Am i the only one who finds Doom's palette extremely appealing?

[MattFright]

Nerdy talk: I've noticed that whenever Doom's color palette is brought up, i only really see people talking about how it's too limited in places or that some other palette is much better to work with (heretic is one i've seen talked about in this way, since it's got a more balanced distribution of colors). Now, i've always LOVED Doom's color palette, and in fact i've even been limiting myself to it in UMDF without the need to because i feel like it's what makes a map look like Doom, and gives the whole thing much more visual coherency in comparison to other ZDoom family maps (or even just GLBoom maps) that use unrestricted color palettes, which may even look good but have a very clear clash of styles when using paletted sprites/textures with others not limited to that (with very few unnoticeable exceptions). I also feel like a big part why Doom is still so visually appealing among so many FPSs that have visually aged much better has to do with how unique its color palette is to this very day in comparison to other stand-out shooters of the time or even recent ones.

 

Now here's where my question comes in: How do YOU feel about Doom's color palette? Do you disagree with me in any of these points? If so, which ones? Do you mind it when maps don't work with any palette limitations? I'm really curious to know what you guys think.

[seed]

I like Doom's palette as-is, although for a while now I've been wanting brighter/crystal like blues and more vibrant greens.

 

Thankfully Reaper fixed that for me :p.

[Kore]

I prefer playing with the palette on, but I don't think it's perfect. It can be moody but it also can be very ugly. I particularly dislike how dark red turns into brownish green. It's very noticeable on blood. Speaking of that, I think the colormap is just as important as the palette, but I don't think most people bother messing with those. I'd love to see more palette mods.

[Alper002]

I'm not too focused on doom's color palette so much as I am in love with the way the colors fade into darkness in software, reds/pinks turning brown included! When there's more colors around then it could maybe seem out of place, but if we're simply talking palette replacements I'm less likely to be bothered in that particular way.

[Doomkid]

UDM3.wad blew me away with it's custom palette way back when. Seeing actual turquoise in a Doom wad was a jaw-dropping thing (probably sounds silly to newschool users). With that said, I think Doom has the perfect selection of colors for what it is. I really love how it uses such a deep royal blue in particular. Blue rooms always made otherwise drap maps pop.

[Tango]

I really agree that sticking to a palette brings a lot of visual cohesion that is absent otherwise! I don't love the color choices in Doom's default palette, but the bigger issue for me is that 256 colors feels a little limited, especially if you're dealing with software rendering and color banding with the colormap and all that. I'd really, really love to have a renderer that's performant like GL but allowed me to use an arbitrarily sized PLAYPAL lump, with the ability to make and use my own colormap too. unfortunately I think the best I can do there is just using an arbitrarily-sized palette in my image editing programs and importing them as PNGs in slade :(

[Stupid Bunny]

I'm colorblind so all the browns and greens and pinks and reds and stuff all kinda blur together at certain points.  I guess the good news is that I could've died never knowing that blood looks brownish green or whatever at low light.  

[Pixel Fiend]

The blue is ugly, I doubt anyone's gonna differ on that. There's a lot of brown color that's quite appealing but you get weary of it after some playing. The limited color palette is an extraordinary thing and it contributes to how ageless Doom is. I think at some point I might try and make an edit that only changes the blue for playing Doom 2 campaign.

[MattFright]

5 hours ago, <<Rewind said:

The blue is ugly, I doubt anyone's gonna differ on that.

 

I find the blue absolutely gorgeous when played to its strengths. It's a beautiful choice for maps with more abstract visual styles or to just bring some significant contrast since it's one of the most vibrant colors in the palette. Best uses that come to mind right now are Skillsaw's Lunatic with the big, glowing blue Earth in the sky, and more recently Antares' Beluga Sanctuary (as well as many of his other maps) in general. I don't think anyone would dispute that these look great, and if i tried looking for more i'm sure i wouldn't find any shortage of them 

 

Spoiler

 

[Redneckerz]

I never had any issues with Doom's pal. In fact, i wish it was taken advantage of more in terms of lighting.

 

Its a prima donna palette as is.

 

19 minutes ago, MattFright said:

 

I find the blue absolutely gorgeous when played to its strengths. It's a beautiful choice for maps with more abstract visual styles or to just bring some significant contrast since it's one of the most vibrant colors in the palette. Best uses that come to mind right now are Skillsaw's Lunatic with the big, glowing blue Earth in the sky, and more recently Antares' Beluga Sanctuary (as well as many of his other maps) in general. I don't think anyone would dispute that these look great, and if i tried looking for more i'm sure i wouldn't find any shortage of them 

 

  Hide contents

 

YES. This is just great usage of stock resources. Careful shading is an important aspect, i feel.

[Kute]

Doom is a great looking game but I am a little sick of Plutonia-Brown.

[Serum]

It's pretty sexy. Just like Blood

[Fuzzball]

Doom palette is fucking ugly, too many blues, duplicates, horrible saturated to black ramps, not enough purples and where the fuck are all the dark reds and greys? Nah- making stuff for it is a complete pain in the ass

[Stupid Bunny]

15 hours ago, <<Rewind said:

The blue is ugly, I doubt anyone's gonna differ on that.

