ILDA File Format

From the Spec:

The ILDA Format is made up of multiple "sections". As of this writing there are 4 section types (of the 255 possible) in use.

• 3D Frames
• 2D Frames
• Color Palette
• True Color Data (added in 2004)

The ILDA file format represents an animation, as such, the meat of the file is contained in the frame sections, while the color sections are supplementary. The order that they occur is essential to how/what is displayed, so it is best to think of the file as a linear sequence of sections, that are iterated during the course of the animation.

So the order of the frames determine the animation, what do the color sections do?

Well, there are the two sections, the color palette - which is a set of RGB colors indexed from 0 to 255. The color palette determines what I will call the "color context", that is, when a point in a frame section refers to a color index, the color specified at that index in the most recent palette is displayed.

While the palette determines the colors used by any number of frames, the true color section defines colors for the subsequent frame only. The true color section specifies the color of each individual point in the subsequent frame (if this seems like a hack, it is - done for compatibility purposes).

Frame Description

Color Table Description