What do you think about RGB and Color Index mode? should developers forget about the palette?
Yeah, indexed color mode is almost dead today. Think indexed colormode requires an 8-bit displaymode, and almost noone uses this today. Think it still exists because old apps still should work with new drivers, but I’m not sure.
Well, it’s not dead. Diablo 2 still uses this I think. I’ve only written one app using index mode so I’m not an expert, but I don’t see why you’d want to use it anymore. I mean the reason people used to used it was to save space. It causes all sorts of grief with lighting and blending and all those things so I would just forget about unless space and speed are super super important, or if you have some old functions for tricks using indexed mode which is my guess as to why diablo 2 uses them.
On a related note I have used Texure lookup tables (TLUTs) alot lately and think they kinda are going to completely replace indexed mode since they can be used to do the tricks allowed by index mode, but don’t required the entire scene to be limited to indexed mode.
And that’s my take.
Indexed Color has it’s place. Not everyone can afford 24bit displays etc, and the Third world is just opening up to software…
Better to not burn bridges
Nah. As a 3rd world citizen (although my country is not that bad) I can say that someone that can buy a decent PC (at least one that runs Win9x) can also buy (at least) a Trident 2mb cheapo… And someone that can spend 30 dollars in a game, can spend a bit more dollars in a decent video card…
For starters video cards only operate high color… You have to specify certain index pallettes, but not all 3D video cards support those palettes… in fact some 3D cards don’t have pallette support at all…
These are only found out by opengl extensions… You can have a 16bit video mode, and have palletized textures ( all with their own palletes )… that also looks great, 256 color textures do in fact look great ( as long as they have thier own pallettes ), it can look life like…
As far as your question, i think so… yep do it all in 16-24 bit colors…