No such thing as black and white, only shades of brown

I remember ages ago somebody was complaining about the fact that doom got ugly brown shades when monsters got a certain distance away… and somebody, (I think it was Fredrik) said he made something thing to fix it… so the two obvious questions are: can somebody tell me what it was and where I might find it?

Cheers.

Dammit you just gave me a cool idea. What if we could play Doom in black and white? Not like the crappy invulnerability sphere black and white, but like nicely grey-shaded. Dang, that would be so cool. Sorry, can't help you about the brown thing, though.

geekmarine said:

Dammit you just gave me a cool idea. What if we could play Doom in black and white? Not like the crappy invulnerability sphere black and white, but like nicely grey-shaded. Dang, that would be so cool. Sorry, can't help you about the brown thing, though.

There should be a wad in the archive that does that. Replaces PLAYPAL I believe.

There is. I wasn't able to locate it using the archive search, but you can pick it up here:

http://members.aol.com/dmchess/nickdoom.html

On occasion I watch DOOM demos on a computer with a monochrome VGA monitor (shades of gray); it looks fine except that deep blues and reds looks black (so those all-red or all-blue maps look strange.)

LOL Who'dathunkit? That's so cool. Thanks a bundle. Heh, I think I'm gonna start a collection of weird palettes.

I have 2 files that I sometimes mess around with. 1940.wad changes the doom palette to a black and white (ie shades of grey) palette, whereas 1920.wad makes it look a little more like an old sepia (yellowy/greyish brown) photograph. Both were knocked together in a few minutes using the DeePsea palette tool.

myk said:

On occasion I watch DOOM demos on a computer with a monochrome VGA monitor (shades of gray); it looks fine except that deep blues and reds looks black (so those all-red or all-blue maps look strange.)

I installed Doom on my cousin's old computer and it have a monochrome VGA monitor and it looked like ass.

Where did that pallete that had the light blues and the red to yellow gradients instead of red to white come from? (it also made all of the colors slightly brighter too) I think I first saw it in fughdm01.

Perhaps you're referring to this?

http://doomworld.com/fredrik/?page=textures

Draconio said:

Perhaps you're referring to this?

http://doomworld.com/fredrik/?page=textures

Actually no. This was more like the regular doom pallete with the aforementioned changes.

There's a very old (Dec-93) freeware utility by Bill Hanlon for messing around with the palette, called Doomgogl. I haven't tried it myself, so have no idea how good it is. I haven't found it anywhere online - it was on the Doom Companion CD. It includes these sample palettes:

BRIGHTER.PCX - Enables you to see in the dark.
INVERTED.PCX - Inverted color palette for that psychedelic look.
GRAY.PCX - Grayscale version for that silent film look.

If anyone wants it, PM me with your e-mail address (it's 77kB when zipped).

What about Inkworks?

I usually only see those ugly shades of brown in software ports. It's the colormap. Could easily be changed by messing with the InkWorks util.

Yeah, I think I once made a WAD that removes the brownness even with the default palette. It's lost now but I can probably build it again.

EDIT: it appears that a hack to the palette is necessary, but it doesn't affect the original graphics more than just giving parts of them a bit more contrast.

I haven't found it anywhere online - it was on the Doom Companion CD.

Dude, you have that too?! I thought I was the only one! Woot!

But, uh, yeah, DOOMGOGL. I could never get it to work.

Fredrik said:

Yeah, I think I once made a WAD that removes the brownness even with the default palette. It's lost now but I can probably build it again.

EDIT: it appears that a hack to the palette is necessary, but it doesn't affect the original graphics more than just giving parts of them a bit more contrast.

D'you mind putting it in a wad and releasing it? It would be great, especially for reviewers taking screenshots. Bad screenshots in dark areas could look even better with a better palette. Something like that I could just drop in my ZDoom /skins directory...

It's called JDoom, it works wonders..

Ed said:

It's called JDoom, it works wonders..

Except that uh, I don't LIKE JDoom. I just want a better palette for ZDoom in SOFTWARE mode. Also, JDoom may fix the fade-problems, but you'd still be limited in the BASE colors that you have to work from. With an improved palette you would have more colors to work with in creating better looking sprites, and THEN you could worry about whether or not they fade in a pretty way in whatever port.

Then download inkworks and DO IT YOURSELF.

Ed said:

Then download inkworks and DO IT YOURSELF.

Fuck you, bud. :P FREEEDRIIIK!!! I figure since you're gonna do it anyway, you might as well release it for download...

Well it is a bit of work. I have to create a configuration file for *all* the color ranges, manually, and feed it into a certain program.

Fredrik said:

Well it is a bit of work. I have to create a configuration file for *all* the color ranges, manually, and feed it into a certain program.

I'll sex you for it...

Things just got ugly around here. What some people will do for palettes...

Grazza said:

There's a very old (Dec-93) freeware utility by Bill Hanlon for messing around with the palette, called Doomgogl. I haven't tried it myself, so have no idea how good it is. I haven't found it anywhere online - it was on the Doom Companion CD. It includes these sample palettes:If anyone wants it, PM me with your e-mail address (it's 77kB when zipped).

Archive it!

And if all else fails, you could always get invulnerability in Mooddoom, which changes just about everything to normal black and white (the bullet marks on the wall are white though).

Ultraviolet said:

I'll sex you for it...

No, please, not that....

Fredrik said:
Yeah, I think I once made a WAD that removes the brownness even with the default palette. It's lost now but I can probably build it again.

EDIT: it appears that a hack to the palette is necessary, but it doesn't affect the original graphics more than just giving parts of them a bit more contrast.

That is exactly what I'm looking for. But if it's not around, I'm not going to ask you to remake it.

Some weirdo said:
It would be great, especially for reviewers taking screenshots. Bad screenshots in dark areas could look even better with a better palette.

That's like the last thing that patch could be useful for, Ultraviolent.

myk said:

Ultraviolent.

Heh, it only took me about a year to realize there was no n in his name.