Gray Scale Rendering

#1 Just have your artists draw all your game's textures in black and white. Simple.

#2 Be sure to make all your lights colourless.

If you wanted to do it in realtime (aka have a switch), you could either dynamically greyscale the textures(+lights), or somehow filter the output image.

#3 The solution about making all the textures balck and white is perhaps the simplest solution. but i was looking at may be setting a flag which would convert the rendering to grayscale and color depending on what the user's settings were.

So that the same textures would have two different appearances depending on the flag.

#4 Well, you could preprocess the textures as you load them. Set the average of your color triple as all three color values to get a good greyscale mapping. That would probably cause a bit of a load time increase, though. Alternatively, waste some disk space by doing the precalculation once and saving alternate textures.

Your other option is to change the colors in a pixel shader, which would probably be a bit of a performance hit. You'd be able to switch color on and off in real time, though.

#5 thanx mark,

that was one of my lines of thought too... i believe another line of attack can be to duplicate the textures in rgb and greyscale images...and depending on the mode load them... a bit of wastage in terms of diskspace but fast nonetheless...also in greyscale i was thinking about(as per an earlier suggestion) looping through lights and making their colors grey/white/black.

thanks anyway i have a lot of pointers now..any idea where exactly to start about it in Torque...???