GameMaker Get_Pixel alternative

[IGameArt]

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've really dug into the new buffers system but I remember seeing something about how much faster accessing a buffer directly is compared to using surface_get_pixel.

So my question is, what's the most efficient (read absolute fastest) way to get the rgba values of a specific pixel in a surface/sprite?

 

[Deleted member 13992]

Are you looking to read more than a handful of pixels per frame? A whole surface maybe? If so, best to use a shader for that kind of work. That would be the fastest, but also more advanced.

 

[IGameArt]

I'm trying to create an array carrying the values of each pixel in an image. This is not meant to be a realtime effect, it will be performed one time. And I cannot do it with a shader because shaders will not give me a value but merely display what data I put into it on the screen. I need to just find a faster way of getting the data of a certain pixel.

 

[Homunculus]

You are probably looking for buffer_get_surface . Once the buffer containing the RGBA values of the surface is set, reading its values should definitely be a lot faster than using getpixel functions.

 

[YellowAfterlife]

You might have seen this asset, which uses buffer_get_surface https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/5344/buffer_getpixel

 

[TheouAegis]

If you aren't using too many colors, you could consider making a ds_list of all the colors, create a second buffer that's 1/4 the size of the surface buffer, then retrieve the index in the list of each color and write the index to the second buffer. Now the second buffer has a 1-byte value for each pixel instead of a 4-byte value.