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Geek Culture / Colour Cycling - An Old School Technique

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TheComet
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Posted: 20th Aug 2014 22:24 Edited at: 20th Aug 2014 22:31
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Quote: "Seize the Day was a calendar program made by in 1994 by Buena Vista software. It features graphics that at the time, were revolutionary because of the way they handled color cycling. These images were static bitmaps, but by changing color values, they appear animated. What is also impressive about these images is that they had full day night cycles built in, rendered also through color cycling.
A few years ago, a html5 version was made. A copy was uncovered online and there is a way to use the program through DOSbox. As well, one of the original programmers for the project, Iam Gilman, has thought of the idea of remaking it, open sourced, for modern machines."


This popped up on my blog today and I wanted to share it with you all. The HTML5 demo can be played here:
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

Make sure to play around with the settings on the right. The guy who implemented the HTML5 canvas program mentions that he improved on the technique by linearly blending the cycling colours to produce smoother transitions.

Here are the results of what can be done with colour cycling:



















hands are ruined by repetitive stroking... - Mr. V, 2014
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budokaiman
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Posted: 20th Aug 2014 22:58
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These are absolutely beautiful. It's such a simple technique, but the results are great.


"Giraffe is soft, Gorilla is hard." - Phaelax
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Digital Awakening
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 00:36
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Yeah those are beautiful. I wonder how much effort goes into making those images though. They are very small in size but still is quite a bit of work for the artist.

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budokaiman
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 01:20
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Quote: "Yeah those are beautiful. I wonder how much effort goes into making those images though. They are very small in size but still is quite a bit of work for the artist."

Especially considering how careful they have to be about their colour choices, to make sure nothing gets cycled that they don't want.


"Giraffe is soft, Gorilla is hard." - Phaelax
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Libervurto
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 07:03 Edited at: 21st Aug 2014 07:45
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I think harbour town at night is my favourite, the colours are lovely and there is a lot of subtle animations: the water, the lights in the houses and the stars.

I think I appreciate this kind of art more because they had to work with such heavy limitations and engineer ways to get more detail and life out of it.
I want these as desktop wallpapers.

Wonderful. Makes me think of these http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/cinemagraph/

Formerly OBese87.
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Van B
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 10:01
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Brings back memories of Neochrome on the AtariST, never had that sort of quality but it wasn't too bad... I'm one of those people who spent a large part of the early 90's staring at colour cycling mandelbrots

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Phaelax
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 17:32
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Isn't this how the old Windows start up screen animated?

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Van B
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 18:00
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Yup - with an fixed palette of 256 colours, you could effectively scroll the palette in the same way as it was done, back in the day I mean - these screens are kinda cheating with the linear colour fades.

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Randomness 128
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 18:48
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Quote: "Especially considering how careful they have to be about their colour choices, to make sure nothing gets cycled that they don't want."


Nope. They cycle colours by changing the palette. Any pixel that should be cycled uses a palette entry that gets cycled. A colour could be cycled and not cycled at the same time by putting it in the palette twice.

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budokaiman
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Posted: 21st Aug 2014 23:28
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Quote: "Nope. They cycle colours by changing the palette. Any pixel that should be cycled uses a palette entry that gets cycled. A colour could be cycled and not cycled at the same time by putting it in the palette twice."

Ah, makes sense. The reason that I thought otherwise was the distinct snowfall pattern in one of the images.


"Giraffe is soft, Gorilla is hard." - Phaelax
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PAGAN_old
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Posted: 22nd Aug 2014 00:42
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WOW that is awesome. i wonder if any games used this techniqe. But i can see how it could be hard to do.

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BatVink
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Posted: 27th Aug 2014 18:58
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Quote: " i wonder if any games used this techniqe"


The original Sim City used cycling for chimney smoke, fire and a few other effects.

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Green Gandalf
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Posted: 27th Aug 2014 20:21
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Only just looked at this.

Quote: "These are absolutely beautiful. It's such a simple technique, but the results are great."


Absolutely.

Thanks for sharing these.

Is there a simple way of doing something similar in DBPro?

I vaguely recall doing something similar with Basic on the old Atari XL . I think you just change a pointer to a colour lookup table - but I might be thinking of font tables not palettes.



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budokaiman
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Posted: 28th Aug 2014 02:11
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Quote: "Is there a simple way of doing something similar in DBPro?

I vaguely recall doing something similar with Basic on the old Atari XL . I think you just change a pointer to a colour lookup table - but I might be thinking of font tables not palettes."

It would be possible (well, kind of a hack as opposed to real support for it) through shaders and a custom image format, but existing image formats are pretty much just 2D RGB arrays. You'd have to make an image format that referenced an index in a palette table instead of the pixel's colour, then just send over the palette to the pixel shader and set the colours of the image there.


"Giraffe is soft, Gorilla is hard." - Phaelax
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Clonkex
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Posted: 28th Aug 2014 05:57
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Wow, those are really cool! I've never heard of this technique, but I think I understand how it works, and it's beautiful. The flowing water ones look the best IMO


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Ortu
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Posted: 28th Aug 2014 06:28
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Fascinating, and thanks for all the additional info links. love the style and it really makes me want to try some of this out.

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