Palette cycling is back !

[PypeBros]

May I share this collection of demos with you ?
I  bet most of you know palette cycling animation; HTML5 seems to allow to code them efficiently enough to see a gallery of examples appearing. I must say some of them are pretty impressive.

Have a nice day.

[Indigo]

just briefly looking over the code i feel like it isn't actually shifting the indexes around in 8-bit, but most likely in 24 bit in real time.  its very impressive.  I'll look into the source code further.

[ptoing]

I think if you enable blend mode (default) it generates inbetween colours to make stuff smoother. kinda like animated aa. And indeed, this is quite impressive. some clever use of colourcycling.

[Ai]

Beautiful use of dithering (I'm pretty sure it's computer-generated, too, heh) to enable the various subtle cycling effects. the palette's kind of obscenely large, but not surprising really.. I suspect the originals were made with a tool that overlaid color cycling layout onto a base picture

As for the 'blend' animation, that seems to be a simple linear interpolation with wrapping at edges, so yeah, just like subpixel animation.

[Helm]

Yeah the dither patterns tell the tale, there must be a tool that worked on top of the image.

[PypeBros]

I suspect the originals were made with a tool that overlaid color cycling layout onto a base picture

The author of the website speaks of a home-made converter of (amiga) .LBM files into picture (png) + JSON data (palette cycling info), so I bet the "tool" is deluxe paint ...

[Ai]

I suspect the originals were made with a tool that overlaid color cycling layout onto a base picture

The author of the website speaks of a home-made converter of (amiga) .LBM files into picture (png) + JSON data (palette cycling info), so I bet the "tool" is deluxe paint ...

I quite definitely disagree. Have you looked at the complexity of some of the color cycling patterns? Sure, you could draw them directly onto the picture, but that would make it MUCH harder to do -- if you look at some of the complex water cycling effects, creating them would depend on being able to see each color cycling set distinctly from each other, whereas previewing the animation would require only a subtle contrast (as found in the result). You could do that with palette swapping, but again, this seems to me to be a lot of pain to go to versus simply drawing the cycling flows on the spare page, saving it separately, and combining them using a simple tool.
Though the base image at least was certainly produced in DP, the LBM fileformat was writable by other things than just Deluxe Paint.

(I'm really just going by 'How I would do it' here.. To be fair it may well have been done all via DP.)

[PypeBros]

Though the base image at least was certainly produced in DP, the LBM fileformat was writable by other things than just Deluxe Paint.

(I'm really just going by 'How I would do it' here.. To be fair it may well have been done all via DP.)

That could very well be true, yes. And that would be mandatory with the DP2E for DOS I used to have. Since I don't know about the features of later DP IV and DP V on Amiga, I can only imagine that such tricks could have been natively introduced as part of the main deluxe paint package.

[ptoing]

Depending how sophisticated you use DP I think it could well be done with just that. You could plan a lot of things in the spare frame for example or whatnot.
I don't think it would be impossible.

[Helm]

Definitely not impossible, and the artist states he was using Deluxe Paint II for DOS no less. He might have made some personal tools or not, we'd only find out if we facilitated an interview. Is there any interest in that from the userbase, here? I could certainly send out a few e-mails.

[ptoing]

I doubt he made his tools, but if you write an email and ask, it would be interesting to ask if he could explain the general process he used to create these effects.
I have a general idea of how I think he went to do it but it would be nice to hear it from him if possible.

[Helm]

E-mail sent.

[skw]

Amazing! I too am interested in how the whole thing was made, and what were the tools used.

I would definitely buy an LCD painting with these!

[Helm]

Mark wrote back and he'd be interested in doing the interview. He's doing a different Q&A tomorrow and if we have unanswered questions after that, we should compile them here in this thread and I'll conduct the interview soon. So if you have some ideas, write in. Trust me to ask the sensible questions, naturally, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

[junkboy]

Helm: That is awesome news. I'm really curious about how he went about doing these, because to me it's all sorcery and black magic. And sugary prettiness in that Kinkade sort of way.

[EyeCraft]

I love these works. I really missed this whole era of gaming. When I see it now I'm blown away; so much atmosphere and mood. It's brilliant!

I am VERY interested to know his process for creating these. I spent a little time looking at them last trying to figure it out, but I didn't get very far 

[Ai]

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Q_A_with_Mark_J_Ferrari

Someone just posted this on a Grafx2 bug report for color cycling; I presume this is the 'different Q+A' you referred to, Helm.

All in DPaint apparently, with the aid of advanced technical ignorance (to paraphrase Mark's words) and excessive amounts of time. In particular the way he describes making some of the rain effects, those would be much easier to make with a dedicated tool.

Perhaps it warrants more in-depthness on technique, but the essential details of the method are there.

technique question:
* when you have two adjacent color-cycling areas (with the dithered mixing to disguise the transition), do those cycles need to be synchronized or can you get away with having them cycle asynchronously? (WRT either the 'phase' (when the cycles start) or the length of the cycling range)