Re-coloring the Game Font

the only way I can think of turning the game display orange [AV] or green [HR2], is to extract the font lumps and recolor them all using paint programs like Photoshop, piece by piece... is there a more efficient process to recoloring the fonts?

Extract all of the fonts with deutex, use irfanview to modify the pallete of one of them. Then use image alchemy to force the modified pallette into all of them. Once youve done that, rebuild the wad with deutex so that they will be correctly palletted and have their original offsets.

http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/deutex/

http://www.irfanview.com/

http://www.handmadesw.com/

With alchemy, the syntax to force one images pallete into a load of others is:

alchemy -F modified.bmp *.bmp -a

Note the capital F. The -a option makes it save them as .tga files, so you should convert them all back to bmps with alchemy *.tga -w, but it wont overwrite the originals so delete them first.

Piece by piece? You mean each pixel at a time? You can make a palette conversion making sure you're using colors that are in the DOOM palette, and then reapplying the DOOM palette, keeping the colors (it switches the palette numbers for them.)

That is, find the color you want to replace each of the red shades in the fonts (like a set of browns), modify the reds to those browns, and then reapply the DOOM palette keeping the absolute colors and rearranging the palette colors.

I've done such a thing with Paint Shop Pro. By making a transition palette and keeping doom.pal handy for making the graphics DOOM compatible.

A rougher but possibly faster way is altering the (RGB) color values on the picture, and then touching up any portions that don't look good. I believe this is what was done for AV.

Which program would you use to extract the Doom2 palette? I tried DeepSea and it had no option for such a lump. When I tried, I clicked on playpal and colormap and exported them as lump, it's wrong... So where to get the doom.pal?

I must be blind, sorry =(

Here.

Um.. the doom palette is in any graphic you extract from the game using virtually every tool made for the purpose.

A slightly more complicated way is to print a coloured message (containing the alphabet) in ZDoom using the BigFont and take a screenie in 320x200.