Retro texture making questions.

1) Is there a good coloring program that can limit color palette according to different gaming eras\systems?

I messed around with a Gif editor once called Gimped, but the colors in its palette never came out the same when I tried painting over original Doom monsters (wanted to give zombiemen red happy hats to test editing out).




I like retro colors so I would like to give Doom community epilepsy if possible.

I use GraphicsGale for pixel art:

http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

Note that if you want to use it for gifs, you need to buy it. The free version is fine for everything else, including png. Export a Doom resource from a lump editor in png format (bitmap should be fine too), open it with Gale, and you should have the Doom palette to work with.

By the time Doom came about, 256 color was standard for PC games. That gives a ton of possible color combinations, so there was no such thing as "retro colors" anymore.

Ok thanks I'll use that program instead. There must be a way of limiting the palette to some basic colors though, I mean even just by the user only using a handful.

So Doom was 256 colors, why does choosing 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit affect the colors in Doom? I know the NES was 8-bit and the Genesis 16-bit, wonder if that hints at their color range.

Doom uses 8-bit to chose colors from a palette of 256 colors.

Light levels are handled through a COLORMAP that maps each color to darker versions of it (the invulnerability effect is also handled with a special colormap).

The algorithm for choosing the darker version (which was used to generate the COLORMAP lump), however, does not necessarily give a color that is exactly in the palette already. In fact, it'll generally give a result that is outside the palette. Then there's a color matcher that will try to find the closest match, by simply looking at the distance between the ideal color and each palette color in RGB space.

Here, you can compare Doom's COLORMAP with its truecolor version:



If you use a non-paletted renderer, you can instead of using the COLORMAP, use a truecolor map. Instead of mapping to another palette index, you map to the ideal color in RGB value. This is what you get, for example, in MochaDoom's highcolor and truecolor modes. Or you can use a different algorithm altogether to handle light levels, similar to what OpenGL renderers do.

SweatyGremlins said:

I know the NES was 8-bit and the Genesis 16-bit, wonder if that hints at their color range.

That had nothing to do with the graphics, only their CPU. The NES used the 6502, which was a common 8-bit processor in consumer products throughout the 80's. The Commodore 64, Atari 2600, and Atari 7800 all used variations of the same processor.

The Genesis/Megadrive, on the other hand, used a Motorola 68000 CPU, which was a common 16-bit processor in consumer products in the 80's as well. Variations also appeared in the early Macintosh computers, as well as most Amiga computers.

It seriously had nothing to do with graphics, though, that's a common misconception. For example, the TurboGraphix-16 was advertised as a 16-bit platform, and had graphics on par with the Genesis and SNES, because it had a powerful graphics chip, but it actually used an 8-bit CPU. Those consoles were always advertised by the CPU bits, not GPU, strangely enough.

Yeah I always wondered about that, but I noticed that changing the 8-bit\16-bit\32-bit option in both Doom and Windows messes with colors which confused me a bit.

I'll have to read what Gez said a few times to sink in properly but the "darker version\color matcher" might explain why the other program I used would paint human Pink instead of Red when I tried to give the zombiemen red hats.

I'll mess around with XWE and see if I can export zombiemen in png format for now.

Hey it worked, that was easy as balls, thanks for that program.



Only bad thing I noticed is that the super bright purple\pink has made the center of his thigh invisible, some colors must be invisible to Doom or something.

I think magenta is the transparent colour.

SweatyGremlins said:

I'll mess around with XWE and see if I can export zombiemen in png format for now.

You should use Slade 3 instead, it has a TON more intuitive and useful graphic features. IIRC, XWE exports graphics in BMP format using cyan to represent transparent (which editors are NOT supposed to do), and you'd have to manually convert it to PNG.

Slade 3 can just export it as PNG itself without you needing to worry about manually converting everything. Beyond that, it's a much better editor in general.

Eris Falling said:

I think magenta is the transparent colour.

The transparent color depends on the tool you use to make the conversion; because in Doom itself there are no transparent color.

In Id Software's original toolchain, the transparent color was that in palette index #255. It's a sort of pinkish tan: R:167, G:107, B:107.

In very old versions of DEUTEX, the transparent color was magenta (R:255 G:0 B:255; however since this is a valid color in Doom (index 251), it was replaced afterwards by a dark teal (R:0, G:47, B:47).

In XWE and SlumpEd, the transparent color is cyan (R:0, G:255, B:255).

In SLADE 3, the transparent color can be anything! By default, no color will be turned into transparency, but you can check the radio button for that. By default, cyan is used as the transparent color, but you can input any other instead. In fact, you can even click on an area to make transparent in the picture view to select the color of the pixel at the point you clicked. This is because SLADE is an awesome program.

I do have Slade but the exporting didn't work, I'll read a guide for it once I am on holidays in a couple of weeks.

I'll try and make a simple flying enemy, like a little bot that shoots energy balls.