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Battle_Korbi

Why put brown stuff in maps?

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One of my main pet peeves in regards to Doom maps are the consistent use of the same brown-red scheme, be it a urban map, tech map, nature map or even some hell maps.

My question is why?

Does it make the game more realistic and less cartoony? Why not add some blue and grey? And some darker shades of red? Who forces you to use brightly brown and green and yellow stuff?

I mean, every popular map that gets a lot of praise use the same scheme all over again. Even those who can take the opportunity to insert custom stuff into their maps, still use the same brown-red scheme over and over. And even the id dudes used other colors, and textures, and whatnot, and I like to take the opportunity they provided.

Thanks for tolerating my shit.

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It might partly be because of Doom's stock palette lacking certain colors and/or shades, for example the darkest red shade is much brighter than the darkest blue shade, and many bright shades (yellow, purple, and the red-to-white and blue-to-white ranges) end up looking badly when used in sectors with low brightness. I mean, with so many potential color usages that don't look too good (and not only because of the palette), it may be understandable that mappers tend to stick to those that do, and as a result, a lot of maps end up having similar color schemes.

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Doom's best general-use textures are brown, really. Everything else either tiles poorly, does not have regular vertical intervals, are too busy for a texture you just slap on walls, are just plain garish for a typical texture, or various other reasons.

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Alright, I understand when half of the map is brown, but still, once I had played a multiplayer map where every texture was a mix between brown and green and I had to quit soon due to headache I had gained looking at the garbled mess of green and brown. Is there some taboo stating you cannot try and use some other colors?

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Was the map part of Greenwar, by chance?

Sarcasm aside, if it was then that mapset was ( unless I'm misremembering ) made entirely focused on the map layouts, with the texturing effectively just using a handful of textures for simplicity's sake.

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But is there any line or mid area between simplicity and health hazard?

Would really like to know so whenever someone says the mapset is simplistic i can skip it :D

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Battle_Kirby said:

But is there any line or mid area between simplicity and health hazard?

I mean, that depends on what your condition is. It's entirely possible that your issue with such flatly textured maps could be alleviated with using a different renderer, or by tweaking your display options or FoV setting.

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Battle_Kirby said:

I mean, every popular map that gets a lot of praise use the same scheme all over again.


I remember totally how Swim With The Whales, Stardate 20X6, Violence and Ancient Aliens were all praised for their large amounts of brown and red. Or was that brown and green? EITHER WAY, there's too much of that and not enough who-knows-what.

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I once had a dark room in a level I tried to give a blue theme too. In the end I just had to give up because blue textures just don't look good at low light levels thanks to the palette.

Obviously true-colour source ports remove this limitation, but if you're designing with vanilla+ in mind, you can't ignore it.

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Aight, new question?

Had someone actually tried to release a mappack with a diffrent color scheme? I get it, it can look ugly, but that doesn't neccesarily mean it IS actually ugly. Probably it would look great when painted with blood :D

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Battle_Kirby said:

Aight, new question?

Had someone actually tried to release a mappack with a diffrent color scheme?

Jayextee said:

Swim With The Whales, Stardate 20X6, Violence and Ancient Aliens


Blue, magenta, purple, and HOLYFUCKITSVAPORWAVEDOOM colour schemes respectively.

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Okay.

Last question though (im kinda off my pc so I cant download and look now),

On a scale from:

"Such color you can headbang and listen to Eurobeat"

to

"Color variety is in keycards"

how colorful are the maps you suggested?

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I'd describe Ancient Aliens as the headbang type of colourful (shit's beautiful, yo), but I doubt your descriptions do the others justice. Swim with the Whales and Stardate do a great job of focusing on one colour each (blue and magenta, as mentioned) with pepperings of other colours (usually brown, alas, but it does a nice job of complementing the main hue).

Violence is very VERY purple, but also very red and yellow, etc.

Those WADs are all very colourful. I appreciate good colour, and those stick out immediately.

For non-modified COLORMAP WADs, I'm sure there exist others. You speak about disliking brown and red/green there, every tried the classic megaWAD Icarus? Not everyone's cup of tea (too much arcane switch-hunting for me) but I recall it being very silver, and quite a hefty amount of blue. Obviously not as colourful as my four mentions there, but still.

Then again, I also like the colours of Back To Saturn X E1/E2 -- definitely more subtle (again, has brown and red in spades, maybe less green) but certainly what I'd personally call a welcome change from DOOM's admittedly-dismal palette.

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I'm sometimes mapping in gray/red as well. And yea, it's mainly related to the fact that Doom palette is biased towards brownish colors (I count red and yellow as well here), and it's blue and green colors are generally unusable for anything except FWATER and marbles which doesn't really suit techbases.
Occasionally there is some texturing genius who manages to make fresh-looking textures under Doom palette, but that's more of an exception.

Plus, there's also this thing that not only stock palette, but also stock textures are generally either brown, ugly or not varying enough.

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I get the feeling that you've not actually taken the time to look at many different WADs and Mods, there's thousands that make colourful use of textures with a total lack of brown.

If you want bright colours, try the following.

Violence:
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/84829-violence-4-map-ep/





Action Doom 2:
http://action.mancubus.net/





Winter's Fury:(makes the colours feel colourful through a lack of colour, but it's not brown.)
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/62496-winters-fury/

http://i.imgur.com/T49GH.png?1



Sunlust:
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/68089-sunlust-on-idgames/





Back to Saturn X e1:
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/62529-back-to-saturn-x-e1-99i9-plus-new-unheard-midis-on-page-13/





Ancient Aliens:
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/87784-ancient-aliens-final-version-on-idgames/





The Adventures Of Square:
http://adventuresofsquare.com/





I've just thrown tens of hours of colourful fun your way. Off you go. Have fun.

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Roses are red
Violets are blue
FIREBLU are FIREBLU

I should make a map with different fireblu variants!

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Maybe you don't know what this means. 

 

On 3/6/2017 at 7:01 AM, Dragonfly said:

textures with a total lack of brown.


I see a lot of effective use of textures that don't have any brown in them in those shots. 

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It's the sort of thing where you're never not going to get no brown, just like you're not going to get no colors on the monochrome scale: they just go with everything so well and help vibrant details stick out more, and brown especially is really nice with Doom's palette and palettes based off it. If you replaced the brown in the Ancient Aliens screenshot with orange, for example, it'd end up just looking horrendously garish and your eyes would be less drawn to the technobridges, blood, UFO rings, torches, and chromatic bricks

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9 hours ago, illuknisaa said:

I'm not sure you know what this means.

 

 

As rdwpa pointed out, I definitely know what that means. Take a look at the sentence again. I said "textures with a total lack of brown". That doesn't mean MAPS with a total lack of brown, that meant textures. Look at the taxi in the Action Doom shot, or the grass and water from The Adventures of Square, do you see brown in them textures? No, no you don't!

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On 3/6/2017 at 5:52 AM, ZZYZX said:

Doom palette is biased towards brownish colors (I count red and yellow as well here), and it's blue and green colors are generally unusable for anything except FWATER and marbles which doesn't really suit techbases.

 

TEKGREN? STARGR?

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Depends which greens. DOOM palette has two sets; a saturated 'nukage' set of greens, and a less-saturated 'STARGR' set; the latter of the two are much easier on the eye and better for texturing IMO.

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