Doom Not In Technicolor (DM2PAL)

This one is for those of you who like to play Doom in software rendering sourceports such as Chocolate Doom, ZDoom, etc.

It's a custom Palette and Colormap, that removes various redundant parts of the original color palette and replaces them with additional ranges to increase the overall color depth of the game. Here's some comparison shots:





In short, Pinkies no longer become Brownies in dimly lit areas.

It's similar to the BTSX palette in some respects but also borrows part of Quake's palette DNA as well. Since it changes the PLAYPAL quite drastically, it requires a complete set of remapped vanilla graphics for it to work, which are included in the WAD files. I'm not sure if the idgames archive will accept it, but in the meantime it's hosted here on Mediafire:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/om4apsh12edt7cb/DM2PAL.zip

Light blues still fade down to grey, though. Any way to make them fade down the gamut of the blue colour range instead?

I did experiment along those lines, but you end up with something like this:



To create the custom colormap, I blacked out parts of the palette I didn't want to bleed into a particular range and let SLADE generate the result, which worked well in other cases.

To get that to work here, I would need to create an addition range of 8 to 16 muted blues to smooth out the transition, which would mean sacrificing another part of the palette. And since the light blues in Doom are almost always used at full brightness, that seems redundant.

However, it might be worth doing something like this to create a fullbright range, essentially for free:



And the bright yellows, perhaps could be treated the same, which might work well for a custom texture set, but I suspect it would require a few duplicate colours or remapping of individual graphics.

Nice, though the necessity of reincluding sprites isn't a good thing. Also, did you know this existed?

Bugger, I thought I was being clever.

Oh well, I'll rename it DM2PAL.

(Not just the sprites either, all the patches and flats too! If only there was some form of colour transition table for this sort of thing...)

This looks excellent, and would probably be a great starting point for custom palettes, too.

Most alternate blue ranges that are useful in Doom wads tend to be more compatible with the approach of mapping the bright blues to fade into the dark blues, but there's probably not much that can reasonably be done about it here. That said, though, the example you posted does look a bit odd to me, in that the darker shades flatten out on the bottom left of the blue colormap rather than following the slope of the brighter blues above them, which makes it look more awkward than I think it otherwise would.

I don't get why the middle of the blue range is completely skipped on the non-fullbright one though. There's a huge dropoff right in the middle there, likely a symptom of trying to keep the lightest blue light. Any reason they can't resemble the full blue range, light > dark a bit closer?

Those are simply the colours that the SLADE3 algorithm picks when you isolate the blue range.

Yeah, if you're willing to alter the blue range dramatically, then you can get a better gradient, but going from low saturation light colours to higher saturation dark colours is always problematic, and really requires addition muted ranges of a similar hue.

Ah, gotcha. My inexperience with colormap editing shows there; I presumed there might be a way to manually tweak the thing, which would be ideal for managing those blues.

Of course COLORMAP can be edited manually (SLADE3 allows you to export/import it both as a raw data file and as a PNG image, and once you have it as a separate file outside the wad, you can use any graphic editing program to change it). The problem is that the entire colormap is limited to using the same 256 colors that are defined in PLAYPAL, which is why you can't always make it look good.

Yeah, you can hand edit it, but I would be very wary of doing so, unless you deliberately want to create a stylised look. The algorithm was designed to recreate Doom's Colormap as closely as possible, so it's generally better to alter the PLAYPAL and observe the changes in the resulting COLORMAP that the algorithm produces.

Urthar said:

Yeah, if you're willing to alter the blue range dramatically, then you can get a better gradient, but going from low saturation light colours to higher saturation dark colours is always problematic, and really requires addition muted ranges of a similar hue.

Which is the sole reason I gave up on improving the stock colormap without drastic changes to the palette.

Great job, BTW. I might borrow this. The Standart Question: were the player palette swaps and automap colors taken into account when rearranging the palette? I could probably check everything myself, but it's boring.

Urthar said:

fullbright range

I had the same idea. I also wanted to use it for the colors that fade the worst: bright blues, yellows, and magentas.

Urthar said:

The algorithm was designed to recreate Doom's Colormap as closely as possible, so it's generally better to alter the PLAYPAL and observe the changes in the resulting COLORMAP that the algorithm produces.

To be fair, the algorithm is the simplest possible linear fade into blackness (computed in truecolor, then matching each result with the closest existing color from the palette), and as this thread showed, some colors might end up looking better with different fading.

Da Werecat said:

Which is the sole reason I gave up on improving the stock colormap without drastic changes to the palette.

Great job, BTW. I might borrow this. The Standart Question: were the player palette swaps and automap colors taken into account when rearranging the palette? I could probably check everything myself, but it's boring.

I had the same idea. I also wanted to use it for the colors that fade the worst: bright blues, yellows, and magentas.

The player palette swaps look ok in ZDoom. I think the automap colors might be borked though.

scifista42 said:

To be fair, the algorithm is the simplest possible linear fade into blackness (computed in truecolor, then matching each result with the closest existing color from the palette), and as this thread showed, some colors might end up looking better with different fading.

It's a fascinating thread.

Corrected a glitch when running with Doom Retro (parts of the SSG turned transparent.)

