ComputerCraft Forums

About

palPal (Palette Pal) is a simple but powerful library that aims to be easy to use and can be implemented by other software.
palPal allows you to store the entire current palette of a given terminal object into a table which you can manipulate, save and load again to any given terminal object.

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Downloading

palPal is available on GitHub here (https://github.com/Wendelstein7/palPal-CC). You can check out its repo, or download the library file directly by executing the following in your terminal:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Wendelstein7/palPal-CC/master/palPal.lua palPal.lua

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Related

palPal can be used in combination with my other library palCollection.
palCollection provides a collection of new, popular, historic and beautiful palettes that can be used.

Please see this forum post to inquire more information about working with palCollection. (https://forums.computercraft.cc/index.php?topic=61)

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Documentation

palPal has a few functions you can use. To harness palPal's power, we must first load it into our environment by doing the following:

local palPal = require("palPal")
Now we can access palPal's
Functions:

-- storing and loading palettes:
 palPal.storePalette(terminal) -- returns palette table
 palPal.loadPalette(terminal, palette) -- returns nil

 -- setting and getting palette colours:
 palPal.getPaletteColour(palette, colour) -- returns red, green, blue
 palPal.setPaletteColour(palette, colour, red, green, blue) -- returns (updated) palette table

 -- note: en-us users can replace colour with color
Reference:

• terminal refers to a terminal object here, which for example can be a wrapped monitor or just term for the default terminal.
• palette refers to a palette table here as created by the palPal lib. A palPal stored table has 16 keys representing the numeric colour ids with their respective values representing an red green blue colour ranged from 0 to 1, similar to term.getPaletteColour (https://wiki.computercraft.cc/Term.getPaletteColour).
• colour refers to a numerical colour index. This must be a power of 2, being at least 1 and at most 32768.
• red, green and blue refer to numbers ranging from 0 to 1.

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Example

palPal's simpleness can be demonstrated using the following brief example to show the concept of storing a terminals palette, modifying it and loading it into another terminal.

-- First we load palPal into our environment
 local palPal = require("palPal")
 
 -- Now we store the current palette of 'term' (the default terminal) into a variable 'p'
 local p = palPal.storePalette(term)
 
 -- Then we change the default red to being pure red, by giving it new RGB values.
 p = palPal.setPaletteColour(p, colours.red, 1, 0, 0)
 -- For demonstration, I will show that you can also use hexadecimal. We will set blue to being pure blue.
 p = palPal.setPaletteColour(p, colours.blue, 0x0000FF)

 -- Let's wrap an adjecent advanced monitor so we can use it.
 local monitor = peripheral.find("monitor")

 -- Finally now that we made our adjustments, we load our modified palette 'p' into the monitor.
 palPal.loadPalette(monitor, p)

 -- We should use our new blue and red!
 monitor.setTextColour(colours.blue)
 monitor.setBackgroundColour(colours.red)
 monitor.write("Thank you for using palPal. Have a nice day!")
Executing the example will result in the following:

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Format

palPal stores its palettes in a table which has 16 keys representing the numeric colour ids with their respective values representing an red green blue colour ranged from 0 to 1, similar to term.getPaletteColour (https://wiki.computercraft.cc/Term.getPaletteColour).
These tables allow for easy serialisation and therefore storing to disk, loading and unserialisation.
For example, the default computercraft palette looks like this when serialized:
{
  [ 1 ] = { b = 0.94117647409439, g = 0.94117647409439, r = 0.94117647409439 },
  [ 2 ] = { b = 0.20000000298023, g = 0.69803923368454, r = 0.94901961088181 },
  [ 4 ] = { b = 0.84705883264542, g = 0.49803921580315, r = 0.89803922176361 },
  [ 256 ] = { b = 0.60000002384186, g = 0.60000002384186, r = 0.60000002384186 },
  [ 32 ] = { b = 0.098039217293262, g = 0.80000001192093, r = 0.49803921580315 },
  [ 64 ] = { b = 0.80000001192093, g = 0.69803923368454, r = 0.94901961088181 },
  [ 32768 ] = { b = 0.066666670143604, g = 0.066666670143604, r = 0.066666670143604 },
  [ 16384 ] = { b = 0.29803922772408, g = 0.29803922772408, r = 0.80000001192093 },
  [ 128 ] = { b = 0.29803922772408, g = 0.29803922772408, r = 0.29803922772408 },
  [ 8192 ] = { b = 0.30588236451149, g = 0.65098041296005, r = 0.34117648005486 },
  [ 4096 ] = { b = 0.29803922772408, g = 0.40000000596046, r = 0.49803921580315 },
  [ 2048 ] = { b = 0.80000001192093, g = 0.40000000596046, r = 0.20000000298023 },
  [ 1024 ] = { b = 0.89803922176361, g = 0.40000000596046, r = 0.69803923368454 },
  [ 8 ] = { b = 0.94901961088181, g = 0.69803923368454, r = 0.60000002384186 },
  [ 16 ] = { b = 0.42352941632271, g = 0.87058824300766, r = 0.87058824300766 },
  [ 512 ] = { b = 0.69803923368454, g = 0.60000002384186, r = 0.29803922772408 }
}Note: The strange order of colour indexes and rgb is caused by the way textutils.serialise works. The order does not harm the data in any way.

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Licence

palPal is licenced under the MIT licence, Copyright (c) 2018 Wendelstein7 (a.k.a. HydroNitrogen)

You can definetely use this in your programs, I really recommend everyone doing so! You should make your programs that require it download the library from the raw GitHub link (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Wendelstein7/palPal-CC/master/palPal.lua).
You are allowed to distribute this library yourself along with your other software that requires it (giving proper credit), but I strongly recommend downloading it from GitHub dynamically.