32bit colour

[TerranRich]

EASY SOLUTION:

Have 24-bit color support instead! This way you don't have to deal with alpha channels and you can still have the 16-million colors available.

Is this possible, CJ?

[Privateer Puddin']

pretty sure cj said it will take a similar amount of effort for 24 and 32.. might be mistaken

[Gilbert]

There're usually no difference in 24 or 32 bit graphic modes, just that using 32bit modes may be faster for some modern cards because of the alignment of bytes for the pixel data, in 32bit truecolour actually 8bit of data is wasted per pixel. So implementing 32bit colour mode is basically the same thing as 24 bit colour modes.

Sprites with alpha channel, on the other hand, is completely another thing.

[TerranRich]

Ahh, okay, then that's what I was thinking of, having just 32-bit color and not alpha channels.

[Paper Carnival]

Use AGAST instead, it's more suitable for hires/hicolor games and pretty easy too! AGS is great for the classic low res feel.

Well, I believe the only benefits you have from AGAST is that it is faster and that there are anti aliased sprites. Oh, u also have more possibilities, but AGS does everything I want it to do

[Privateer Puddin']

now now, lets not start an agast vs ags fight

[Nixxon]

I'll check AGAST out, it would have to be pretty damn spiffy to beat AGS though. If for some reason i did use AGAST, could i still post my game on the AGS forums?
8) taa

EDIT -
checked AGAST out, couldn't really figure it out. The editor looked a bit dodgy, so did the demo game (though graphics were supurb). All in all i didn't feel at home with it's interface.
So i say this to CJ...
God of all that is holy,
Creator of wonder and all things that smell of things that don't smell bad... cough
Please amp up AGS's graphical capabilities for your next release.
For you efforts, i will give you verbal praise and an apple core.

[Igor]

A bit off topic... but- that's one fantastic background IbeX! If you find my jaw, please mail it back

[Paper Carnival]

now now, lets not start an agast vs ags fight  

Ok, I'm sorry. What I meant to say is that both programs are great and each has its own benefits from using. I didn't mean to start a fight about them.

[Volcan]

could i still post my game on the AGS forums?

If you wish to post your agast game in this forum, go to 'General post' section. This forum is more designed for ags users.


Volcan

[Juan Pablo]

16-bit conversions from higher colour depths usually look really bad. True-colour modes use 8 bits (one byte) per channel (red, green, blue) , meaning each pixel's intensity for each component will vary from 0 to 255.

In 16-bit mode, 5 bits represent red, 6 represent green and the other 5 left represent blue. That is, the red and blue components vary from 0 to 31, while the green one goes from 0 to 63. This means that for the red and blue components, the precision of 24-bit is 8 times the precision of 16-bit, and for the green component the ratio is 4.

This will be more noticeable when soft colour transitions are made, like in gradients.  However, if you use dithering (with pattern, or diffusion, etc) when converting the 24-bit picture to 16-bit, it may not look bad at all. In fact, it might look really good. This depends on the resolution the graphic will be shown at. At low-res (320x200/240) dithering won't look very well. At hi-res (640x400/480) it will be noticeable, but won't look bad. And at higher resolutions, it might even be not noticeable.

I don't think adding true-colour support is urgent, although it would simplify art editing, since dithering and getting the right effect requires a little extra work.

What would be nice is alfa channelling, tough I don't think that's urgent either.

********

By the way, I'm working on a 16-bit, 640x480, semi-LucasArts styled game. As soon as I have something to show, I will.

Bye!

[Pumaman]

So i say this to CJ...
God of all that is holy,
Creator of wonder and all things that smell of things that don't smell bad... cough
Please amp up AGS's graphical capabilities for your next release.
For you efforts, i will give you verbal praise and an apple core.

\o/ when there's an apple core on offer, how could I refuse?

Seriously though, 32-bit colour is on my to-do list, but it's quite a big addition and so it definately won't be happening in 2003.

[Nixxon]

\o/ when there's an apple core on offer, how could I refuse?

Seriously though, 32-bit colour is on my to-do list, but it's quite a big addition and so it definately won't be happening in 2003.

Thanks! as I said, I don't mind the wait

[ricb1970]

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to clarify with everyone what we are really talking about with 16/24/32 bit graphics.  A little of it was described a couple of posts ago.

16 bit - Red/Green/Blue takes up 5 bits each - 2 bytes
24 bit - Red/Green/Blue take up 1 byte (8 bits) - 3 bytes, but normally 1 byte wasted due to internal register alignment
32 bit - Red/Green/Blue take up 1 byte (8 bits) plus an alpha channel is included (8 bits) ranging from 0 (transparent) to 255 (opaque).

For backgrounds, where there is (obviously) nothing behind them, 24 bit color works just fine, because the alpha-calculations can be done between the two adjacent colors properly.  (Yeah, its a math calculation that I don't particularly want to post here).

Adding the alpha channels to sprites would be a great idea, however, unless native graphic functions are used (and since I am not privy to the code behind AGS), it make increase the time to 'paint' a sprite, because for any pixels with alpha-channel, the calculation must be done.

IMHO, I think that getting at least the color components up to 8bits each (24 bit) would be a big improvement.  The sprite alpha channels would be the next greatest imrovement.  But I only express this for developers who really would like to developer their games in hi-color.

[Nixxon]

Yeh, 24bit colour is all you need, not 32 sorry... I'm not up on the technicalities