Test concept for taking in a folder full of sprites, combining them into a spritemap and then reducing them to individual channels with a palette lookup. To use, this requires a folder somewhere on your PC which contains the sprites you want to merge into a spritemap.
There is no fancyness to this project, it was more of me testing an idea on reduction for a quicker GPU lookup in 2D games with excessive sprites. The color palette is generated by first averaging like-colors in the spritemap, reducing the color count significantly to basic averaged colors.
Tests with storing sprites on the Alpha channel show that the bitmap processing, especially when exported, the compression will cause all transparent pixels to be removed resulting in loss of data. To prevent this, you'd have to write a custom exporter, but the benefits of accomodating the alpha channel seem negligable...
Below is an image of how the "compressed" image looks, including the generated palette next to it. Sprites are laid out onto the R, G, B channels where the values correspond to the color on the palette. Selecting a filter will match the values to the palette and return the original sprite with it's full color.
