WARNING FLASHING IMAGES
I wanted to try out the new extended (32 color) low res palette mode.
Use left and right arrows to cycle image rendering methods.
(Some of these methods take a while to draw, especially with the extended "flicker palette"--it's a slow dither.)
Your mileage may vary with the flicker color modes. I think it's a nifty way to get more colors, but many people find it to be distracting / uncomfortable to look at.
Modes
1) Floyd Steinberg: Standard Palette
2) Floyd Steinberg: Optimized Palette (basically just swapped some greens and blues)
3) Low Res with all 32 colors at once!
4) Low Res with "flicker palette" built up from all 32 colors mixed (be patient)
5) Floyd Steinberg with "flicker palette" with standard colors (be patient)
6) Floyd Steinberg with "flicker palette" with optimized colors (be patient)
Notes
--Actual image data is stored as 4-bit RGB channels, with Red in the sprite sheet, Green in the music blocks, and Blue stored as a string. There is no reason for Pico8 to be able to store 4096 color images. But, if you ever want to, this is one way.
--The low res mode with 32 colors is interesting, but I don't think the extended palette colors complement the standard palette very well--definitely not enough to make up for the loss of resolution. Dithering with 16 colors looks better to me.
Framerate for 60 fps is also very unstable on desktop chrome web-player for me.
Actually looks pretty good on iphone/safari.
Hi @electricgryphon. I did this earlier so I know your frustration ... There is a secret to getting a perfect framerate with minimal flicker, however. :)
Hmmm... maybe doing checkerboard pattern is the way to go--it does prevent large blocks of flicker.
Dw817, did you do anything else to maintain frame rate?
(loaded yours on my local pico8 and still seeing some flashes...maybe smoother 60 fps is in the cards in the future.)
Yep, the checkerboard idea I did back then worked great, @electricgryphon.
I'm also taking advantage of a very strange feature I haven't seen anyone else using in Pico-8. I discovered it when trying to find if there was some way to really cut down on the flicker.
So I thought well, we have 30fps, 60fps. Is 120fps possible ? Yes and no. If you choose 120fps then the flicker goes away tremendously.
That is if in your Pico-8 configuration that you have this set:
-software_blit 0 -foreground_sleep_ms 0 |
@electricgryphon
I have a suggestion : how about flipping between low res 32 colours horizontal pixels and low res 32 colours vertical pixels thanks to the screen rotation flag ?
In effect you'd get 128x128, max number of possible colours,but with strong colour constrains on each 2x2 pixel blocks.
This could also be used as a logical 128x128 32 colours mode, where colours would bleed clockwise in their 2x2 cells :
AB AA CB CD --->DD +CB |
This reminds me of the early days of amiga HAM : a new quirky display mode where artists might find ways to do bluffing 128x128 528 colours while hiding the constraints and building their image editors on the way.
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