Introducing the New Color Picker and Palettes

Over the past few weeks, I've been making slow but steady progress on rebuilding all of Pixel Vision 8's tools to match CastPixel's amazing designs.  This has required a completely new set of UI scripts to power the more intricate UX interactions we have been planning. Nothing shows this off more than the all-new Color Picker Tool.

By default, you'll be able to create a game in "Direct Color" mode. This mode is perhaps the easiest to understand. You have a set of unique system colors and when you load up the sprites, they are matched to those colors and indexed accordingly. You won't have to do any additional work to get your sprites to render correctly. As long as your artwork uses the same exact colors found in the new system-color.png file they will be parsed correctly. For the most part, this is exactly how the current version of PV8 v0.8.x works. For legacy games without system-color.png files, one will be generated based on the unique colors found in the existing colors.png file.

Starting with PV8 v0.9.x, you'll be able to switch to "Palette Color" mode. This allows you to reindex your colors based on the palettes you create in the tool. You can simply drag and drop a system color to the palette window, or press the new palette page button.

Once you create a palette, the sprites will be remapped to that palette. You can create up to 8 different palettes with 16 colors on each palette page. The last color, if you are using less than 16 colors, will be transparent. When you have multiple palettes, you can preview what they will look like by switching between pages. Each page will update the sprite preview window so you can see exactly how your artwork will look like in the game.

If you decide to not use palettes, you can always delete them and the sprites will be reindexed back to the original system colors.

While I'm excited to finally have this tool functioning, there is still a lot of work left to do. I've been overhauling Pixel Vision OS's UI code to also support some new features such as drag and drop which allows you to reorder system colors.

This will eventually make its way into the sprite picker so you can easily reorganize sprites which is not possible in the current build of PV8. I can't wait to share more updates next month when I move over to rebuilding the Sprite and Tilemap Editors!