So last week got weird with Psychnerd being in town for Jarre, because he was playing live with him, and suddenly I was doing that and not other things. (And the usual trying to pay bills stuff discussed already which ate tons of time.)

This week also was trying to pay things and taking all that time and I swapped to working on things via Pomodoro, which I don't guess I fully use but I am using the pomodoro thing on the tablet to do blocks of time. Also threw on some mynoise.net again. Result:

I can't show you because the 60hz pico8 stuff I'm doing can't be captured (: And it's not fully ready yet so I can't... actually link it to the webthing (which now does 60hz.) Also, depending on the gfx driver, it may be more flickery - and depending on the monitor. On my 4 monitor setup it works pretty well on 3 and the vertical one has more flicker.

So yes of course dithering can be used to get additional colors, and I'm doing that - but I'm also combining with the 60hz mode to trick the eye into seeing more colors than actually there. This is more neccesary on pico-8 because it has large pixels. The result, despite flicker (noticable but worth it, and not headache inducing) is additional colors.

This started because Felor asked if I would be going to Vortex, and at the time I was. (Yes I missed another party due to not being able to afford getting there and this one was in Finland) Felor mentioned he had almost got additional colors working, and... I remembered him saying several thousand, so I of course went to work on trying to get that also.

I actually have something like... I don't know. That's where the color stuff I'm working with for a few days comes in. Various color spectrum things, HSV, HSL, not-YUV-but-the-NTSC-equivalent-YIQ, and ranges. I've got gradients but they are odd, of course, because the palette on pico-8 is 16 fixed colors.

And that's where I am, trying to figure out how to calculate the resulting color and put them in gradients so I can draw pictures, either by hand, or by calculating them. Lightness works, but then adding chroma to it gets... odd. And if you throw dithering in there... it gets difficult to explain this but essentially you can see a TINY bit of it in the picture for this month - the purple that you see in the center is close to the purple you see on the sides, but the side purple is NOT purple, it's combinatorial. So which is darker/lighter, and by how much?

And I'll end up with a combination of 4 colors over 4 pixels here (2 visible at any time, flipping at 60hz) - and I could possibly end up with 8 if this works out over a 2x2x2 rather than a 1x2x2 combination.

Also pico8 has some interesting additional modes that can do interesting things like mirroring that may come into play here for doing some interesting things...

Anyway right now I'm 3 languages deep trying to figure this out, did some manipulation of colors in python to save the memory on pico8 - but may need to do calculations on the fly later for some gradients (after having some of the orders hardcoded for 'initial' ranges, or maybe not, it depends what I find out.)

What I do know right now is that NOTHING I have seen, or tried, in my attempts to do combinatorial stuff is resulting in what my eye sees. I've got a 1x2 swapping... erm... this:

AB
BA

So that, over an area - and so I've got 'green' and 'orange' combining and it results in a yellow-green. Significantly yellower than green, but dark. And the combinatorial things I'm trying right now are producing a resulting solid color (you know, hsl or rgb value) of ... NOT THAT. But a LOT more green. And I'm not finding any suggestions - additive it's not, and it's not subtractive...

So that's what I'm twiddling right now, and I hope to have something to work with soon. Not sure if I'll do a gfx editor first or not...

Oh and also got the very basics of the pico-8 demosystem in (things like what Felor had with ticks and forward/backward time.)

(this does markdown, right? I hope so (: )

Also I've actually done my everydays for a few days with my .fi lessons.

See y'all next week when I will likely be very upset about the results of a stupid contest that will have no winners thanks to the stupid people setting up the board for the game.

Last Edited on Sun Nov 06 2016 16:18:32 GMT-0500 (EST)

AB
BA