Colored Blood with Palette Support

[Awesomebears]

Hello Doomworld,

I have just created an account in order to eliminate a very big pet peeve of mine, FIXING THE DOOM MONSTERS BLOOD.

Now I know there are plenty of mods out there that can fix the cacodemon and baron / hk blood + lost souls etc, however, they do not accommodate the different palette swaps that many wads out there use. This is largely due to the custom coloring the wads implement.

Here are some examples:
Sunder - Green is shifted to lime green and blue is given a darker tone
FracturedWorlds - Both barons and HKs should bleed a cyan blue, as well as the cacodemon bleeding a lighter blue.
Entropy - HKs and Barons both should bleed yellow
BTSX 1&2 - Blue is shifted, therefore, cacodemons bleed a lighter blue

These are just to name a few, there are many more. I have already been creating my own blood fixes with the cblood.wad or with bloodfixer.wad (See attached)

BUT I AM GETTING SICK AND TIRED OF ALWAYS HAVING TO MANUALLY OPEN UP SLADE AND PLAY A GUESSING GAME WITH THE BLOOD COLOR CODES!!!

So now I am turning to the community in the hopes of finding a solution to this small issue and seeing if there is way to create a blood fix wad that automatically takes into account the different palette swaps that creators implement into their wads. I know this has been done with brutal doom, and I have seen a method implemented into prboom+, (more of a hack really) I am hoping there is way to make this possible for Gzdoom.

Anyone with some coding experience, or at the very least knows more about modding and slade that could help, I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks and all the best!

P.S. IF ANYONE HAS MORE COLOR BLOOD FIXES FOR OTHER WADS, LIKE THE ONES I CREATED, PLEASE POST THEM HERE, I WILL UPDATE THE TOPIC REGULARLY FOR THE COMMUNITY TO USE, HAPPY HUNTING!

 

cblood-FW.7z (Fractured Worlds) - by Me

cblood-Sunder.7z (Sunder) - by Me
cblood-aaliens.7z (Ancient Aliens) - by Lippeth (Compatible with Alienated, and Intergalatic Xenology 1 & 2)
cblood-btsx.7z (Btsx 1 & 2) - by Lippeth
cblood-rudy2.7z (Rowdy Rudy 2) - by Lippeth
cblood-hexen_patch.7z (Hexen) - by Lippeth
cblood-infection.7z (Infection) - by Lippeth
cblood-Disjunction.7z (Disjunction) - by Me


Of course, none of this could be done without the OG cblood.pk3 by Nash.

Edited April 28, 2022 by Awesomebears

[Shepardus]

Use this DeHackEd patch with dsda-doom.

doom_colored_blood.zip

[Awesomebears]

6 hours ago, Shepardus said:

Use this DeHackEd patch with dsda-doom.

doom_colored_blood.zip

I appreciate the effort my bro, thanks! but I was hoping to find a solution for Gzdoom. I just tested it with gzdoom, and the cacodemon blood was very purple(?). I also tried it with Disjunction.wad (cacodemon blood is supposed to be a lighter shade of blue) and unfortunately it did not change and was still purple.

[Lippeth]

As far as cblood is concerned, I probably go the long method by exporting the wad's palette, opening it in Photoshop and copying the color's hex code using a sprite from the wad as reference and adding that code to the appropriate monster in a new cblood zscript file. It usually only takes a few minutes and I like doing it, though I suppose it would be nice to do something like list the palette color's position (1-256) so that it will be the equivalent color no matter the palette. I'm not sure if it even works that way, but that's all I got!

[Nash]

Yeah, this is unfortunately not possible with GZDoom, I would also very much like it but there doesn't seem to be a way, currently. I actually made a thread about it here (with no results): https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?p=1182099#p1182099

[Shepardus]

1 hour ago, Awesomebears said:

I appreciate the effort my bro, thanks! but I was hoping to find a solution for Gzdoom. I just tested it with gzdoom, and the cacodemon blood was very purple(?). I also tried it with Disjunction.wad (cacodemon blood is supposed to be a lighter shade of blue) and unfortunately it did not change and was still purple.

I actually wasn't aware that it would do anything in GZDoom, as this DeHackEd extension actually comes from Eternity, but turns out it got added to GZDoom as part of MBF21 support. I'm not sure why the blue in GZDoom is so purplish, but it may be worth reporting it as a bug (I think the hex value for "blue" in the commit I just linked needs some adjustment). The colors are translated according to the palette in dsda-doom, but unfortunately for you that doesn't seem to be the case in GZDoom.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Shepardus

[Nash]

Unfortunately the way (G)ZDoom does the blood colors is just colorizing the entire sprite to a target RGB shade, rather than do palette index translation. When this feature first existed in ZDoom like almost 20 years ago (?), there was no hardware rendering, no true colors, so there were no problems there. Then hardware rendering and true color came along so the colorized blood just uses true colors.

 

It has also been suggested for an alternate blood colorizing method in GZDoom that does basic translation instead (take color from index xxx of the original sprite and remap it to index yyy).

[Graf Zahl]

1 hour ago, Nash said:

Unfortunately the way (G)ZDoom does the blood colors is just colorizing the entire sprite to a target RGB shade, rather than do palette index translation. When this feature first existed in ZDoom like almost 20 years ago (?), there was no hardware rendering, no true colors, so there were no problems there.

 

Wrong. The feature originated in the hardware renderer before GZDoom's release and was backported to ZDoom 2.0.96x (yes, that community build from long ago.)

