Thread by @pshenk

This may be boring for some but next is color palette tech in D2.
In 2000 PCs were too slow for full-color games. Graphics cards were rare & didn’t support fast 2d ops. Everything on screen used the same 256 colors. Thanks to @davidbrevik for refreshing my memory 😜 #d2memories

D1 had 1 palette for ALL art which informs the OG Diablo look- Very somber & grey. It’s cool but also limiting. In D2 we wanted lots more variety especially in locations. But there was still the tech limitation of only 256 colors on screen at any time. They needed new tricks!

Making ideal palette for D2 was very hard for 3 main reasons 1) Lots more variety vs Diablo 1 (esp more locations) 2) New art during dev meant changing palette as we went 3) Dynamic lighting, which requires shades of colors that don’t necessarily exist in the original art.

The solution was two clever things: 1st @davidbrevik & Mike O’Brian wrote some VERY clever code for finding the best colors from 24-bit source. It was smart about knowing what would be needed for lighting for example. VERY magic secret genius stuff that I can't explain 🤪

2nd was idea of breaking the palette into 3 regions- UI had about 32 colors that never changed at runtime. Chars & monsters had 128 also fixed. But environs had their own 96 colors that CHANGED act to act. Since environment tiles never crossed acts we could do this.

Fixing the UI & Char regions meant we could update those sub-palettes during dev & not mess up the other areas. We did this when we put in things like a new class or monster OR if new sprites looked bad because they couldn’t find a good color on the current palette region.

But like I said, environments were free to have their own unique colors act to act (maybe even dungeon to dungeon I'm not sure). As long as we knew 2 sets of tiles would never mix on-screen they could have their own color set.

I love how a change in tools & engine makes a game look so much better. Both D1 & D2 were 640 x 480 w 8-bit rendering but I think D2 looks MUCH better- Certainly D2 feels more “colorful” :)
None of this matters anymore- For better or worse we can use ALL the colors now 🥳

OK next is the monster I did after Big Head- Corrupt Rogues! This was a big project because they were the 1st real component unit. CR’s were the test for the component system before I built the Amazon :)
Full disclosure this is very CRINGE for me for a variety of reasons 😳

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