An Idea for newer ports....

I was thinking that the newer ports (EDGE, ZDoom) should have a feautre that allows you to use either PNG or JPEG files instead of BMP's in the WAD. This would take some major tweaking or stuff like that but that would boost the colors from 256 colors to Thousands of Colors and would provide more releastic things (shading, weapons, fire effects, blood). What do you guys think?

Games like Unreal support PCX which can be 24bit color. I think this would be a a good addition. I don't see why you couldn't map a PCX like you do a bmp. Of course it wouldn't be a palette-based game then, so that would probably be a problem.

Yeah, good idea though.

Bmp's can be 24 bit too, (they even can be 2bit , black and white), the problem is though that 16 or 24 bit color slows down the game alot in software rendering (try dosdoom in highcolor...), however the gl ports like jdoom and zdoomgl should be able to use them without any speed loss...

Yeah, I think it's high time that the GL ports at least allow for hicolor textures/flats/sprites.

bitstate said:

Bmp's can be 24 bit too, (they even can be 2bit , black and white), the problem is though that 16 or 24 bit color slows down the game alot in software rendering (try dosdoom in highcolor...), however the gl ports like jdoom and zdoomgl should be able to use them without any speed loss...

IMO the biggest problem with 24bit BMPs would be the size since they are not compressed.

... Either that or the images could all be 8-bit but each would have a different palette of colors (for those ones already in iwads, they would have the doom palette). The EXE would be using 16-bit mode so the conflicting palettes would not make a difference (you could have plasma bolts that are a cyan tint, even though the COLMAP doesn't have a cyan-colored spread in it).

And images that don't have a palette of themselves (like images in the iwads) would use the standard palette to define the colors or some other palette for a particular set of images (say that the entire PLSS series use a golden colored palette for the blues instead of the COLMAP set, or maybe even down to an individual frame like PLSSB0).

Another idea to combine with the one above is to have the ability to read images THEMSELVES in subdirectories instead of them absolutely having to be in a wad (of course this would be controversial). Very edit-supportable, just drop the images into a subdirectory instead of having to make the commitment of merging them with your iwad.
*) Or maybe just work the bugs out of the program and allow it to use "sprites-in-a-pwad" of any kind (some have attempted to do this, but I haven't seen much success).

boris said:

IMO the biggest problem with 24bit BMPs would be the size since they are not compressed.

i would like to see a port with legacys good looks and zdoom physics

haha...
lads I've been saying this since the early dosdoom days, granted it was bit a bit early, and it would have been too slow, but there are no excuses now.

boris said:

IMO the biggest problem with 24bit BMPs would be the size since they are not compressed.

My suggestion would work even that way around... They would still be *8-BIT* images but the palette thay had would not matter because the game engine would use 16-bit anyway. You could have images that actually contained 256 shades of blue or purple and it would display ok.
My idea to have the *ability* to load outside images like .gifs or something is very similar to what you can do to Duke3D to make it load external .wavs instead of using the default sound (sound instead of graphics in this instance, but it can work either way around).

This external graphics loading idea would have the highest potential to be used in a port like EDGE where you can make things in it that there weren't even there before (like new weapons that don't replace old ones).

My point here is that the images don't have to be true-color to look realistic, the whole palette can be used for colors instead of a few choice strips of colors. An image that uses the entire 256 color palette is almost impossible to discern from a true-color image (there are some instances where you can notice, but those are *RARE*). I am a 2D graphics artist and know what im talking about. Yes you can have photo-realistic explosions without them being true-color (but you run into trouble if you view them with a standard palette).