mortal kombat ninja palette swap sprites

#Mortal kombat ninja palette swap sprites series
#Mortal kombat ninja palette swap sprites windows

#Mortal kombat ninja palette swap sprites windows

For example, one set of pixels will turn grey while another set turns black, giving the appearance that cars are moving along the streets.Īnother use of palette swapping is in the Windows 9x startup screen.

All the blinking city lights, moving cars, and water animations are done by palette manipulations. One of the finest examples of palette swapping animation that I've seen is Sim City 2000. The upshot of which is, by changing the color of an entry in the palette (a few bytes of information), you change the color of every pixel on the screen with that particular index (thousands and thousands of bytes). Using the color palette, the video card turns the indexes into RGB color which gets sent to the monitor. In computer terms, a 256 color bitmap is actually stored in video ram as byte-long indexes into a color palette. By drawing the graphics and manipulating the palette cleverly, it was possible to create simple animations with very little processor and bus usage. So limited that it was difficult to impossible to redraw a 640x480 screen quickly enough for animation. Palette swapping is also used to produce animation effects in old 256 color computer games and Windows 9x.īasically, in the days of 386s and ISA video cards, video bandwidth was very limited. Both of these techniques are infinitely cooler, more satisfying, and less cheap feeling than palette swapping. I suppose the modern equivalent would be re- skinning a 3d model a few games with skeletal animation systems (like Tekken Tag and Quake III Arena) will even take a new model and just reuse the old animations.

#Mortal kombat ninja palette swap sprites series

That explanation is a complete bastardization, but I'm not a programmer and I'm trying to keep it simple.Įxamples of palette swapping: Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Reptile in the Mortal Kombat series the red and green Koopa Troopas (turtles), and Mario himself with and without flower power, in the Super Mario Brothers series Link's different armors and swords in the Legend of Zelda series virtually every enemy in any 2/3 view beat-'em-up (like Final Fight, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game, Streets of Rage) alternate costumes in fighting games (like the Street Fighter series, the Samurai Showdown series, the King of Fighters series) many of the enemies in the Diablo series.

Like a harder version of the same monster. That graphic can now be reused for something else. If you want to change every instance of a particular color on a sprite, you just attatch a different palette to it, with the new color at the value the old color used to be at. A technique used in (mostly) older sprite-based video games to conserve video memory and cartridge space, and also to keep the artists from having to draw too many graphics.īasically, every pixel on a sprite is a number, and each of those numbers corresponds to a color on that sprite's palette.