 

21 hours ago, Doomkid said:

I really love how it uses such a deep royal blue in particular. Blue rooms always made otherwise drap maps pop.

 

lol

 

I also like the blue honestly, probably because due to aforementioned colorblindness it is one of the few color ranges that really sticks out to me.  The purple range is really paltry though, that is absolutely true and was a real pain during my aborted effort to make a Commander Keen megawad.

[Megalyth]

I particularly like the deep greens and blues of the nukage and water flats.

[0o0[ULTIM4TE]L1FE[F0RM]0o0]

I personally haven't created any custom textures for Doom or something, however I always thought the way the red colors turn into a weird brownish color is part of the atmosphere of Doom, I can't really describe it, but it has such a weird effect on me. I just really like it for some reason. And yeah, the deep greens and the water is pretty awesome, I have to agree with that!

[DOEL]

I like the palette as is but I also like when it's tweaked for certain WADs like in Stardate 20X6. I forget which WAD does it but there's one where the blues are, I don't know, "richer" and you can really see it with cacodemons and shooting the plasma gun.

[Boy]

I think the palette is pretty good. I think it can get a little boring if you're just sitting there and staring at some walls, but I also think it being made up of a lot of muted colors and earth tones allow the monsters to pop out more. Which obviously is good for keeping track of what's going on in a fight lol.

[0o0[ULTIM4TE]L1FE[F0RM]0o0]

1 hour ago, Boy said:

I think the palette is pretty good. I think it can get a little boring if you're just sitting there and staring at some walls, but I also think it being made up of a lot of muted colors and earth tones allow the monsters to pop out more. Which obviously is good for keeping track of what's going on in a fight lol.

 

Yeah, that's what I noticed too, you just see the enemies first and therefore the gameplay is generally very "clearn" and it gives you a lot of oversight because every wall looks so utterly different from the enemies, except from maybe the meat walls or something.

[eltiolavara9]

i love doom's ultra-saturated blue, but i think that might have to do with the monitor? on my laptop it looks kinda gross

also depends on how you use it

i do agree with other people here though theres no purple and id also like to add that the magenta in dooms pallete looks really bad, i'm not sure what the original game even uses it for

[eltiolavara9]

On 1/29/2021 at 10:30 PM, Alper002 said:

I'm not too focused on doom's color palette so much as I am in love with the way the colors fade into darkness in software, reds/pinks turning brown included! When there's more colors around then it could maybe seem out of place, but if we're simply talking palette replacements I'm less likely to be bothered in that particular way.

colors fading into other colors in software makes maps feel way different  

[purist]

I thought it was fine before I saw vanilla replacement palettes and realised they could have done a lot better within their limitations.

[roadworx]

other than the fact that there's way too much brown, i've always been fond of doom's color palette, blue included. it's like...iconic in a way

[Kute]

3 hours ago, purist said:

I thought it was fine before I saw vanilla replacement palettes and realised they could have done a lot better within their limitations.

 

I've wondered about this stuff a few times. Doom was an INCREDIBLE looking game, but they could have did some more variety back then. Maybe memory was a real issue? I remember my uncle installing it when I was 7 or 8, and it was on a bunch of floppies. Maybe more textures and colors etc. would have made the game take up like 30 floppies, hell, IDK.

 

Or maybe we're forgetting just how hard this game was on computers in the early 90's? Not everyone had a pentium 75 and 8 MB of ram. Hell not everyone even had a 386.

[Argent Agent]

In recent times, I have found the original palette to be extremely limiting; the lack of golds, aquas/turquoises, and violets has forced me to make tweak/edit palettes, while condensing ranges that already have plenty of shades/tints to work with and eliminating redundancies. Some of the colors in the palette seem to be an afterthought as well and makes tweaking palettes a bit trickier.

[purist]

3 hours ago, Kute said:

 

I've wondered about this stuff a few times. Doom was an INCREDIBLE looking game, but they could have did some more variety back then. Maybe memory was a real issue? I remember my uncle installing it when I was 7 or 8, and it was on a bunch of floppies. Maybe more textures and colors etc. would have made the game take up like 30 floppies, hell, IDK.

 

Or maybe we're forgetting just how hard this game was on computers in the early 90's? Not everyone had a pentium 75 and 8 MB of ram. Hell not everyone even had a 386.

 

Well my original thought was that it was good for what I had assumed was the limitations on colour but since people have made more efficient use of the number of colours available in the vanilla pallete that apparently was not that the case.

[Wagi]

On 1/30/2021 at 12:58 AM, <<Rewind said:

The blue is ugly, I doubt anyone's gonna differ on that.

 

Hard disagree. The deep vivid blues are downright iconic. Can you imagine the start of E1M1 if the carpet was that drab, faded blue that a lot of PWADs like to have? Yuck.

 

I think the biggest problems with the Doom color palette is that the red doesn't roll off to black quickly enough, meaning that the COLORMAP has to fade red to brown when it gets dark (same with the pink range). Heretic did a much better job of preventing color artifacts with their palette, seemingly by restricting what colors a particular range is allowed to fade to. I'd be really curious how the tool that generated their COLORMAP worked compared to Doom's.