Game Engines and palette effects

[Maxim]

What Game Engines have support for palette effects like color swapping/cycling as seen in Mega Man on changing the weapon or the ninjas in the early Mortal Kombat titles? I already googled on Game Maker, but there's only a workaround with a script, that is slow and lags behind. Other engines like Construct or Game-Editor don't support this either. Any ideas?

[puggsoy]

I'm not sure what sort of effects you're talking about (haven't played the games you mentioned), but chances are that if you can't find a game-making program with a similar function built-in you're better off writing the game in one or other programming language instead. It's harder but it offers much more flexibility and you'll be able to do everything you want pretty much exactly how you want.

Of course, which language to choose depends on a bunch of stuff.

[Garamonde]

Well he means, in Mega Man, when you switch between weapons, Mega Man's color changes for each weapon. So, having the character swap palettes instantaneously for different conditions, I suppose.

[puggsoy]

Oh, well that should be relatively simple then shouldn't it? Then again I've never used Game Maker or the like, so they might be more restrictive than I thought.

In that case yeah, programming is probably better. For this effect I don't think you'd need to learn anything too advanced, something like Flash or even something simpler should be able to get the job done one way or another, just as long as it has some image-manipulation capabilities.

[Maxim]

Well he means, in Mega Man, when you switch between weapons, Mega Man's color changes for each weapon. So, having the character swap palettes instantaneously for different conditions, I suppose.

Exactly. Also, here's an example for color cycling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_cycling

Having control over the palette allows you to work more efficiently. Otherwise, you may have to insert whole sprites/tiles over and over again, even though they are only different colored. Of course, people may say "that's a thing of the past, because nowadays there is plenty of disk space" but it's just a waste and avoidable. Unfortunately, i am not good enough at programming to build an engine from scratch, so as a beginner at game development, i am stuck with the 'general purpose' engines.

[puggsoy]

Actually, there are a lot of pre-made game engines for most common programming languages, which handle just about everything. As long as you don't try to do anything too out of bounds it can practically be like Game Maker without a GUI, actually. The only difference is that you can make slight differences in the code to suit your needs, which in this case you could do with the main character's code to allow palette cycling.

That would only require a basic knowledge of the programming language and a bit about how the engine is put together, but you would by no means need to build the entire engine from scratch.

[Hiynastrike]

are you talking about lighting effects like in the DKC Series when your underwater the kongs have a blue tint and a red tint when they are aboard the Knutalis?