What's with the recent trend of messing with color palettes in WADs?

[Xfing]

Lots of newer WADs have altered palettes for some reason, which does make for aesthetically interesting levels, but also seems to needlessly affect monsters, palette-swapping them without changing their functionalities. Why has this idea gained so much traction recently?

[Biodegradable]

Because it's fun!

[Shepardus]

1 minute ago, Xfing said:

which does make for aesthetically interesting levels

Well there's your answer.

[Stupid Bunny]

1 minute ago, Biodegradable said:

Because it's fun!

 

This.  It makes the experience feel a bit different.  It allows for a somewhat different range of textures to work.

 

Also I'm not sure how recent a trend this is, I mean I'm not sitting on hard data or anything but I feel like palette-adjusted WADs have come out fairly often for years now.

[Majin]

1 minute ago, Shepardus said:

Well there's your answer.

i think they're wanting to know why it's become a trend, not necessarily why people might do it. i can think of a million things that could make a level more appealing but the use of these things are infrequent between every mapper, it would be an exception if something became fairly consistent among people & that brings curiosity as to how it became a trend. it would be like saying fidget spinners became a fad years ago because it was "fun"--while true (to others), it's not conclusive by itself. there are a billion things that are fun but aren't popular or become trends. 

[baja blast rd.]

It's kind of been a thing for a while. 

 

Also, while there are wads that stake larger parts of their identity on their palette, like Magnolia and Ancient Aliens, in ~90%-ish of wads that replace the palette it's not in the top three of most defining aspects about it aesthetically. It's more of a "support" element. 

 

It's just really easy to notice, often instead of more meaningful parts of identity. So palette discussion, and color use in general, is prone to offhand perceptions of "trends" that are weird to think of as trends, which is kinda like Doom's analogue of pareidolia imo. And sometimes people, imo incorrectly, think of wads primarily in terms of their palettes and color use while not paying proper attention to other stuff. 

 

If you narrow it down to a specific type of palette change, like the sort of heavy remapping of AA, or colormaps that have full-bright colors at all light levels, or palettes that fade one color into a very different color in an atypical way, then it becomes more potentially meaningful, but then those are all on the rarer side. "I notice wads change the palette a lot" is a super broad thing and it's like "oh my god a lot of wads use custom textures, haven't you noticed."

[Thelokk]

Because, from a certain point of view, there isn't much left to explore in Doom's aesthetics without resorting to conversions / modding. Palette swaps are quick way to give the old, tired textures a fresh coat of paint. 

[Bauul]

Also, in case you weren't aware of the technicalities, palette-swapping allows the engine to display greater ranges of certain color spectrums.

 

The original palette has notably low ranges of certain colors, most famously blue. So if you have a wad that includes a lot of blue textures, the default palette will undermine how well that renders. So some map authors will choose to use a palette that more closely reflects the textures they have used in the map.

[Xfing]

I've noticed that most of those WADs indeed target the blues - turning the deep blue of the water texture, the Soul Sphere and the health boosts to a brighter blue. But wouldn't GZDoom work in full color anyhow? I think it's weird to make pinkies and barons gray without changing anything else about them.

[Thelokk]

1 minute ago, Xfing said:

I've noticed that most of those WADs indeed target the blues - turning the deep blue of the water texture, the Soul Sphere and the health boosts to a brighter blue. But wouldn't GZDoom work in full color anyhow? I think it's weird to make pinkies and barons gray without changing anything else about them.

 

Not everyone uses GZDoom. In fact, you'd be surprised how many people wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

[Xfing]

2 minutes ago, Thelokk said:

 

Not everyone uses GZDoom. In fact, you'd be surprised how many people wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

I can dig that, my favorite way to play is Crispy Doom, ditched GZDoom for it pretty much the moment I found out about it haha

But it has so many features that I'd expect it to be able to enrich palettes without sacrificing anything. I don't think I've ever seen something like that done though, most WADs I've seen affect existing assets. 

This is a lot like the situation with the palettes from Descent. The first game had a single one and the second game had a whole six of its own. Being restricted to 256 colors is a reaaaal bitch

[Decay]

Doom is ugly and the original palette has a lot of redundant or underused colours, so why not improve it?

[Shepardus]

12 minutes ago, Xfing said:

I can dig that, my favorite way to play is Crispy Doom, ditched GZDoom for it pretty much the moment I found out about it haha

But it has so many features that I'd expect it to be able to enrich palettes without sacrificing anything. I don't think I've ever seen something like that done though, most WADs I've seen affect existing assets.

Many people don't mind or even enjoy palette-swapped enemies, so they feel no need to go out of their way to ensure the palette swap selectively doesn't apply to them. In the best of cases, you're basically getting free reskins to fit your theme. In the worst of cases, the existing sprites end up being a garbled mess and you have to resprite everything for it to look normal, as in Ancient Aliens.

