image_color(3)

✨ image_color(3) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the image_color page — this is part of the Arcan Lua API and it's the glow-up button for your surfaces 💅

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🎀 NAME 🎀

image_color — change the color_surface and the rendertarget clear-color, no cap.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

it hands you back true or false, and it comes in two flavours:

image_color( vid:dst, number:red, number:green, number:blue )
image_color( vid:dst, number:red, number:green, number:blue,
number:alpha )

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so there are literally two whole uses for this function, and both are iconic:

• the first one: it updates the current color that a color_surface uses as the color value that gets passed to the shader 👑
• the second one: every rendertarget — and yes, that includes the sneaky one hiding behind WORLDID 🙈 — has a clear color, which is basically its default "background" color. it initialises to 25, 25, 25, (255), which is a dark grey vibe, but you can update it whenever you want with this function 🎨

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📝 NOTES 📝

1. trying to set this on a surface that's not a rendertarget and is textured? that's a terminal state transition — like, fr fr, do not do that 💀

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🌸 EXAMPLE 🌸

function image_color0()
      local a = color_surface(64, 64, 255, 0, 0);
      show_image(a);
      image_color(a, 0, 255, 0);
end

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🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

function image_color1()
      image_color(WORLDID, 255, 0, 0, 0);
end

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💀 MISUSE 💀

bestie. no. 😭

function image_color0()
      image_color(BADID);
end

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🙈 MISUSE 🙈

this one is giving "I didn't read the notes" energy:

function image_color1()
      local img = fill_surface(64, 64, 0, 0, 0);
      image_color(img, 255, 0, 0, 0);
end

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🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

• color_surface(3)
• define_rendertarget(3)

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okay that's the whole page, you ate that 🍓 go forth and color your little hearts out 💖

this has been the image manual, October 2026 edition, image_color(3) — mwah, ily, bye 🧚‍♀️