This article talks about palettes a bit.

16 bit graphics as far as I know does not use pallet''s ie they cant use them (at least not in directx) it would be possible to write your own colour shifiting/animation functions however I cant imagine they''d be very fast.

Sephwrath

Just finished wiriting a fire routine recently.

First of all, I tried to writh the fire routine in 16 bit mode. I was not happy with the colour palette. I couldn''t get enough colours to make it look any good.

I ended up writing it up in 32 bit mode, which could also be done in 24 bit, but the 32 bit was easier to work with.

I constructed my own palette using 768 colours for the routine. Playing around with different pixel averaging, you can get different effects. Like when the wind blows it left or right, a frame timer etc.

This is what I ended up with:



This is a very old, but dependable method.
I also made good use of pointers, and that made the animation go quite quickly. I even got a decent effect by taking the average of only two pixels below the pixel I was calculating for. I believe this worked because of the large colour palette I was working from.

My palette was generated like so:

 // white to yellow - red - black for ( c_loop = 0 ; c_loop < 768 ; c_loop++ )      { Palette [ c_loop ] = FIRE_RGB32( red, green, blue );                if      ( red   <  255 )                  red   ++;        else if ( green <  255 )                  green ++;        else if ( blue  <  255 )                  blue  ++;      } 

Writing a fire routine with ye-old pixel averaging method is alot of fun. You can experiment endlessly with it to get the desired effect.

Happy coding, Guy