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[Baobab]

So, I have a frustrating dilemma here. I came up with a simple game idea for a change and so my programmer friend and I set off making it for windows phones. Not knowing it has a 16bit lcd display I made tons of gradients all over the place, in the menu, in the background of the game screen, in the HUD. So now it looks like this:


And in my arrogance I've assumed up until now that this was the fault of Microsofts' WP7 emulator. Only last night did I realize that it's because of the 16bit LCD. Since most of the assets I've made so far contain gradients, mostly to compensate for my still rather sub-par art skill, I'm really not sure how to fix this. We were planning on releasing soon, but this really messes things up. Any ideas?

[Danmark]

I suppose you can convert the images to a smaller color space in any decent image editor (in GIMP it's image->mode->convert to color profile), and dithering or what-not should be applied automatically.

[EdgeOfProphecy]

I don't think what you posted looks bad at all, but I'd suggest two things

1)  Do an experiment.  Grab some random people and see if they like the visuals in their banded, 16-bit form.  Then grab some more random (different) people and see how they like the visuals.  Get them to rate it 1-10.  Compare the two data sets later.

While this isn't a 100% accurate way to figure out if the graphics are a problem, it could give you an idea.  I think sometimes game developers are far more sensitive to the presentation of their art than their audience is, especially when you have to downscale/compress art.  If it's not really a problem, then you can save yourself a lot of time and heartache.  Sometimes, sadly, you have to make compromises on vision due to technology.

2)  Convert to colors into a 16-bit format in a graphics editor, then re-export them.  Hopefully, this will make the gradients smooth again, but your colors might look different.

[rivon]

Use more hues. You see, if you use one hue, let's say 0 which is red and you use it on both ends of the gradient, and only make the saturation or lightness different, you get let's say a hundred or few hundreds different colors which inevitably create the bands/stripes. Now if you use 0 hue on one end and 16 on the other end you end up with many times more colors between the two ends and therefore you get less or no banding (you need to experiment with this).

[Baobab]

Awesome replies. Will try this out.

[BlueSweatshirt]

For the record, I couldn't even notice the problem until you mentioned it and I started actively looking to notice it.

[Danmark]

^ Blown up 4x and on a decent PC monitor. You'd have to really strain to see it on a phone.

[Twitch]

You'll want to use a technique called Dithering. Google will have plenty more info than a forum post.

[Christian Knudsen]

I use this program for packing my textures into sprite sheets:

http://www.texturepacker.com/

It supports 16-bit output with a bunch of different dithering methods, so you can choose the one that gives the dithering you like the best.

[bluescrn]

The default back buffer is 16bpp. However, you can set it to 32bpp:

http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72541/442615.aspx