The thing was, the hardware was so slow by today's standards that it was barely even possible to pull up and display one byte of memory for each pixel. It wasn't until maybe the early 90's that pc's started to have a whopping 256 colors. There was almost no such thing as a dedicated graphics card. Back in the late 80's for example most PC's could only handle 4 or 16 colors. Years ago, true color displays were unheard of. People *could* make a colour effect that looked exactly like old school palette swapping if they wanted, but they simply choose to do other things instead. These days it's simply not necessary, and there are other, far more flexible ways to make effects. I guess it could be considered simple, but it certainly isn't cheap).Īs the guys have said above, palletisation was a technique borne of necessity to minimise memory usage, and once that was done it added relatively little memory usage to animate by swapping palettes. Additionally, because you'd have to modify the texture itself, "reassigning colours" isn't so "simple" (well. Thus there is no pointer to the palette, which means that palette swapping is fundamentally impossible. In modern textures, however, the colour value is stored directly in the texture itself, and is not an index into an external list of colours. Changing that pointer is the actual "palette swap". When doing that, it's fairly easy to use the same index but pull colours from a different palette just by changing the pointer to the palette used for drawing. Click to expand.In those old games colour values aren't stored in the sprite itself, they are stored in an external list of colours called a palette, from which they are referenced by index.
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