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CarpetolA

Textures looks like crap!

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Hey, this is CarpetolA, long-time player of DooM, and fond of designing cool maps.

I got a problem with some textures I'm gonna use
for my Capture The Flag WAD. I add them from a directory called textures.
Since I use ZDoom, I just add them between two markers;
TX_START and TX_END. The process went flawless and smoothly,
though I had to wait some brief period of time,
because they are MANY. I closed XWE without looking
at the textures, then I opened up Doom Builder
to continue on one of my maps. Then I notice something.

When I highlighted a solid wall linedef,
I noticed the texture was strangly colored,
it was looking more grey. It was not possible, I thought,
because I studied the textures before and they
were all perfect! Afterwards, I tried to change
them to bitmap format, but when I loaded one of them
into the WAD, I got a fun little error; "Bitmap is not valid".
So I changed them back into .PNG (maybe that's the problem)
and I checked bit depth when some guy advised me to do,
and they were all 8 bit (well, I just checked 3-4 of them, so I assumed they would all be 8 bit).

When I reported this to the other guy,
he said it must be something to do with the palette.
He said I should change to some other textures,
which I, sorely disappointed, had to accept.
So then I come here and hope that someone
who is advanced within this area will give me some royal help,
because I really like these textures and don't want to change.
Thanx! ;)

CarpetolA

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Where you importing them with Wintex? because it changes images put into wads into the Doom palette automatically

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CarpetolA, DooM/2 has a defined 256-color palette. If your original graphics were in a different palette, importing them for use with the standard DooM palette will mess up the colors, even in most source ports. You have at least a couple of choices:

    1. Create a customized palette in a PLAYPAL lump.
    2. Use a source port that supports .png format (such as GZDooM) and import your graphics in their original .png format.

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Welcome to the thorny argument of Doom's limited 8-bit palette (aka as the One True Doom Palette) and ALL known WAD tools' implicit conversion to said One True Doom Palette :-)

Seriously, you've just gotten yourself into a rat hole, since now you'll start asking about hi-color and true-color textures and the ports that support them...trust me, it's QUITE a rat hole.

So if your idea was to create a truecolor texture pack for anyone to use, I'm afraid you'll have to do some extra homework and learn how to import textures as 24-bit PNG and the such, and learn the peculiarities of using them with every different port.

If you want to use just SOME new textures, not a whole pack, you'd better single them out and reduce them to the Doom palette yourself by pre-processing contrast/colors/hue etc. until you can obtain satisfactory results. Using modified palettes is possible but you will affect everything in the game.

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Well, Maes, I'm gonna use some textures from Ultimate Simplicity (it's in a .pk3) by Agent Spork, to be more specific. And when I meant that they are many, they are MANY. Like over 400 (not inclunding those that I don't want and the bitmaps from the first Simplicity).

I don't understand shit about hi-color or truecolor, and I feel like I don't have time for it, 'coz I wanna finish my wad soon. But that's just me (a lazy jackass). But you can tell me how it works, so maybe it will help me with this. (see above; lazy jackass)

And yes, I have tried the modified palette which came with the megawad, but with the same results. Weird...

But I'm gonna try importing the textures into the WAD as 24-bit just like you said. I'll tell you if it works. See ya! ;)

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Look, it's really very simple. Doom uses just a set of 256 fixed colors (aka "the palette"), while the textures your are trying to use have millions of colors.

And just like in real life, you can't really cram more into less without losing something, so your wonderful, colorful textures will have to get their colors reduced to 256....and in particular to those 256 used by Doom.

As a guideline before using a particular texture or graphic with Doom:

  1. Doom has a very poor selection of blues and greens, so water and day skies will look like crap, or will likely be reduced to gray.
  2. Certain shades of yellow and of human skin also render pretty badly and will likely end up gray.
  3. The shades of colors that render better with Doom are grays and browns, and many shades of red.
  4. All tools use a "nearest color approximation" method to downgrade the colors to the Doom's palette, so a texture will look "almost" like it's intended too, if you're lucky. Most usually, colors without an exact match are just rendered as gray.
  5. The best way is to handle the downgrade yourself, by recolorizing everything texture-by-texture and patch-by-patch with a graphics editing program with indexed palette support, like PSP. Personally, I add more color saturation to the images, and then apply the doom palette, this seems to fix most graying problems. You can try batch-converting the textures if there are really a lot of them.
Do a forum search in the "Doom Editing" category searching for "palette", you will find a lot of related topics.

About Ultimate Simplicity, I think the author uses a custom 256 color palette, to better suit the look of his maps. If you err...borrowed the textures from Simplicity, Austerity or anything related, you'll also need to borrow their custom PLAYPAL lump, else they won't look as intended when exported and imported back. Also try to make a raw data extraction instead of saving and loading as images, so the tools won't try to convert an image which is intended for use with a custom palette.

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A clarification, for those that read this post and offer suggestions. CarpetolA intends to make his map for ZDaemon. This will limit his options. For instance, I don't believe that .png format graphics are supported.

And yes, I have tried the modified palette which came with the megawad, but with the same results.

I don't understand why the color palette that was included with the textures in the wad will not work as intended. If they work with the original PWAD, then they ought to work with any other wad in which the palette and textures are inserted.

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ReX said:

A clarification, for those that read this post and offer suggestions. CarpetolA intends to make his map for ZDaemon. This will limit his options. For instance, I don't believe that .png format graphics are supported.


I think it is, it's supported in ZDoom after all, but only in 8-bit color depth. The trick is convincing XWE to open them without performing a color approximation. In fact, Ultimate Simplicity avoided XWE by using a PK3 file, not a WAD.

ReX said:I don't understand why the color palette that was included with the textures in the wad will not work as intended. If they work with the original PWAD, then they ought to work with any other wad in which the palette and textures are inserted. [/B]


Again, it's probably just because of XWE. Try using the pk3 format, too. However if I got it right, that's something you can do only in the final packing of your map, while for testing textures and scripts will have to be in a "traditional" WAD file, with whatever limitations this would impose.

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