The People's Doom?

Okay. so I was just checking over at Newdoom and I saw this. http://www.geocities.com/tpdoom/frames.html
What the heck? Now there are two public domain IWAD projects? How very strange. Well, whatever, if they can get it done, props to them, but I'm not sure they'll have any better luck than Freedoom.

yeah i saw that a few days ago... i wish them the best of luck but seeing how much work there is to do, it just seems like time better spent helping FreeDoom.. but maybe one day they will both be done and both be great in their own ways

Looks cool. I wish them the best of luck and added a link on the freedoom links page.

Hah, they're going to use an incompatible palette and choose such a crappy one? They should've asked me instead.

Speaking of which, I have a nearly Doom-compatible (all original graphics are free from artifacts although some aren't at the right contrast level) palette that eliminates some of the problems with Doom's (red fading to brown etc) somewhere on my hard drive.

heh, they are using geoshitties.

Funny.

As they are releasing it under the Public Domain we can just rip any good stuff and use it for Freedoom ;P

boris said:

As they are releasing it under the Public Domain we can just rip any good stuff and use it for Freedoom ;P

and, as freedoom is liberally licensed they can (and probably should) rip stuff for their project. whatever.

mewse said:

and, as freedoom is liberally licensed they can (and probably should) rip stuff for their project. whatever.

Not if they intend to re-release it in the public domain. Or am I wrong?

Fredrik said:

Not if they intend to re-release it in the public domain. Or am I wrong?

oh right, true, freedoom will still be copyrighted.. blah.. well i guess freedoom can benefit from this project but not vice-versa.

mewse said:

oh right, true, freedoom will still be copyrighted.. blah.. well i guess freedoom can benefit from this project but not vice-versa.

That was my point...

Actually, I am planning to change the wording on the site to "freeware", rather than "public domain".

It is mainly because of the original musics created by Patrick Working. After all of his hard work, I would prefer that he keep the copyrights to them. I think the same consideration will also be given to the other contributers.

As for the palette, the reasons for a new one was primarily to increase the opportunities for the graphics designers. Most of the original DooM colours are represented, so converting graphics from the old palette to the new one should not be much of a problem.

Boingo said:

As for the palette, the reasons for a new one was primarily to increase the opportunities for the graphics designers. Most of the original DooM colours are represented, so converting graphics from the old palette to the new one should not be much of a problem.

It's a nice thought, but the palette you have there has several problems. It's not going to look very good in-game and it actually fails to fix the *biggest* problem with the Doom palette which is in fact not lack of certain bright hues but rather the lack of certain dark ranges (this palette actually only makes the problem worse).

You are referring to the "red morphs to brown" instance?

Little Faith said:

You are referring to the "red morphs to brown" instance?

That's one. But the general problem is that Doom's palette has too many bright/highly saturated colors and too few dark/low saturated colors. Those bright colors can be nice for sprites, computer screens and decals, but they're unfortunately useless for textures (I'm not the only person who has designed heaps of neat-looking textures that the Doom palette has butchered completely). This new palette shifts this to problem to the worse by removing several important low saturated ranges and adding a bunch of high saturated ones.

I think this wad is primarily for doom legacy... Legacy GL pretty much removes those nasty fading problems.

All colour ranges on the new palette go to dark, near black versions, which should at least reduce the problem.

Boingo said:

All colour ranges on the new palette go to dark, near black versions, which should at least reduce the problem.

Not true, the turqoise range doesn't.

But it doesn't really matter if they go all the way to black. What matters is how many steps there are. While a graphic converted to a 8-step range might still look good in fullbright, it probably won't look good when you apply dimness. Have you actually tried the palette in game (in colormap-based rendering)?

As a rule of thumb, allow at least 16 steps between brightness 128 and brightness 0 for each hue. Your palette only provides 8 steps for a bunch of them.

You've also removed far too much brown from there. For instance there's now only one range of browns in the 128-255-bright range and you're not addressing the lack of dark brown hues for textures either. No matter how much you might dislike Quake, the grey and brown ranges make up the backbone of a palette.

Your palette reminds me a bit of Wolfenstein 3D's. And if you're striving for Wolfenstein 3D's look then you should stick with it. But if you want something more like e.g. Quake 2 then I'd suggest you start over.

If you want inspiration, here's a few palettes I've made in the past:

Made for someone who was making a PC with an Egyptian theme. I made a really cool test setup with sand and palm trees for this :P Project died, I'm afraid.


Made for someone who was making a Quake 2 TC with a jungle theme:


Made for a Doom project with an icy theme. This one's pretty good, and mostly Doom-compatible.


Crappy palette made for something Dark Forces-like:

Fredrik said:

You've also removed far too much brown from there. For instance there's now only one range of browns in the 128-255-bright range and you're not addressing the lack of dark brown hues for textures either.

On the contrary. Browns are something that are almost entirely unchanged from the DooM palette.

On a second look, it appears that I was wrong about your palette removing the bright browns. Your palette features a total of 56 browns, Doom's has 65. What you've done is removed some of the darker variations, which is worse than removing the bright ones.

And even if you had kept all of Doom's browns, you'd still have failed to address the fact that Doom's palette should not be treated as a norm as it has a flawed selection of browns to begin with.

Heh Fred, as interesting as these palette discussion are, they are a bit off-topic in this thread.

This is an interesting project but seeing as the objectives and rationale are virtually identical to that of freedooms, I wonder why the authors did not consider working with us ... or even contacting us!

Jon said:

Heh Fred, as interesting as these palette discussion are, they are a bit off-topic in this thread.

Off-topic? o_O

I was talking about THEIR palette and how they coule improve it.

Fredrik said:

Crappy palette made for something Dark Forces-like:
http://fredrik.mancubus.net/img/palettes/force.png

Was it this? http://www.geocities.com/insertwackynamehere57/DFD/

insertwackynamehere said:

Was it this? http://www.geocities.com/insertwackynamehere57/DFD/

No.

Well, this is pretty irritating. Does it make sense to anyone here as to why they would just steal Freedoom's idea, act like it's a novel concept, and then try to make essentially a competing project when there's no real reward involved?

I mean, you'd think it'd make so much more sense to combine their talent with what we've already got with Freedoom, and create the best possible product.

If I decide to make a megawad, does that mean I'm stealing from whoever made the first megawad? Your just looking at it from a negative viewpoint. It's not even meant to be in competition with Freedoom.

Doom Dude said:

If I decide to make a megawad, does that mean I'm stealing from whoever made the first megawad? Your just looking at it from a negative viewpoint. It's not even meant to be in competition with Freedoom.

This totally different from a megawad. Of course I'm not saying you don't have the right to do it, but it seems kind of pointless to have two of these things running around when there could be just one, that involves the maximum amount of talent in the Doom community.

That's true but people will do what they want. I myself wish they would use their substantial talent for FreeDOOM, but if this is what they want to do then I wish them luck. If all goes well we'll end up with two free game iwads.

I see your point and it would be cool if everybody could join together and work on the one jobby. Eh well, thats probably not going to happen. ;)