Contents
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Standard
You can use the Standard Palette configuration panel to control
the how the colors are generated for the Displays you create. In order to
understand how the effects apply, you need to know a little bit about how colors
are created on the computer. Each pixel (picture element) on your screen is composed
of certain amounts of red, green, and blue. On the computer, these amounts can vary
between 0 and 255. By mixing the amounts of red, green, and blue in a particular
pixel, you can produce just about any color in the visible spectrum. The purpose
of the palette configuration panel is to allow you to control how the red, green
and blue will be mixed. Each of the three color guns (red, green, and blue)
can be configured independently of the other two. This means that you can apply
different effects to each of the guns to produce a wide variety of colors when the
effects are combined. In order to control which gun you are editing the settings
for, you use the three push buttons in the upper left. They are labeled “Red”, “Green”,
and “Blue”: Color Gun Selection
These control which color guns you are editing.
- All - If this button is depressed then setting
changes are applied to all of the color guns.
- Red - If this button is depressed then all
setting changes are applied to the red color gun.
- Green - If this button is depressed then all
setting changes are applied to the green color gun.
- Blue - If this button is depressed then all
setting changes are applied to the blue color gun.
Color Effects
Control how the palette engine generates colors for the
color gun you’ve selected.
- Ramp - Generates intensities that start out
bright then fade to black. You can control how quickly the fade to black
takes place by using the “Ramp Frequency” control.
- Fade - Generates intensities that will start
out black then brighten and then fade to black again. You can control how
quickly the fade takes place by using the “Fade Frequency” control.
- Smooth - Generates smooth, even, intensity
transitions.
- Coarse - Generates intensity transitions that
contain random localized intensity fluctuations.
- Blackout - Will set the intensity to 0.
- Random - Will randomly pick one of the previous
color effect options.
- Custom - Intensities will be taken from the
custom palette created in the “Custom” configuration panel.
Control Settings
Use these to configure how the color effects are applied.
- Brightness - This will scale all of
the intensities for the selected color gun. A value of 50 would indicate
that all values will be reduced by 50%.
- Color Frequency - This control how quickly
the selected gun will vary in intensity. A high value will produce
faster, more hectic, intensity transitions while lower values will produce
smoother, more gradual, intensity transitions.
- Fade Frequency - If the “Fade” color effect
is selected, this will control how fast the fade takes place. Larger
values produce quicker, more compressed, fades.
- Ramp Frequency - If the “Ramp” color effect
is selected, this will control how fast the fade takes place. Larger
values produce quicker, more compressed, ramps.
- Duration - This controls how long (in seconds)
the set of settings for the selected gun will last before a new set is generated.
When a new set of settings is generated, the old settings are morphed (or
interpolated) into the new settings (this produces smoother transitions
between settings). You can control how quickly the interpolation occurs
using the “Morph Rate” control documented below.
- Cycle Rate - This controls how much delay
(in milliseconds) there is between palette animation frames. Lower values
will cause the palette to animate faster. At the present, only the “Red”
gun is used -- its value is applied to green and blue.
- Event Rate - This controls how often an event
will take place for the selected gun. Events include things like changing
the direction of animation or changing the frequency of the intensity transitions.
- Direction - This controls whether the colors
will animate forwards or backwards and how fast they will animate in that
direction.
- Morph Rate - This controls how quickly the
transition from one set of palette settings to another will take place for
the selected gun. A lower value will produce more gradual transitions while
a high value will produce faster transitions.
- Intensity - Like the brightness control, this
will scale the intensities for the selected color gun. The difference is
that the “Intensity” value is only applied to the intensities generated
in the current frame of the animation rather than all the intensities (as
brightness is).
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