Hi all,

You know how sometimes, after you’ve been working on some important thing, you get sick after you finish it? Like your body was holding off on getting sick until it could get away with it? Maybe it’s just me, but either way, I got sick right after putting the new version of Sprite Lamp out there. Anyway, sorry it took me a few days, but here’s my first crack at the palette shader from Sprite Lamp, in Unity form.

A couple of important things to note:

• It basically works as you’d expect, I think. Put the textures from Sprite Lamp in the appropriate texture slots on the material and you should be good.
• Currently it makes use of the diffuse map, just to get the opacity value from it. The obvious thing to do is put the opacity in the index map’s alpha channel, but since Sprite Lamp doesn’t output them that way automatically yet, I made the shader so it works readily with what Sprite Lamp exports.
• You can get some very crappy results if you don’t load your textures in as ‘uncompressed’. Compressing the palette map in particular will pretty much make everything awful (or at least, that’s what happened when I tested it).
• The palette system is designed to work without coloured lighting. I might hack something in later that just multiplies the output by the light colour, but that kind of misses the point of having close artist control over what colours are rendered to the screen. Ultimately, if you’re making use of the palette system, the key is to set the lighting mood via the palettes.
• Since this is a straightforward shader-based implementation, it makes use of simple additive lighting to handle multiple lights. Technically, this isn’t quite correct, but I think for most cases it should look fine. I hope to work on a more complete and correct approach to this in the future, but it might get a little hairy (might require something resembling a deferred rendering pass). I’ll go into some detail later as to how this might work.

Anyway, that’s it! As you can probably guess, this shader is a work in progress, and will change in the future – both in terms of how it works under the hood and how you use it as a developer. Let me know if it’s giving you trouble, failing to compile, or if it’s not clear how to make use of it, and I’ll try to straighten things out.