Can we please agree not to touch the palette? (and the colormap while we're at it)

1. It could clash with existing art within Freedoom.
2. It could clash with art from PWADs that were built with the original palette in mind.
3. Any custom color effects are not guaranteed to be seen in ports. ZDoom applies the effect manually during runtime to the first palette while ports like MochaDoom generates new colormaps for its high-color modes (and can also import external ones if Maes got around to that yet).

Besides, id gave permission to use this identical palette/colormap. Might as well keep it for the sake of compatibility with everything everywhere that it already worked just fine with.

Sodaholic said:

Besides, id gave permission to use this identical palette/colormap.

Nope, I have no idea where you got that impression from.

Anyway, I don't think we have any immediate plans to change it. It was just me wondering aloud about the possibility in that other thread. If done carefully (any change would have to be a minor, compatible one), (1) and (2) shouldn't really apply.

fraggle said:

Nope, I have no idea where you got that impression from.

I swear I read that in some internal documentation somewhere in the Freedoom directories. Are you certain permission wasn't explicitly granted?

fraggle said:

Anyway, I don't think we have any immediate plans to change it.

I know, but the topic comes up from time to time and it concerns me because of the things that could get messed up. As for 1 and 2, sure, as long as it's roughly comparable it shouldn't be too bad, but still, it might not be ideal for assets with heavy dithering (crap, I know, but it is used in many PWADs out there).

It would certainly never be done unless we had a high degree of confidence that such a change would not disrupt mods. Mod compatibility is an important goal for the project. That said, I do believe that it might be possible to pull off some very subtle changes, if done carefully. But more research is needed to tell for sure.

If you wrote code to programmatically generate an identical, or near-identical, palette and colormap from scratch, wouldn't that take of any possible objection?

(Not that I could ever foresee such an objection... copyrighting a list of colors? Is that even a thing you can do?)

Linguica said:

(Not that I could ever foresee such an objection... copyrighting a list of colors? Is that even a thing you can do?)

I recall Adobe and Pantone got in some legal fights over it, so... maybe. It's best to avoid that mess.

Linguica said:

If you wrote code to programmatically generate an identical, or near-identical, palette and colormap from scratch, wouldn't that take of any possible objection?

(Not that I could ever foresee such an objection... copyrighting a list of colors? Is that even a thing you can do?)

From what I recall, that's exactly what we did. I think cph authored those bits, right at the beginning of freedoom.

Nope, the Freedoom palette is the Doom palette.

cph's PLAYPAL script did indeed have some code that was supposed to generate a palette, but it was never used.

Personally I consider it fair use. I think it's fine.

Does SLADE use id code to generate palettes and colormaps?

Also I highly doubt that a new colormap would be as disruptive as sodaholic seems to think given how many pwads use custom colormaps with stock resources.

e: for accuracy

Not sure how SLADE is relevant. Freedoom has a couple of Python scripts that are used to generate the PLAYPAL and COLORMAP lumps (plus a bunch of alternate colormaps used for environment effects). See here.

That's not the point though. Ultimately the PLAYPAL lump is derived from playpal-base.lmp, which contains the Doom palette. The script (playpal.py) pads this out to the full PLAYPAL lump: ie. all the alternate versions of the palette, like the red tinted versions you see when the player gets shot.

We calculate as much as possible from scratch, but ultimately it's all derived from the Doom palette.

Oh aha I misread your previous post and didn't realize what you meant re: the scripts so my question is, in hindsight, real dumb.

Would using that doomcrap palette dump utility to create an original, compatible base playpal solve the problem (though this would probably upset sodaholic)? It dumps them in .act format though so idk how meaningful it is to have it appear as a .lmp or what that entails. The filesize is still 768 bytes so I assume it is the same structure of information.

I have only done some pretty basic palette editing so this might also be a dumb question.

Yes, compatible palettes can be made and it'd probably look fine, but given that the current palette is already an established asset with no legal issues (AFAIK) I see no reason not to be conservative on that front.

I just don't think it's worth focusing on when there's other areas Freedoom actually needs attention in.