Jeff Lunt Games

Ultima VII ran in 256-color VGA, where each pixel is a palette index with no alpha channel and no hardware blending. In the early 90s they used a translucency lookup table to re-color pixels, blending them with whatever was behind something (allowing for "invisible" party members, for example). It could not do smooth, dynamic opacity on-the-fly, however. This is something we take for granted as trivial and easy. By cross-fading animation frames I blend them instead of cell-to-cell animation, making effects like ocean waves and water fountains much more smooth and organic without needing additional art.