Um...WTF

Okay, I made replacement titles for the episodes by saving the original episode names as .bmp files and cutting and pasting letters from them into a new .bmp file. When I loaded the new file into WinTex, for some reason it was blue letters with a yellow background instead of red letters with a transparent (light blue) background.

This is weird, because I used the exact same process to make the menu title different, and that worked just fine...does anyone know what's going on???

That's doom changing the image to match it's color palette. Make sure you're working with the doom palette in whatever graphics app you're using (although if you simply cut-and-pasted images from original doom graphics I don't see why it shouldn't work).

I definitely just directly saved the "Knee Deep in the Dead" and "The Shores of Hell" bmps from WinTex, and definitely cut and pasted letters from those into my new bmp. I don't get it, either.

Archvile64 said:

definitely cut and pasted letters from those into my new bmp.

Well there's your problem. WinTex does crappy work when it tries to convert stuff to doom palette it seems, even if the image uses the exact doom palette colors. :P

In case you don't know how to get the doom palette, just save it from one of the level titles, and load it for the new title. If your paint program doesn't have an option to do this, it sucks (in paint shop pro, colors->save/load palette).

Uh, you don't need to bother with all this palette crap.

Just use MS-Paint, open an existing letter, save it to a new name and paste the rest in after it.

Or just start with a 256-color image, not a 24bit one. BTW at first I got pissed off with the blue, but I decided to keep it blue in Millennium because it just looked cooler =)

Hmm, this is odd, since the colors were somehow switched around when I loaded them via WinTex, I opened up the bmps in IrfanView, and went to Image -- Swap Colors -- Red Green Blue --> Blue Green Red. That made it the same colors as they were in WinTex, so I saved them, and loaded them in WinTex...which swapped the colors again and made them look like normal. Weird.

This is another thing in Wintex you can work around. When you copy graphics and paste into another wad, the colors do get messed up. To fix it, at the same time as you are pasting into the destination wad, also save the graphics to files. Wintex will by default save to whatever.bmp. Then, in the destination wad, select the names you've pasted and select "load entry from file". Let Wintex load those files you just exported. All fixed. Kind of a pain, but it works great when you are copying and pasting many entries at once, sprites for instance. You can select a bunch, copy and paste, then when saving to files, you can repeatedly hit the enter key and each file will be saved...at least it's fast. Also, when loading entries from file, having a lot of entries selected, again you can just repeately hit the enter key and load them all fast.

Or don't use Wintex:)

The reason colors swap in Wintex is because the method used to color match is flawed. You can't just use a delta difference of colors and find the "least variance".

Why? Because different RGB can actually give you the exact same variance. The way I overcame that in DeePsea (and I imagine it's done similarly in others that work) is to weight the actual R, G, or B in the original and force it to match not only a delta, but the actual color space it belongs in.

What's most interesting about this is that NO text material I found is worth the powder to blow it to hell on this subject (when dealing with 8 bit color). Squaring variations are NOT a solution.