What is a good method for coloring textures based on a palette in XNA?

Posted by Bob on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Bob
Published on 2010-07-15T01:04:40Z Indexed on 2011/06/29 16:32 UTC
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XNA

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textures

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palette

I've been trying to work on a game with the look of an 8-bit game using XNA, specifically using the NES as a guide.

The NES has a very specific palette and each sprite can use up to 4 colors from that palette. How could I emulate this? The current way I accomplish this is I have a texture with defined values which act as indexes to an array of colors I pass to the GPU. I imagine there must be a better way than this, but maybe this is the best way?

I don't want to simply make sure I draw every sprite with the right colors because I want to be able to dynamically alter the palette. I'd also prefer not to alter the texture directly using the CPU.

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