Are we really limited to 256 colors for image import and palettes, or am I just missing something? It seems really strange to be able to set bit depths and export as many colors as we please, and yet only be able import and conveniently select 256.
Perhaps I’m blind and stupid?
Welcome @Diode,
Pro Motion is limited to 256 indexed color per frame/layer or project. The bit depths you set up are used for legit systems that used a reduced set of overall color spaces.
-Jan
So that’s a no, then.
If I’m working with the sega genesis (3 bits per channel, 512 colors), I’m basically limited to only using half of the possible palette in a single file.
The 512 colors is the overall color space that can be used. You have three bits = 8 values per channel (red, green, blue) = 8 * 8 * 8 = 512 colors that can be displayed physically. And this is what you can set up as channel bit depths in Pro Motion. This ensures that you don’t leave the colors that are available on the system.
And from this only 64 colors are used with 4 palettes each having 16 colors according to this:
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Palettes_and_CRAM
Am I mistaken?
Shading modes aside, the genesis can only display 64 colors on screen at once, yes. but those 64 colors can be switched on the fly, meaning your tilemap can happily use all 512 colors as long as you only need 64 at a single point in time, so if if you’re doing color cycling or other varied backdrops, you can easily break the 256 mark, especially if you want to store your tilemap as one file…
At the moment I’m stuck having to either juggle multiple files around in Pro Motion, or juggle one file back and forth between Photoshop and Aseprite.
PM can use different palettes per layer so that would work, but at the moment there is no tile set per layer, so this won’t help.
You would end up using two different tile sets with two projects and display them using the layer effect “display other project”, but this could be tedious and is not what you want.