Color cycling effect plugin

[whtdragon]

I'm curious to know if it's possible to create color cycling in MV, and have been looking for something like it for awhile without having to resort to animating things manually.

Color cycling is a technique used in older games to shift the color palette of a particular sprite or image and produce an animated effect without actually animating it. Here's a pretty nifty link about it: http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5.html and another link showing more examples from the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_cycling this is not the same thing as hue shifting or simply changing the colors in a sprite to a number value. this seems to be taking a color palette and having it cycle through those specific colors within the palette itself.



This effect was used a lot across many SNES era games, and I've always been mesmerized by it. Granted I could manually animate sprites out to fake it, but the effect wasn't used on just sprites, and I feel like this would be better allotted as a plugin for things like parallax maps and picture overlays. An example of this would be from Final Fantasy VI's dream world.


another example of this, although far more subtle but still very nice was the large flowers in flower lamp forest in the game Seiken Densetsu 3 and from the same game, the same effect was used during battles when using some items or using special attacks.


Chrono Trigger also used this effect for a bosses and attacks (so cool~♪) in the game.


I imagine the best way to do this would be having any images you plan on using the effect for be black and white gradient while having a separate color palette image in the game's folder to pull from, but then again I'm no programmer lol


I personally would like to use it as an effect to use in battles both for enemy sprites and possibly to produce background and map effects, but I wouldn't object to also using it for water tiles since it was pretty common to use it for water in older games too, and seems like it'd make more sense to use color cycling for a wide variety of waterfall shapes and sizes then having to use a limited number of autotiles or having to animate a lot of sprites. I'm curious to see how far it can go in newer games with higher quality images, or if it's just too much of a hassle and would put a strain on RPG maker's resources.

 

[whtdragon]

adding some more examples o 3 o/


here's a few quickly made waterfall samples as well as various other effects

I've used similar gradiant black/white patterns for moving parallax images behind semi-transparent tiles to have a kind of moving lighting effect for scifi games and effects. the colors in the center of the above image would be palette examples, though I also left the waterfall things blue so they could also cycle their own colors.


another useful example that maybe a bit more easier to picture would be one of the fountains in the modern tileset that comes with MV.

adding a static gradient sprite, or picture overtop the tile for example would easily animate it or at the least produce the illusion of animation. A tagged static water tileset could also be animated this way though I personally wouldn't want to go so far as to use color cycling on the tilesets themselves, but I could see potential for magic based tiles, warp zone tiles, magic circles, special lighting or items.

 

[LunarFlareStudios]

I looked through the JavaScript examples in the help file, but there's really nothing I could whip up quite right. However, with a plugin Galva made, it is possible to lengthen the event animation cycle to 7 frames. Maybe there's a way to increase that enough to create a color cycle. I'll do some more research and maybe ask Galva about his plugin, and I'll get back to you on it!
This is considering if your intention is to make one part of the sprite change color, not the entire image (which can be done in JavaScript, but I'm still learning). To change just one part's color takes image editing skills, which you clearly have considering how great your resources are, and JavaScript experience, which I don't have much of, and it appears you're just starting out. However, despite not being a scripting/coding expert, I know a lot about how it works. I might not get to continue the search anytime soon, though. Therapy and college tomorrow... it's going to be a jam-packed day.