SLADE v3.0.2

Bumpity-bump:

So, a new build of SLADE 3 is available.

The big addition is some palette generation tools. Let me explain how it works:

• When a palette is displayed, you can right-click on any color to change it directly. Creating a whole new palette this way will probably be tedious, however.
  
• So you can now import palette files. Other than raw format, you can import palettes that are saved a square image (make sure the color cells are uniform, no numbering or whatever), as a comma-separated list of RGB values, in the JASC text format or in the GIMP text format. I'll need some feedback for the JASC palettes however since the only samples I had to test were those generated by SLADE in the first place; so I can't guarantee much. (Plus I wrote that code when I had no Internet access to look up documentation.)
  
• But you can do other tweaks! From the palette menu, you have "tint", "colourise", "tweak", "invert", etc. options. When using one of them, you get a window where you can select ranges in the palette, perform some changes from this. At the moment, you need to okay each change to validate them, and reopen the window to make a new change. I admit it might be a bit tedious, too.
  
• As you know, a Doom engine PLAYPAL does not contain only one palette, but several. Well, good news! You can now edit that too! You can remove a palette from a palette file, or reduce that file to this single palette, deleting all others. You can duplicate a palette (its copy will be added at the end). You can change the order in which they are. Lastly and perhaps most excitingly, you can automatically generate a full Doom or Hexen set of palettes from the current palette. Painstaking reverse engineering efforts have been deployed to ensure the values of the colors generated for the extra palettes are identical to those you would have obtained from Id Software's own palette generation tool. In fact, if you regenerate any of the stock PLAYPAL from their first palette with this tool, the resulting PLAYPAL will be bit-for-bit identical.
  
• "Add to custom palettes" now take effect instantly. You no longer need to quit and restart SLADE to see your new palette in the main palette chooser.
  
• A "Test palette" option is now also added. This will add the tested palette to the main palette chooser, but only for the current session (it is not added to the custom palette directory). You can then look how various paletted graphics are rendered with this palette. An example of use could be also to see how one of the palettes beside the first in a PLAYPAL look. Want to take a good look at how a texture will look when the player wears a radsuit? That's what you'll use.

Nice that a new version is released, but I can only find 3.0.2 on the slade website, which I already have.

Here are JASC palettes some saved with PSP 5.0:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/7nzet1bb2zd0g1a/rgb232.pal
http://www.mediafire.com/file/fk7oz6vkzauo3vi/dos256.pal
http://www.mediafire.com/file/trna6d3q8wndjck/dos16.pal
The last one has 16 entries, so I expect that sould give an error.

I also have Fractint palettes, which was a popular fractal generator before the time of Ultra Fractal:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/5r61y82vmvam8j2/chroma.map

I could even give you some source code of how to 'convert' the spline style Ultra Fractal 'gradients' to 256-point palettes, if you like, which I painstakingly reverse-engineered from looking at the spline behavior.

Zom-B said:

Nice that a new version is released, but I can only find 3.0.2 on the slade website, which I already have.

Look at http://svn.drdteam.org/slade/

Please PLEASE add OPL emulation for music playback within Slade. I hate having to run ZDoom or Chocolate Doom any time I want to test how something sounds, and I am a vanilla mapper so it is very important to me.

At the note, you'll need to implement MIDI to MUS and vice versa functionality. XWE can achieve these through external .exes, but they don't work on 64-bit platforms. Converting MUS to MIDI works, but it organizes the MIDI file very badly and it is very difficult to work around it.

I'm not sure I see a point for MIDI-to-MUS. Except for players who insist on using vanilla Doom pre-1.5, I don't see who would actually benefit from it; and as you noticed the MUS conversion is destructive so it's not possible to obtain a good MIDI back from the resulting MUS.

Gez said:

I'm not sure I see a point for MIDI-to-MUS. Except for players who insist on using vanilla Doom pre-1.5, I don't see who would actually benefit from it; and as you noticed the MUS conversion is destructive so it's not possible to obtain a good MIDI back from the resulting MUS.

It's actually incredibly simple, it's mostly just the formal aspects of it that it fails at. You can open, view and edit MUS files in XWE already, and all of the information you see there can very easily be translated into MIDI. The problem is that the old MUS2MIDI would mash all of the song data into a single channel instead of having each instrument on a different one :(

Slade doesn't use mus2midi, it uses mmus2midi. (And earlier it used qmus2midi.)

There's been several threads on the topic of converting mus to midi correctly, and the consensus appears to be that it's not done because mus sucks.

By all means, if you have pointers for how to code a more accurate mus-to-midi converter that will yield a usable tempo and channel separation, be my guest. I'm interested. But midi to mus, I really don't see any point in doing that. Nobody needs it.

Gez said:

By all means, if you have pointers for how to code a more accurate mus-to-midi converter that will yield a usable tempo and channel separation, be my guest. I'm interested. But midi to mus, I really don't see any point in doing that. Nobody needs it.

I'm actually considering writing entirely new programs to perform both. OPL emulated music is integral to my Dooming experience and I can't stand the way music sounds without it. The very first time I played Doom, it sounded that way and it is now branded into my brain.

If you created a program that could convert MUS to MIDI with proper tempo settings it would be a great achievement.