Colour And Blending

This section deals with the functions related to colour, alpha and blending.

GameMaker: Studio has a comprehensive selection of functions to manipulate the colour, alpha and blending of what is drawn on the screen. Using these functions you can separate colours into their component parts, create new colours, manipulate the draw alpha and also play with blend modes to change how different things in your game are drawn together. Apart from these functions, there are also a number of constants that can be used as base colours in these (and other) functions:

Constant Colour Value
c_aqua 16776960
c_black 0
c_blue 16711680
c_dkgray 4210752
c_fuchsia 16711935
c_gray 8421504
c_green 32768
c_lime 65280
c_ltgray 12632256
c_maroon 128
c_navy 8388608
c_olive 32896
c_orange 4235519
c_purple 8388736
c_red 255
c_silver 12632256
c_teal 8421376
c_white 16777215
c_yellow 65535

Getting colour and Alpha Values

The following functions can be used to get the component hues, compound hue, saturation and luminosity of a selected colour as well as the alpha and other properties:

  1. colour_get_blue
  2. colour_get_green
  3. colour_get_red
  4. colour_get_hue
  5. colour_get_saturation
  6. colour_get_value
  7. draw_getpixel
  8. draw_getpixel_ext
  9. draw_get_colour
  10. draw_get_alpha

Creating colours

These functions can be used to create colours from raw input values for colour components:

  1. make_colour_hsv
  2. make_colour_rgb
  3. merge_colour

Note that you can also create colours from their hexadecimal value using the "$" symbol beforehand, and these values can also be used in the colour functions to get component hues or for mixing, etc... The hexadecimal value for these colours is split into three parts with the format Blue - Green - Red so, for example, to define a purple colour you could use:

col = $983c95

Where 98 is the blue component, 3c is the green component and 95 is the red component.

Setting colour, Alpha and Blending

The following functions can be used to set the various different options for drawing to the screen, including alpha, colour and blending:

  1. draw_clear
  2. draw_clear_alpha
  3. draw_set_alpha
  4. draw_set_colour
  5. draw_set_colour_write_enable
  6. draw_set_blend_mode
  7. draw_set_blend_mode_ext
  8. draw_set_alpha_test
  9. draw_set_alpha_test_ref_value
  10. draw_get_alpha_test
  11. draw_get_alpha_test_ref_value
  12. draw_enable_alphablend


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