Black And White Torque

#1 sure. make all your textures black and white ;) sorry to give a smartass reply, but its the only way i can think of doing it.
Ryan

#2 hehe =)

#3 It's certainly not impossible and it can't be that difficult. If I was doing it I'd find out where the gamma setting (chosen in options) effects the actual visual output: you may well be able to put in an extra stage at that point.
It could well have a noticable effect on the frame rate doing it this way though: going through every one of 1024*768 pixels and doing a small calculation every frame sounds fairly bad. There's probably a more complicated but more efficient method by doing it in the texture rendering code instead.

#4 Here is a thought: Have a look at the code where Torque loads textures. There you could insert another function that converts them to gray-colour-textures, so this only has to be done once during the loading process.

Sounds easy, too easy - I didn't have a chance yet to have a look at it...

Stephan

#5 That's a much better idea.
How do you deal with particles though?

#6 hm interesting ideas... the captain nutrino part of the elite force addon was all in black and white, and it was pretty cool. particles... i havnt worked with them yet, but cant you set particle color, to some sort of grey scale...
Ryan

#7 yes, but you would have to change every particle in the game that way. You could change the actual particle classes with an if statement on a global variable like $inblackandwhite or something, but it would still be a lot of work. I'm thinking that at least some graphics cards would let you restrict the palette, but i don't know if it's a OpenGL environment function.
Maybe have a look at night vision goggles on one of the open source games see how they do that.

#8 heh. youd like to think it would be as easy as saying "hey, graphics card, no more color" but, i guess we are so advacnced, the old stuff is hard to do ;)
ryan

#9 heh, I wish it was as easy as telling the vid card no color =)

#10 I think cats SEE in black and white...and dogs...but who really knows? And yes that's true...all the work we have to go through to display black and white when it really should be the easiest thing in the world. It's crazy in the same way that black and white film is more expensive than color film these days...

#11 Errm, this post just got slightly philosophical.

And I think dogs are the ones that see in black and white because they only have rods in their retina and no cones. Im pretty sure cats see in colour.

#12 *shrugs and continues to off-topic stuff*

My cats see in this weird "Is it expensive enough to be worth the effort of shredding" view... Extra weighting on anything that moves, bonus if it's human... ;)