Loading animation

[Slawomir Piegdon]

Hello,

Fantastic work on Exult, first off. I want to make a screensaver out of the loading animation used in Black Gate or Serpent Isle. I'm referring to the reddish-purplish or icy blue 'moongate' effect that animated when you are loading or starting a new game. I just downloaded the source and will be going through that to get more details on duplicating it.
If anyone can provide any quick tips or a point in the right direction, I would appreciate it. I was thinking I'd replicate the effect in OpenGL, but it would be great to see any explicit descriptions of what it does or the exact colors that are being shifted through.

Thanks,
Debonaire Dragon

[artaxerxes]

I may be wrong but I think it goes this way:

the image is indexed based, like an 8-bit GIF and the palette rotates, creating an illusion of animation.

So if your image is a 2x2 (for the purpose of simplification):

#1 #1
#3 #2


and with the following color palette:

#1: yellow
#2: red
#3: blue

Then all you do is get the palette to change cyclically, so that at the next round #1 is red, #2 is blue and #3 is yellow.

I hope this helps.

Artaxerxes

[Colourless]

It should be fairly trivial to replicate the effect using Pixel/Fragment shaders.