Case: Drawing for Dynamic Colouring

As an example when drawing can be very helpful, think of the following situation. You create a game, let’s say a racing game. There are different players. Of course, each player’s car has to have a different colour. There are generally two ways to achieve this:

1) You create several images with differently coloured cars and store them on your harddrive.

This is perfectly okay if you have a small number of cars (and colours) to be chosen. But what if you want the player to choose from a large variety of colours, 100 colours or more, or what if you want to let the player to choose the colour of his car by himself? Notice, in case of 16 bit colouring that means 65536 possibilities after all! Would you want to create that many images? In case of 32 bit colouring you have fantastic 4.29 billion colours!! Amazing, but you will never be able to create so many images in just one human being’s life. Furthermore, this would take up a lot of hard drive memory (4.29 billion times the file size of the car image) for just a simple car racing game. Look at the following image. It contains the discussed method from left to the middle. On the right to the middle is the solution :-).

Instead of having each car coloured as an image file, why not using just one image file of a car without colouring? It is kind of a template. Now you can easily ask the player what colour he prefers (and he may pick from 4.29 billion colours if necessary), and then you simply colour the car on the fly. This is the second way:

2) You create one template image on your harddrive and colour it during runtime of the program.

This is just one example where drawing is very helpful.