[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:55:06 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 19 September 2013 at 07:24:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
> wrote:
> > That's essentially the same strategy behind the graphics 
> > hardware in most 8/16-bit consoles.
> 
> Something else I love from the good old days: palette swaps. 
> (This is why color.d, previous image.d, has a separate class for 
> IndexedImage - it isn't a true color image with limited colors. 
> It is a whole new paradigm with rich semantics! You can saw entry 
> 1 == foreground and stick to that in your images and get some 
> cool matching with the user's theme with ease.)
> 
> You could do so much with it to get cool looks, and it was fast. 
> One of my favorite palette swap things was the old Nintendo game 
> Dragon Warrior.
> 
> When your life ran low, it changed the font entry from white to 
> red. But, of course, there's other places that used that entry 
> too - the NES had only a 16 color palette (with only 4 colors per 
> tile) so reuse was a necessity - so you'd have parts of the world 
> changing to red too!
> 
> On one hand, that's a technical limitation, but on the other hand 
> I thought it looked great and purposefully copied it for my 256 
> color DOS rpg.
> 
> You could also show/hide things by changing palette entries to be 
> black on black, you could do transitions to night time with a 
> palette swap, the list goes on.
> 
> I love it.

Yup. The NES Mega Man games made very heavy use of that to fantastic
effect. Most notably changing Mega Man's color theme for each weapon,
but the levels made very intelligent use of it, too.

It was also a common trick in DOS VGA games, and really almost
anywhere you look in late-80's/early-90's gaming.

Palette swaps were a great way to get variety while inherently
*guaranteeing* consistency, not to mention the processor/bus/memory
savings.

That said, 16/24/32 bit color is *also* nice since you no longer have
to worry about managing and matching up palettes or getting the wrong
colors where you didn't expect it.