...so I finished mapping the doom palette

...kinda. And found there are eight duplicate ids (0 vs. 247, 4 vs. 168, 208 & 224, 13 vs. 236, 45 vs. 190, 47 vs. 191 and 207 vs. 240).

Can they be used for anything? E.g. to extend the pink range into deep purples, or bridge that sudden gap from darkest red to black?

I suppose a replacement procedure would be possible, moving identical color ids that have been applied in two bits of graphics over to the one id, freeing up a brand new range of eight. Anyone have practical examples where this was done? Is there a known path one can take?

ZDoom uses a system where image formats are converted to an internal bitmap format which uses a transparent color (this system allows to easily support many additional image formats), so it's advised to keep one duplicate of black. In Doom, 0 & 247.

The other duplicate colors, feel free to use. Generally you can assume that the later color (e.g., 236 for the 13 & 236 pair) are safer to change since converters tend to use the first match they find. However, Doom has a number of built-in translation ranges, so check that players still look right when translated.

There are far more colors that can be safely replaced than the ones you've selected. Check out the palette in Back to Saturn X for some ideas, though I'm pretty sure even that could be bested :)

Doom has a shocking amount of colors that aren't 100% identical but are similar enough that they can be merged into one, freeing up a lot of color slots.

The yellow range from 225 to 231 can be shrunk down to 3 shades with no significant loss, for instance (in BTSX's palette I also altered the other yellows to map more seamlessly into each other, lessening the slight hue differences between them). The very dark blues between 240 and 246 could probably be shrunk down similarly without problems.

Many of the shades in the extra brown range that goes from 144-151 (and then continues at 13-15) can also be safely replaced due to the existence of very similar shades to most of them.

The 32-47 and 176-191 skinpink and red ranges can be dramatically improved without adding any new colors at all, simply by increasing the contrast of their darker halves to fade further towards black. Notice how in the stock palette, they (inexplicably) flatten out to a medium-dark color, having several uselessly similar shades on their low end. You can see the same thing at work with the orange range (209-223, continued at 232-235).

As a result of these changes, you'll need to requantize any graphics that appear in your WAD, including any IWAD resources you're using. In Slade, this can be done in bulk by using the graphics conversion dialog, setting the source palette to Doom and setting the destination palette to Existing/Global (i.e. the active PLAYPAL lump in the wad you're doing the conversion in).

Palettes are interesting stuff. Did you use a special tool to find the duplicates, or did you search them out by hand? Are the duplicate colors treated differently in the COLORMAP or do they also fade identically as well?

ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Are the duplicate colors treated differently in the COLORMAP or do they also fade identically as well?

In the IWAD, they should be identical, because the COLORMAP lump was tool generated and the tool treats each color identically (it has no notion of "ranges" or whatever).

In PWADs, some COLORMAP lumps that have been hand-touched can be found sometimes.

I've heard of a WAD, or at least the concept of a WAD, that took the alternate colors and made a custom PLAYPAL where the radiation suit had all the colors exactly the same as normal play, except for the alternate colors which were bright yellow or whatever. Then you made some custom graphics that used those alternate colors to make secret messages that would normally be "invisible" during normal gameplay but would suddenly stand out when you got the radiation suit.

ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Palettes are interesting stuff. Did you use a special tool to find the duplicates, or did you search them out by hand? Are the duplicate colors treated differently in the COLORMAP or do they also fade identically as well?

Index is fun! Limitations can be strangely liberating. If I had millions of colours, I'd probably drown instantly from color-choice.

I sampled the dupes in Photoshop and checked the RGBs to be numerically identical, is how I went about locating them.

What Gez says checks out btw - I made a two-colored texture once, sporting the two darkest reds; they showed up no differently in a smoothly min-max'ed light-pulsating sector.

EDIT: Cheers esseltfortium - SaturnX's lighter blues were tastefully implemented, though it was almost unnerving to see how much the Cacodemon's personality changed with just a change of eye color! It sure opened my mind to the possibilities though. Re-mapping the reds doesn't sound like a bad idea - I've got precious little experience in colormap editing though. Theres' a first time for everything I guess. At the moment though, I've got my hands full just juggling pixels with the existing colors. A couple more dark grays would be neat also.

If anyone's got good tutorials or links about modding colormaps, feel free to clue me in.