Normally RGB would be the better option for blood color - the problems listed here only come into play when mixing mods that make assumptions based on different palettes.

 

You know, there's a reason why GZDoom does not "fix" the blood colors of certain monsters... ;)

 

[Nash]

1 minute ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Wrong. The feature originated in the hardware renderer before GZDoom's release and was backported to ZDoom 2.0.96x (yes, that community build from long ago.)

Normally RGB would be the better option for blood color - the problems listed here only come into play when mixing mods that make assumptions based on different palettes.

 

You know, there's a reason why GZDoom does not "fix" the blood colors of certain monsters... ;)

 

Ah, I stand corrected then. Somehow I remember playing with the feature more with the 96x build, leading me to just misremembering the origin of that feature.

[Awesomebears]

Wow, thanks guys for all the support. I appreciate it. (Seriously didn't think I would get attention from the creator of GZDoom lol)

So just to be clear, due to GZDoom's programming it is very difficult or near impossible to have the colored blood track palette swaps and automatically set them. Big oof.

I think there can be an alternate method here, however, I am not sure I can create this:

Perhaps, someone with some modding and coding experience can create a mod/wad where you can select the type of color you want for selected enemies. Maybe through a menu selection screen with zscript. For example, you can change the color of the crosshair in gzdoom to any preferred color. Perhaps the same can be done for monsters.  

I believe creating a mod like this can solve all the problems, as it will also users to simply select the color they want for, lets say, the cacodemon or baron. This could also eliminate the factor of incompatibility as you would not have to load the mod with other types of gore mods or gameplay mods, as it would be a separate file.

Again, I don't have much modding experience so I may be barking up the wrong tree.

[Graf Zahl]

GZDoom's blood colorization works by specifying an RGB color which is then used to colorize the entire sprite. What could be done is to specify a palette index instead of an explicit color for that and then pick the color from the palette. That would handle some of the issues - but since the colorization is done in true color you still can't guarantee that it gets matched to the proper colors when using the paletted software renderer.

 

[Lippeth]

13 hours ago, Awesomebears said:

P.S. IF ANYONE HAS MORE COLOR BLOOD FIXES FOR OTHER WADS, LIKE THE ONES I CREATED, PLEASE POST THEM HERE, I WILL UPDATE THE FORUM REGULARLY FOR THE COMMUNITY TO USE, HAPPY HUNTING!

These might not be so popular because they also assign green blood to the spectre, sort of like the predator just not nearly as light, not to mention spectres are almost always in slime pits in nearly every wad I play and has always been my head canon and I didn't consider anyone else's tastes when I did these. For each color I used the hex codes of the specific palette colors that are present in monster death sprites. It's not going to be the exact palette colors, but it makes me feel better knowing I at least tried.

 

cblood_doom.pk3 (Doom and Doom 2) This also brightens Chex Quest blood to match the sprites. (Cheers Nash for adding them in the latest update!)

cblood-aaliens.pk3 (Ancient Aliens)

cblood-btsx.pk3 (Back to Saturn X ep 1 and 2)

cblood-rudy2.pk3 (Rowdy Rudy 2)

cblood-hexen_patch.pk3 (Hexen) Korax and Mage bleed green, dragon blood is darker, blood in general is a bit darker. Load after cblood.pk3

 

I have a few more but would need to update them to use hex codes from their respective palette, I didn't start doing that until after a while.

[Awesomebears]

3 hours ago, Lippeth said:

These might not be so popular because they also assign green blood to the spectre, sort of like the predator just not nearly as light, not to mention spectres are almost always in slime pits in nearly every wad I play and has always been my head canon and I didn't consider anyone else's tastes when I did these. For each color I used the hex codes of the specific palette colors that are present in monster death sprites. It's not going to be the exact palette colors, but it makes me feel better knowing I at least tried.

 

cblood_doom.pk3 (Doom and Doom 2) This also brightens Chex Quest blood to match the sprites. (Cheers Nash for adding them in the latest update!)

cblood-aaliens.pk3 (Ancient Aliens)

cblood-btsx.pk3 (Back to Saturn X ep 1 and 2)

cblood-rudy2.pk3 (Rowdy Rudy 2)

cblood-hexen_patch.pk3 (Hexen) Korax and Mage bleed green, dragon blood is darker, blood in general is a bit darker. Load after cblood.pk3

 

I have a few more but would need to update them to use hex codes from their respective palette, I didn't start doing that until after a while.

Thanks Lippeth, Appreciate the effort.

Listen the truth of the matter is, a lot of people are gonna be pissed if they see the spectre bleed green (?), so I readjusted some code with slade to remove that option. Also cblood-doom is not really necessary as cblood by default is good enough. Rudy and hexen are perfect as they can be

Great work! Ill add them to the OG post.
 
Also Im gonna try your method of finding blood coloring that you described in your previous post. Hopefully this will be the way.

[Auron]

Hello there. Ressurecting this thread lol. I've benn playing some wads with custom pallets and made some colored blood patches for gzdoom:

cblood_eviternity.zip (Eviternity) I updated this one by adding the corret color for the cacodemons.

cblood_scientist2023.zip (scientist2023) Colored blood for the Scidemon.

cblood-dbp61.zip  (DBP_61: Tempest Emterprise) Really cool wad, updated blood color for cacos, barons and hellknighs.

cblood_baculus.zip (Baculus) Same as dbp61, cblood for cacos, barons and hk (also darker red for the rest of the monsters).

 

I tried my best to match the pallete colors. Hope thes will be useful.

Edited October 11, 2023 by Auron