Working with color palettes is one of the fundamental aspects of 2D rendering. I’ve gone over the various color depths used in computer graphics in a earlier post on rendering with GDI, however there are a couple of aspects I didn’t directly mention.
Specifically, the biggest advantage in using a color palette is the sizable speed advantage you gain by having a fixed amount of colors that allow for a direct index into the color table that correspond to a range of values generated by your effect.
I’ll have a more in-depth discussion on this topic in a follow-up post; for now let’s take a look at the steps needed to generate a gradient palette with a variable amount of colors, which is needed by a variety of effects, and a brief introduction to working with pointers in C# so that we can display our gradients to the screen in an efficient manner.
