It's no secret that our palette swap system is criticized very, very often, and it's recently come to my attention that it's attracted some pretty high-profile ire as of late, too.

To recap what we do have:

SSF2 has the costume system it does because Flash does not have traditional palette-swapping capabilities.
In traditional 2D consoles, and engines like Game Maker, the engine could detect a specific color within a sprite and swap it out with another color.
Flash doesn't do that. Every sprite is a whole object that can't have its colors treated individually.
Instead, we have to apply effects over the entire sprite.
For most characters, there are seven sliders that can be adjusted: Hue, Saturation, Value, Red, Green, Blue, and Contrast. Occasionally, other attributes are altered such as opacity (Ghost Ness), and additional effects are applied such as glow (Kaio-Ken) or inversion (Fighting Silhouette Team), but the same principles apply in that those can only affect the entire sprite, not individual colors.

There is another way we could have traditional palette swaps; by pre-rendering them outside of Flash and putting a different spritesheet for every costume in the game.

We've been avoiding this so far because there are currently, counting Pichu, forty characters in SSF2, each with a minimum of eight costumes. Some simple math would quickly reveal that this would mean we'd need to put a minimum of 360 individual spritesheets in the game, which would make the filesize much, much larger.

However. I propose that this is no longer our main concern. The filesize of SSF2 Beta already well exceeds 500MB, with the large amount of modes, physics, graphics, and audio already present. While I normally believe strongly in optimization, the game has gotten large enough that adding the additional 320+ spritesheets to the game would be a relatively negligible increase at this point.

Furthermore, it would not have to be done with the entire cast. Characters like Mr. Game & Watch, Kirby, Tails, Samus—even some select costumes on the other characters, such as the aforementioned Ghost Ness or Anti-Sora—their costumes are fine as-is. The efforts with this can be concentrated on the characters and costumes that need it the most.

This is not even to mention that it would allow more freedom with the types of costumes possible. Accessories, clothing with different patterns, those would also be possible and more CPU-efficient than the ways we're trying to accomplish them now if we started doing this.

Our palette swap system is a genuine criticism that's stood for far too long. I, for one, am willing to accept an increase of another few hundred MB if necessary.

Also worth noting that it's not just adding more spritesheets. A fully coded copy of every character has to be made for every costume.

Meaning that not only does every change made to a character have to be made 8 times over from whenever the change is made to the end of time (otherwise characters would actually function differently per costume, a massive no-no), but that the filesize increase would be absolutely massive, putting the game well over 1GB in size (more than double, just for the sake of costumes).

This would not be a quick fix, and doing this for the whole cast would probably take in the realm of a year or more, as well as extend the development time of all future and current content dramatically.

This is a topic I've actively experimented with many times since I joined the team just under 2 years ago, and none of the possibilities come without massive downsides, whether that be performance, visuals, filesize or workload, generally a combination of multiple.

Hm... that... does change things, but I'm still holding out hope that we find a more efficient solution.

I think I might have an idea, but I don't have the slightest clue how to express it right this moment... not to mention it's probably something you've already thought of...

We are going to have pika hats and stuff soon right? Let's take fox for example. Can't you separate his skin (fur?) from his clothes into two spreadsheets, overlay them and hue rotate at runtime, kinda treating his outfit as a hat? This should only double the spritesheet size.

I like the palette swaps as is.....I know I'm in the minority, and I don't agree with the system, but I can probably count on two hands the only palette swaps I don't like.

I want Sandbag with polka-dots

Well yeah that would be great.
But i'm not sure how possible that is.

Well, doing math;
Sandbag has a grand total of 3 frames, being the ), | and ( states. These then have faces applied to them, which are used as follows;

3 frames normally
+3 more frames for sleeping
+4 frames for Final Smash
+5 for Winning Animation
Multiply all of the current above numbers added (15 total) by 2 for the Bandage alt. costume, providing us with 30
+1 for Losing Animation
And should Sandbag ever need lack of a face (For an animation such as facing backwards), +6 more for good measure (3 + Bandage)
So, Sandbag has 37 total frames, but for all intents and purposes it's mainly just 3.
All you have to do is make the Polka Dot pattern for the base 3 sprites, and then copy-paste them onto all of Sandbag's Sprites as intended.
Not that hard, in the grand scheme o' things.

How about making this a possible option instead of a mandatory change?

It would be like a DLC!

Edit:
Another idea I had is to allow players to add client-side color palettes through sliders in some menu so us players can have some fun testing out the color palettes and stuff and maybe adding some color palettes we want that aren't in game

If his body never stretched or extended or retracted or rotated this would work. Unfortunately it does every single one in every animation

What are all the possible options in Flash, outside of Hue+Saturation and Color Balance? There's definitely Invert and Sepia, right. Are their filters Solarize, Brightness/Contrast, Cross-Process in the program? And can you combine multiple of these filters? Like do Invert -> Desaturate -> Adjust Contrast.



On the bright-side: SandBag and Game&Watch will for sure have the best hats. And I'm bet we will get small characters follow around the character they're attacted to. Like Navi, a Chao, or a Luma.

You know
This topic is really killing my hopes for headband jigglypuff and Blue goggles Pichu.
I really hope those are still possible.

Screw the goggles, bagpack or riot

We need the PMD Pichu

what.