Sunday 14 May 2017

Time for a change

One of the many neat things in Time Pilot '84 is that the background palette is different for each level. The map stays the same, just the colours change, presumably to give an impression of time travel between levels. It adds variety and helps give each level an identity.

I wanted to do something like this in my game but the 6847 VDG doesn't exactly spoil you with choice. In four colour modes, the palette can be one of two colour sets: Green-Yellow-Blue-Red or Buff-Cyan-Magenta-Orange.

The word you are looking for is 'hideous'


Simply switching between these two colour sets doesn't look very good. The alternate colours don't make much visual sense:

Colour set 0

Colour set 1. Yuck.

The problem is that the bright parts of the image are no longer bright, resulting in a very unnatural looking image. However, if the colours are swapped around, it can be made to look a lot better:

Not so ugly
Also usable
My God, it's full of ice cream.


All the colours in half a rainbow


As I was thinking about moving colours around, I wondered how many usable palettes could be made by rearranging the original set 0 colours. It turns out there are quite a few. Each image caption below describes how the colours have been remapped from the original Green-Yellow-Blue-Red palette:

Red-Yellow-Blue-Green
Green-Yellow-Red-Blue
Blue-Yellow-Green-Red
Blue-Yellow-Red-Green
Red-Yellow-Green-Blue
Yellow-Green-Red-Blue
Yellow-Green-Blue-Red

That's a pretty good result. Some of the permutations look more alien than others, but I think that fits this type of game, and they still make visual sense because the brighter colours are where they should be.

So I've now got all these variations on the background map just by swapping the colours around. Awesomeness. But how do I go about making all these palettes actually happen?

One way would be to have a different set of tiles per palette, but that seems very wasteful of memory. It would be more efficient to manipulate the image data in memory to achieve the colour change between levels. A function is required to map the colours from one palette permutation to another.

Green is the new red


Let's say the existing palette is the usual Green-Yellow-Blue-Red and we want to change it to Red-Yellow-Blue-Green. This means that the green pixels need to be changed to red, the yellow and blue pixels stay the same, and the red pixels need to be changed to green.

Let's now change the palette to Green-Yellow-Red-Blue. This changes red to green, yellow stays the same again, blue changes to red and green changes to blue.

The colour changes are defined by comparing the new palette to the current palette. The new palette defines what we want the colours to be, but we need to refer to the current palette to define the colours we are changing from. That means we need to store the current palette for future reference, so let's have four palette registers numbered 0-3, and initialise them by storing the values 0-3 to represent the standard palette. (Green=0, Yellow=1, Blue=2, Red=3)

Updating the palette registers is easy, we just need to store the new palette values in them, but we also need to generate information to define the mapping of current colours into new colours.

To give an example, if we imagine changing the colours of a target image pixel by pixel, what we want to know is if the target pixel is green, what does it need to change to? To find out we need to look at the current palette registers, determine which one contains green, and then get the new colour from the same position in the new palette. It sounds like a lot of work.

It would be more efficient if we first laid out the new colours in a logical order: New green, new yellow, new blue, new red. Then we would know where to look to find the new colour for green. The following piece of code does exactly that. It looks at the current and new palettes, updates the current palette and creates a nicely ordered four byte mapping table:

      ldx #current_palette
      ldy #new_palette
      ldu #palette_map
      lda #4
      sta count
loop  lda ,x    ; current palette entry
      ldb ,y+   ; new palette entry
      stb ,x+   ; update current entry
      stb a,u   ; store in new mapping
      dec count
      bne loop



We can now change the colours of all four pixels in one byte using some code like the following. It recolours the pixels in A using the mapping table at U:

      ldx #4     ; 4 pixels per byte
loop  clrb       ;
      lsla       ; get one pixel in B
      rolb       ;
      lsla       ;
      rolb       ;
      ora b,u    ; look up and combine entry from mapping table
      leax -1,x  ;
      bne loop   ; next pixel


It's a little on the slow side. If I use it to directly recolour the contents of the four shift buffers as well as the tile graphics, it takes over a second. The way I've made it faster is to build a table containing the results of converting each possible value from 0 to 255. This table can then be used to quickly lookup converted colours a whole byte at a time. Much faster.

Rewriting history


I've made it sound like I arrived at a neat and tidy solution fairly quickly. The reality is very different. My first solution involved a 16 byte lookup table to convert the high and low nybbles of each byte separately. Then I came up with a faster and more simple piece of code that generated a 256 byte lookup table using recursion.

At the time, recursion seemed like a natural solution to the problem of generating a table containing every permutation of colours. It was only while writing this post that I revisited the code to remind myself how it works and settled on the even more simple current solution. As I prefer the current solution so much more than the previous ones, I've decided to pretend that was how I did it in the first place.

If we've learned anything from Bill & Ted, it's that only the winners get to go back in time and set things up. That is, as long as you don't pay much attention to the git history...

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