Updated file:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/om4apsh12edt7cb/DM2PAL.zip

Isn't that the feature whereby the port actually changes one or two pixels on the SSG sprite through the actual code? I never rightly understood why those kinds of corrections were ever made, the visual difference is honestly negligible.

Anyway thanks a lot for this palette! Looks great. :)

You know, its rather ironic....I WANT the "pinkies being brownies" effect in opengl rendering, but have never seen anything to get this effect..

Jimmy said:

Isn't that the feature whereby the port actually changes one or two pixels on the SSG sprite through the actual code? I never rightly understood why those kinds of corrections were ever made, the visual difference is honestly negligible.

I think it's something to do with how DOOM Retro handles it's translucency effects.

Anyway thanks a lot for this palette! Looks great. :)

You're welcome :)

mumblemumble said:

You know, its rather ironic....I WANT the "pinkies being brownies" effect in opengl rendering, but have never seen anything to get this effect..

You could be in luck :) The GZDoom Retro Shader is a recent development along those lines:
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=53250

Oh I'm already aware of retro shader, thing is, it makes things BLURRY, not discolored in darkness.

Thanks for trying to let me know anyways. Retroshader is amazing

Thanks so much for creating this palette. This is what id should've done in 1993. I'm definitely going to be making use of this from now on.

I still really hope that source port authors eventually consider this feature idea. That way people could use this palette with PWADs without having to manually convert the graphics.

Well, I had a lot of advantages, such as time, more powerful tools, and access to other's work. The BTSX and Quake palettes were invaluable resources.

Yeah, I hope the palette translation table idea takes off. Something similar already exists to a certain extent in the form of Boom's translation tables for it's text.

Unfortunately, WIMAP0 gets screwed up pretty badly by this palette. Is there anything you could try with the palette to get it back to its former glory?

Original:



DM2PAL:

There's a sub-range of 8 off-browns in the original palette, which are mostly, but not entirely redundant. I wavered over replacing them, because I knew that it would cause noticable degrading of a fairly small number of graphics.

You can put them back in with something like this, replacing the muted beige/browns:



(Once you remove the muted browns you sort of have to replace the muted greens as well, or they bleed into the lower browns, so you might as well put more of the magentas back.)

Ultimately it's all a trade off.

I tried my hand at my own version, how is this?






I replaced index 6 with pure yellow because I felt that the slightly muted yellow too noticeably degraded stuff with pure yellow in it. I only used the upper 4 ranges of the brown that WIMAP0 uses, since removing the lower 4 is not as noticeable. In the remaining 3 indices, I used some of Quake's muted blues to try to address light blue fading into grey.

On another note, perhaps it would be worth selectively blacklisting parts of the palette for certain ranges when generating colormaps, such as blacklisting desaturated green when fading desaturated brown, or blacklisting desaturated red when fading saturated brown.

EDIT: So I did that, and also changed my Slade settings to use double instead of integer so that it's more accurate.

Blastfrog said:

Unfortunately, WIMAP0 gets screwed up pretty badly by this palette. Is there anything you could try with the palette to get it back to its former glory?

Original:

http://i.imgur.com/KDG2Cl1.png

DM2PAL:

http://i.imgur.com/H8cxcan.png

That doesn't look bad to me? Sure there's perhaps a bit of loss of contrast in the radial lines in the topmost crater but it's incredibly minor IMO.

Gez said:

That doesn't look bad to me? Sure there's perhaps a bit of loss of contrast in the radial lines in the topmost crater but it's incredibly minor IMO.

There's a loss of contrast everywhere and the color looks off.

I think it looks good, but bear in mind that looking at a single graphic or the COLORMAP alone won't show you the whole story. You may find when you test it in game, that the results aren't quite what you expected.

It's interesting that the upper 4 colours of the yellowish-brown are the more important ones. I'd be tempted to try using that to get a better conversion of the graphics, if it wasn't for the fact that I've banned myself from tweaking the palette any further.

(You can spend days trying to squeeze the last 1% out of a palette, and I really want to get on with other stuff at the moment.)

Using doubles in SLADE is another thing I'll definitely look into for future projects. I did experiment a bit with isolating various ranges to generate separate colormaps, which could then be stitched back together into a whole one. Separating the palette into warm tones and cool tones had quite decent results and removed colour bleeds. But since, I'm a lazy person at heart, I'm more drawn to the idea of having a palette that will generate it's own colormap without any addition work required.

If I was creating custom textures with the very light blues, I'd definitely consider using some of the Quake blueish-grey range to smooth that stuff out, but as far as I can tell, in the orginial games those colours are only ever used in full-bright sprites.

Yeah, the light yellows are a bitch to get right. Every time I played with them, I'd find myself inevitably refering back to Essel's BTSX version of them. If I ever come back to rework the palette, I'll definitely check your version of those out.

Guys? Cool work there,
Since your masters of generating these, could you generate one that is entirely compatible with doom *and* any other wad, *and* fades to grey in darkness? Cuz this seems to be good. The contrast3.wad does great job there but it looses saturation :/

That's not really possible with this method, due to the remapping of all graphics.

PALPLUS is probably your best bet: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/graphics/pal_plus

Medis said:

compatible with doom *and* any other wad

That second part is not going to be possible at all given how several wads define their own palette, such as BTSX or Ancient Aliens to give recent, high-profile examples.