I plan to program an RPG game with Millions of Colors on/for the Mac. If there are any Mac programmers here (or if this is a cross platform kind of topic), what are some things I''ll have to be carefull about, if any? Will the game take considerable amount of time longer than using 256 colors? Why would people use 256 colors instead of Millions/Thousands? Because of Memory/Speed costs? Thanks in advance for your help!

I know my way around MacOS, and I can even tolerate it most of the time, but if someone tried to get me to program on one, I would go find some garlic and a wooden stake...

Anyway (I am assuming this is cross-platform info...), there are three easy bit depths to program with. 8 bit (256 colors) is really easy because each color is one byte. 16 bit (65356 colors?) is also really easy because each color is a short int. 24 bit is hard! There is no 24 bit value, so you need to move up to 32 bits (long int) in order to use it (or you could try to parse the color into three bytes...). I was originally going to develop all my games in 24 bits because I like it so much better, but it isn''t worth the hassle. 32 bit is good too (thats 4 billion colors), but a decent screen resolution at 4 bytes a pixel *probably* won''t fit on your average video card (for a resolution of 1024x768, you end up with 1024 * 768 * 4 = 3145728 bytes / about three megs of VRAM... now add a backbuffer and offscreen surfaces and you have filled up the video card on my 2 year old PC almost twice). 16 bit color usually looks good enough (at least for me ), and is reasonably fast and doesn''t take up all that space (divide my other figures by 2).

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Thanks for your reply!
I think I will go for 32bit, since by the time I complete programming this game, most people will have atleast 16MB of VRAM with their video cards

You may want to consider using 16bit. It is fine if you wish to chase the latest and greatest, but don''t forget that there are about a million iMacs out there. Most users of the iMac don''t upgrade the video. Also, with most mac users, when they do get a new machine, they often sell (or in some cases, give away) their old machine.

And honestly, will there be much difference between 16bit and 32bit in your game? You will be able to have a much higher frame rate (which translates to smoother movement) with a very minor loss of color. I don''t know what type of game you are developing, but after the first few minutes, most users don''t concentrate on the graphics, they concentrate on the gameplay. Unless your beautiful game runs like a slide show...