and is thus more viable as a 'pacman maze' blue. I haven't thought much about the values yet.
(http://androidarts.com/palette/generic_8_color_palette_alternative.gif)
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Hi. My name is Luis.
I made my own 8 color palette a while ago, it's similar to the first one in that it has gray instead of purple, too.
However, it was designed with YPbPr colorspace in mind. Evenly spaced in a circle around the PbPr plane, three Y steps, constant "saturation" (actually distance between the UV coordinates and (0,0) ). I did so because I was thinking of old iron such as C64 and Apple II which designed their palettes in the YPbPr composite video colorspace.
(http://img.lgm.cl/artwork/sprite/lgmyuvdemo.gif)
Showing combinations.
(http://img.lgm.cl/artwork/sprite/yuvdemo.png)
A scene. Originally it had some people, but these sprites were edits from a spanish Atari game, and I can't post them here.
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That's an interesting case of convergence. I didn't really think about the technical aspects of my palette, although I did read this article on the Vic-II palette (http://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/). (Edit changed link name, thx ptoing.)
I've been wondering if dither (e.g. yellow+blue=green) looks different on a TC/CRT than on an LCD. Some video signals produce Dot Crawl and other artifacts.
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Arne, that is not the Vic20 Palette, more the Vic II palette, which is the CPU of the C64 :)
About the dither stuff.
On older CRT monitors and on most older TV sets 50% dither blurs into a new colour, the dither is not visible at all.
I have seen CRT monitors where this is not really the case. Also on the C64 and Amiga monitors this is not the case, here you can get some kind of interference if you do 50% dither with certain colour combinations.
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Yeah, I saw that page before. I think I got the idea originally from there, although I didn't remember it until now.
Since my Atari died I haven't done many experiments with TV color and stuff, but I remember about the color artifacts in high resolution mode, and that the actual results varied depending on the monitor or TV set, color technology (PAL or NTSC) or even the particular color graphics chip in the computer. I guess this must be something similar. However, with wide pixel graphic modes such interference would be less likely to reproduce... although you probably won't get the blur either...
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It depends of what you call "main colours".
You dont like the default palette?