Last night I whipped up some code which acted on a single 32x32 image (obviously not representative given that my guys are actually going to be animated), and it produced more than pleasing results even on my integrated-graphics laptop. I went one step further and made it carry out the colour change on the fly, when the sprite needs drawn, and it wasn't the major drain I expected on that machine. Not that I'll be doing that - it's fine for one player but not for twenty two.
Given those results, I'll stick with pixmaps for now as they're easiest to get up and running, and then concern myself with tweaking further down the line.
TonyG, the images are indeed scrapped but I'm just very memory-sensitive, especially as I've already got a 50MB or thereabouts database in memory at all times. Not a problem on many machines but when you go as low as 256MB you might start to see problems. Maybe. I might get lucky.
Given those results, I'll stick with pixmaps for now as they're easiest to get up and running, and then concern myself with tweaking further down the line.
TonyG, the images are indeed scrapped but I'm just very memory-sensitive, especially as I've already got a 50MB or thereabouts database in memory at all times. Not a problem on many machines but when you go as low as 256MB you might start to see problems. Maybe. I might get lucky.