Looking to modify or replace default pallette

[Doom Marine]

 

Doom's default palette has several things that can be improved:

 

1. There are at least 7 redundant colors that can potentially create a new range.

2. There are not enough darker reds (isn't the darkest red only R67?).

3. The reds fade into brown too quickly.

 

I don't know enough about PLAYPAL and COLORMAP editing to modify them properly. I know megawads like BTSX, Valiant, and Sunlust modified them. What I'm looking for:

 

1. More shades of reds.

2. Keep the other colors "Doom"

 

Looking for advice (and help if possible) on modifying the palette, what should I do?

 

Research notes:

Edited April 12, 2019 by Doom Marine

[SaladBadger]

Just as a practical example, user Urthar has created a palette that pretty much meets the goals mentioned in your post, it's available here

[elend]

Since I‘m still quite a newby, may I ask if a palette like this also makes sense when playing in openGL, or is there basically no difference, since you‘d play in 24-bit anyway, thus not having those shading problems?! 

[Urthar]

I'll answer this one here, rather than in the DM2PAL thread.

Quote

The extra colors were gotten from the 7 redundant entries, and no other colors were replaced, correct?

 

No, DM2PAL does fairly extensive changes to the base palette:

 

 

The tools I use to modify palettes are Paint.Net & SLADE. BSTX, Valiant, and Sunlust are all good starting points and worth studying for the different ways they approach the problem. Personally, I referenced the BSTX and the Quake palettes when I was working on DM2PAL. I pretty much lifted the truncated yellow range straight out of BSTX, and Quake does some interesting things with having desaturated ranges of brighter colours that fill out the Colormap nicely.

 

Another palette that might interest you is the one from Way2ManyDeadGuys, which retains more of the base DoomII palette and mainly focuses on fixing the deep reds/pinks/oranges. (The bright reds are ease to fix, it's really the pinks that cause problems. Problem being, if you only fix the reds, then it highlights the problems with the pink range even more. I sometimes suspect id deliberately left out dark reds for that reason.)

 

Other things to be aware of include, Automap Colours which have fixed postions in some Ports, Translation ranges for the bright green swapping which have fixed positions in pretty much all ports. Also, Essel mentioned a very good tip on Discord:

Quote

a useful trick for this sort of palette editing is to make a test wad with all the iwad resources converted to png, so you can load it in zdoom with your palette and immediately see how they remap into your new palette

 

@elend No, this sort of palette is redundant for true colour rendering.

Edited April 14, 2019 by Urthar

[Doom Marine]

Thanks for your input. I'll give the Way2ManyDeadGuys PAL a try.

 

... The PNG isn't playing nice in SLADE, importing it is giving me some unknown format.

Can you tell me what you did to turn the PNG into PLAYPAL?

 

[Urthar]

Select your PLAYPAL (create a new one from the Archive menu if you don't have one already,) and then open the Palette menu, and select the 'Import From' option. PNG is one of the file types you can then select.

 

Edit:(To make the palette functional, remember to use 'Generate Palettes' & 'Generate Colormaps' after you've imported it.)

 

Edited April 15, 2019 by Urthar

[Doom Marine]

@Urthar I tested DM2PAL, samples:

 

The extra reds fills out my title screen nicely here.

 

The extra reds now prevents red details from turning dark grey.

 

Here comes the dealbreaker: the browns aren't as lively, the textures don't pop. Please notice the columns, which have been robbed of contrast.

 

Again, the browns of DM2PAL are not as lively as Doom, and as a result, the textures don't "pop" as they should.

 

I'm aware that the increased range DM2PAL is an optimation, a compromise. The reds and pinks are great, but the degradation of the browns are costly and should be reconsidered if you ever update DM2PAL.

[Kappes Buur]

I find playing with this PLAYPAL gives a good result

PLAYPAL.7z

[Doom Marine]

2 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

I find playing with this PLAYPAL gives a good result

PLAYPAL.7z

I'll try but... Where is it from? What optimization route did it take? Do you have documentation associated with it?

[Kappes Buur]

6 hours ago, Doom Marine said:

I'll try but... Where is it from? What optimization route did it take? Do you have documentation associated with it?

