Disabling palette blending in ZDoom

To clarify, when you pick up an item or get shot, the screen flashes in a certain colour. I like to play at a high resolution, so when one of these palette effects occur it causes a distracting jerkiness.

You can turn this effect off in Quake using the gl_polyblend console variable. Is it possible to turn this off in ZDoom through a similar method?

Weird, why would you want to disable key elements of the game in sake of hi res?

I'm not sure ZDoom can do that, though.

myk said:

Weird, why would you want to disable key elements of the game in sake of hi res?

Mainly because my LCD screen doesn't look that great at lower resolutions. However I've just found that using a proper hardware accelerated port (such as ZDoomGL or JDoom) eliminates the slowdown completely.

Thanks for the link though, should prove useful for future reference.

Budko's modified PrBoom offers this option. (It's in the last page of "Status Bar/HUD" under the "Options - Setup" menu.)

If you want to stay with Zdoom (and if there isn't a way to do this directly - I don't know if there is), then some of Mark Klem's wads (such as this one - quite a fun map too IIRC) included a modified COLORMAP that had more or less this effect. I imagine you could stick the relevant stuff in a pwad and load that together with whatever it is you want to play. I also don't know if this will eliminate the slowdown, or if it will just remove the visual effect while leaving the slowdown intact.

Awesome, thanks for the info Grazza!

The pickup effect is done using extra palettes in the PLAYPAL lump (it contains 14 palettes, and this effect uses #10-12). So in theory you can remove the effect by creating your own PLAYPAL lump, but in practice that is difficult (I don't know of any tool for directly manipulating the palettes). Another thing, since the effect is palette based, it shouldn't cause any slowdown (at least not in a software port like ZDoom).

I have the impression ZDoom handles it differently; the effects even look a bit different.

You are correct. ZDoom doesn't use the hard coded palettes. Instead it creates the new palette on the fly. The reason for this is so that it can add multiple blending effects (try Berserk + Radiation Suit.) and enable custom blends for new items.

The slowdown which is being observed comes from poor handling of palette updates by some hardware/drivers. There is some hardware out there that causes noticable jerkiness.

What kind of video card have you got? Updating to the latest drivers and Direct X 9.0c might help

Ajapted said:

The pickup effect is done using extra palettes in the PLAYPAL lump (it contains 14 palettes, and this effect uses #10-12). So in theory you can remove the effect by creating your own PLAYPAL lump, but in practice that is difficult (I don't know of any tool for directly manipulating the palettes). Another thing, since the effect is palette based, it shouldn't cause any slowdown (at least not in a software port like ZDoom).

DeePsea, XWE and INKWORKS allow one to modify each individual palette (DeePsea can also change the COLORMAP index value as can INKWORKS - DOS pgm).

DeePsea is a bit easier for the Palettes since you can click on each entry and modify the 3 values (RGB) at the same time vs having to click for each one in XWE. I forget how INKWORKS does it. Not a big deal since not many bother and it would be simple for XWE to change :)

This playpal modification can also be done with a five-line Omgifol script. But it doesn't really matter since ZDoom ignores the lump.