For convenience, I've saved the index to a palette file for quick conversion. You should be able to use it as a preview before importing to SLADE et al.

doompal.act
doompal.pal

Linguica said:

I've heard of a WAD, or at least the concept of a WAD, that took the alternate colors and made a custom PLAYPAL where the radiation suit had all the colors exactly the same as normal play, except for the alternate colors which were bright yellow or whatever. Then you made some custom graphics that used those alternate colors to make secret messages that would normally be "invisible" during normal gameplay but would suddenly stand out when you got the radiation suit.

That sounds absolutely awesome! Suppose you don't remember the WAD, do you?

That gives me an idea - how about an evil mask (radsuit), that, when you wear it, a monster's face gets all super-evil looking, or pictures on the wall get twisted - that would be freaky - heh.

kb1 said:

That sounds absolutely awesome! Suppose you don't remember the WAD, do you?

I don't remember if anyone actually ever did it, or if it was just an idea bandied around way back in the day.

Also I want to reiterate how weird it is to Google an obscure Doom-related question and find a Doomworld thread from a decade ago, and it turns out you posted in that thread, and yet you have absolutely no recollection of it.

Soundblock said:

...kinda. And found there are eight duplicate ids (0 vs. 247, 4 vs. 168, 208 & 224, 13 vs. 236, 45 vs. 190, 47 vs. 191 and 207 vs. 240).

There are 7 duplicates. Index 13 and index 236 are slightly different. Index 13 is R:79 G:59 B:43 while index 236 is R:79 G:59 B:39.

Doom_user said:

There are 7 duplicates. Index 13 and index 236 are slightly different. Index 13 is R:79 G:59 B:43 while index 236 is R:79 G:59 B:39.

I stand corrected, but have another post-count to show for it.

Linguica said:

I don't remember if anyone actually ever did it, or if it was just an idea bandied around way back in the day.

A great idea. It could potentially be used to solve secret puzzles. If I get my head around the technical sides of it, I'll try to make some textures for it.

That's a clever trick, but unfortunately it likely won't work with OpenGL (or D3D, for that matter) renderers.

Gez said:

That's a clever trick, but unfortunately it likely won't work with OpenGL (or D3D, for that matter) renderers.

Maybe I could add some GL only secrets to balance the map? ;)

Linguica said:

Also I want to reiterate how weird it is to Google an obscure Doom-related question and find a Doomworld thread from a decade ago, and it turns out you posted in that thread, and yet you have absolutely no recollection of it.

Was this directed to me?

I think he's talking about himself.

Linguica that has happened to me as well, weird, it's like your old self doesn't exist anymore, you're someone else :O

Or maybe a weird sensation of time travel?

VGA said:

I think he's talking about himself.

Linguica that has happened to me as well, weird, it's like your old self doesn't exist anymore, you're someone else :O

Or maybe a weird sensation of time travel?

Ah, ok, it makes sense to me today - couldn't really comprehend it yesterday. That's weird too. Linguica: You're spreading weirdness, man :)

Most of this assumes a software palette renderer, using all the color maps.

An RGB renderer, like in DoomLegacy -native mode, treats the texture color as RGB and does RGB blending from there on. This means that the red-black gap only affects the full-light texture, the renderer will RGB blend to any red-black color in that gap that it needs.
I made some effort to make special color maps work better for RGB rendering by doing some colormap lookups where it was practical, but it would not preserve radical tricks. It can only support a two color alpha blend for the entire colormap.
OpenGL rendering is is about the same, but with less support of special tricks.

Software palette rendering may be a problem on Windows-8, due to drivers that do not fully support it any more.

I played with the color map too, on Doom and for another game project.
My conclusion was that it was not worth it.
- There are plenty of colors that could have been mapped better, but you would have to generate an enormous PWAD, or an IWAD. You have to replace every single sprite, flat, and texture. You need to remap their colors to avoid your special trick colors or use a better color.
- Tools to do the color remapping would have to be made, customized, or otherwise tweaked to work right for your particular colormap changes.
- It requires palette rendering and hardly affects non-palette rendering.
- There are multiple points of conflict with other rendering modes.
- To really support this may require changing some code in some of the renderers, because of Doom and Heretic colormap fixes and assumptions.