 

It is the D2 palette, just tinted slightly darker.

This is most noticeable in the sprites.

Edited April 15, 2019 by Kappes Buur

[Doom Marine]

@Urthar I tested Way2ManyDeadGuys, samples:

 

The additional reds help

 

Here's less fading to into the grey

 

Browns here are kept more or less intact

 

Minor loss of contrast on the columns, but it's forgivable.

 

Looks like it adds red while keep stuff more or less Doom. Could be a good candidate. I'll have to play around for a few days before trying other palettes.

 

... BTW, I couldn't track down the documentations regarding the Way2ManyDeadGuys palette, would you be able to provide the source, or tell me what they changed beside additional reds?

[Urthar]

W2PAL is the custom palette used in the W2MDG beta. At the time I was experimenting with overbright and fullbright with the Doom colormap.

(I think mainly sacrificed the magentas and light oranges, along with the usual duplicates.)

 

I did a quick edit of DM2PAL and restored the Doom browns, and put the automap colours in the right place.

 

 

Download DVIIPAL here.

Edit:(Updated to include a variety of Boom colormaps for deep water effects & text translation tables for PrBoom+)

 

Edited April 19, 2019 by Urthar

[Doom Marine]

Nice! Looking forward to testing it.

[Doom Marine]

@Urthar Do you generate your COLORMAP with SLADE or something else? Any specific parameters in general?

[Urthar]

For DM3PAL I did a basic cool/warm separation and generated and two different colormaps in Slade, which I then exported and edited together in Paint.Net (This removed some colour bleeding of desaturated green into the brown gradients.)

 

The experimental W2MDG colormap was created in Paint.Net in truecolour and then imported and converted in Slade.

 

This is the full 200% overbright range with 64 steps that Quake might use. In the end I only used 125% overbrightness and scaled it to Doom's 32 steps. You can get some interesting effects with overbrightness, but it's only really compatiable with software renderers.

 

Note:(To convert a png to colormap format in Slade, you need to convert the image twice. Once to Doom Gfx, and save the changes, and then convert a second time to Doom Flat.)

[Doom Marine]

20 minutes ago, Urthar said:

Note:(To convert a png to colormap format in Slade, you need to convert the image twice. Once to Doom Gfx, and save the changes, and then convert a second time to Doom Flat.)

I didn't know about the need to convert it to Doom Flat, then again, I either copy-paste both PLAYPAL and COLORMAP from their source WADs, or let SLADE generate the COLORMAP.

 

In this case, I copy-pasted DM3PAL's PLAYPAL and COLORMAP directly into my WAD without any further modification to those two files.

 

I hope this is isn't skipping any step.

[Urthar]

It's only necessary if you're hand editing the colormap in a paint application. If you're just copying it across from one WAD to another, then it should be fine.

[Doom Marine]

@Urthar DM3PAL:

 

I'm guessing the reds from DM2PAL were unaltered? Still as good as ever.

 

Red advantage still carries over from DM2PAL here.

 

Reinserting the browns back for DM3PAL makes Entryway's start nearly indistinguishable from Doom2's PLAYPAL.

 

Now DM3PAL has a slight advantage in this shot, with the beiges more vibrant as seen on columns.

 

DM3PAL is an improvement over default Doom2's palette, and has what I'm looking for. Unless I see something better, DM3PAL is now DVIIPAL* and you will be credited ^_^

 

*it will be called whatever you specify in the credits.

[Doom Marine]

@Kappes Buur The PLAYPAL 

21 hours ago, Kappes Buur said:

I find playing with this PLAYPAL gives a good result

PLAYPAL.7z

 

15 hours ago, Kappes Buur said:

 

It is the D2 palette, just tinted slightly darker.

This is most noticeable in the sprites.

 

If it literally is the D2 palette but tinted, then there's still 7 redundancies that haven't been capitalized upon.

I gave it a spin nonetheless:

 

 

There's no need for a rigorous comparison because this palette is too stylized, and doesn't meet the requirement of keeping everything everything else "Doom" IMO.

[Urthar]

DVIIPAL sounds great, have fun with it :)