Selective Color Replace?

[Ryan]

I've noticed the 'replace color' function of animation replaces the color of all duplications of an object with a new color, regardless of whether you use 'pick object at random' or 'ID = 1' etc.

I'm just wonder if there's any way to replace the color of a single instance of an object while maintaining the original color of the other instances.

[Czentnar]

I also couldn't get it work, I am curious, too!

[LB]

I'm pretty sure it's not possible at all, because the animation frames are shared by all the objects, where as which frame, which animation, ect are independant. CHanging part of a frame of one changes it for all of them because I think it is a sort of shared memory of sorts. Just think, if you had a 1MB active, would you really want to increase the memory by 1 MB for every new object you make? Or would you just want to increase it by one tenth of a MB if the images are shared? Not entirely sure if that is all right, but from what I have learned about MMF2 that seem right.

[xyzzy]

I'm pretty sure it's not possible at all, because the animation frames are shared by all the objects, where as which frame, which animation, ect are independant. CHanging part of a frame of one changes it for all of them because I think it is a sort of shared memory of sorts. Just think, if you had a 1MB active, would you really want to increase the memory by 1 MB for every new object you make? Or would you just want to increase it by one tenth of a MB if the images are shared? Not entirely sure if that is all right, but from what I have learned about MMF2 that seem right.

imo mmf should automatically make a local copy of the image data for an instance when you use the change color action; then the instance could just use that image instead of the shared set when it gets to that frame. it should also have a "relink" action that discards this local copy and again uses the shared one

of course it would still need a separate "change color for shared" action to cheaply and directly affect the entire set of instances when you wanted it to

actually a really powerful system wouldn't stick active object instances to a single image bank but would allow them to switch between them, and give you operations like copying a bank, so you could do runtime-generated recolors relatively easily (might not be very fast but you wouldn't need to do it very often)

[RickyRombo]

"Eight seconds left in overtime, she's on your mind, she's on your mind... everyone knows this is over my head, over my head..."

[Ryan]

It would be a great benefit, because for example, in a multiplayer RTS you could have 4 players using the same units, but each player is a different color. Without selective color replace, you'd have to clone each unit active 4 times, or create 4 different groups of animations within the units with different colors.

[xyzzy]

It would be a great benefit, because for example, in a multiplayer RTS you could have 4 players using the same units, but each player is a different color. Without selective color replace, you'd have to clone each unit active 4 times, or create 4 different groups of animations within the units with different colors.

you might be able to get away with shaders/rgb coefficients in hwa since those are instance-based

[N64Mario]

It would be a great benefit, because for example, in a multiplayer RTS you could have 4 players using the same units, but each player is a different color. Without selective color replace, you'd have to clone each unit active 4 times, or create 4 different groups of animations within the units with different colors.

you might be able to get away with shaders/rgb coefficients in hwa since those are instance-based

Aren't the shaders exclusive to the HWA version though? I don't think they have been made for standard versions, let alone being possible without HWA. X_X

[RickyRombo]

That's why he said "in hwa"