 

If you're making a map for GZDoom, you can just use truecolor textures for everything without touching the palette at all.

[OpenRift]

Because it can help your WAD feel more visually distinctive. For example, I really dig the color palette used by Syringe and Arrival with its darker reds.

[Redneckerz]

Maybe after years of stock colours some mappers might want to experiment with things. Heck, some people even make ENDOOM's!

 

1 hour ago, Xfing said:

Lots of newer WADs have altered palettes for some reason, which does make for aesthetically interesting levels, but also seems to needlessly affect monsters, palette-swapping them without changing their functionalities. Why has this idea gained so much traction recently?

You already say it yourself, its for different aesthetics. People tend to vary over time with their choices - A completely natural phenonmenon not exclusive to Doom.

 

52 minutes ago, Xfing said:

But wouldn't GZDoom work in full color anyhow? I think it's weird to make pinkies and barons gray without changing anything else about them.

1. Not everyone uses GZDoom
2. It is, as you say, for a different core look. Sometimes spade = spade.

 

[Womp the Cat]

At this point in the year of our lord 2022, Doom is no longer only a game, but also an art scene and a great outlet for creativity. as a person guilty of swopping palettes, there are numerous reasons for doing so, such as finding a distinct look for the mapset, finding my own identity as a mapper, or quite simply because I wanted to. Also, just because I can swop the palettes in doom, doesn't suddenly make me a sprite artist. We do this for fun, I'm not beholden to anyone to learn sprite art because I wanted purple in my doom maps. If it bugs you, don't play em, there's plenty of generic marble green and startan to explore. 

56 minutes ago, Xfing said:

I think it's weird to make pinkies and barons gray without changing anything else about them.

I think it's weird to change the textures of doors with out changing how they function. (you see the slipperiness of this slope?)

[magicsofa]

1 hour ago, Bauul said:

The original palette has notably low ranges of certain colors, most famously blue.

Actually blue is only 8 entries short of the longer color ranges (flesh red and brown), and the bottom end is near-black (unlike the darkest reds). The problem is that it's very saturated and heavy on the dark side, so you are missing those "icy" blue tones which I think was one of the first real popular changes.

 

The shortest and most isolated range is purple, which has both the fewest entries and the smallest difference between the brightest and darkest entry. There are also some other very small sections of browns and greens, but those more or less fit in with other color ranges and seem like just an example of the art process being somewhat disorganized and/or making changes to the palette in the middle of development.

[indigotyrian]

its cool when doom looks different and also its cool when the monsters look different too

also truecolor should just be banned from source ports altogether imo

[Ar_e_en]

Honestly, changing the palette is fine and all, but it's not necessary for making your wad look better.

 

The colormap on the other hand - the vanilla colormap is HORRENDOUS! 

I mean, you could say that it works fine for the game and only looks ugly if you look at the raw table itself, but I'm sorry - it just looks more and more hideous the longer I look at it!

 

Why do the browns briefly turn pink? Why do the early light reds go from red to brown to red again and to brown again? Why do the later light reds turn darker faster then the mid reds? Why do the blues turn white? Why do the pinks and purples go to grays? Why do the dark oranges maintain this one specific color for so long? WHAT THE FUCK IS EVEN HAPPENING WITH THE YELLOWS?! 

 

I've been experimenting with the colormap for so long that I may have gone a bit insane!

[KeaganDunn]

Because the vanilla blues suck.

[CBM]

I find it odd that there arent more sourceports that supports true color textures.

[Arsinikk]

The main Doom palette doesn't have enough purple... I can get more purple shades by tweaking the palette. Nuff said.

[Stupid Bunny]

3 hours ago, Ar_e_en said:

Why do the browns briefly turn pink? Why do the early light reds go from red to brown to red again and to brown again? Why do the later light reds turn darker faster then the mid reds? Why do the blues turn white? Why do the pinks and purples go to grays? Why do the dark oranges maintain this one specific color for so long? WHAT THE FUCK IS EVEN HAPPENING WITH THE YELLOWS?! 

One of the perks (I guess) of being colorblind is that I mostly have no idea what you’re talking about

 

All this talk about the colors of hell knights following their function and I still have no clue what colors hell knights are (they’re green, right? Like the megaspheres)

[Andromeda]

56 minutes ago, Stupid Bunny said:

One of the perks (I guess) of being colorblind is that I mostly have no idea what you’re talking about

 

All this talk about the colors of hell knights following their function and I still have no clue what colors hell knights are (they’re green, right? Like the megaspheres)

Well they're more like beige, but you're correct that they're the same colour as the megaspheres.

[Rykzeon]

Light Cyan to Dark Blue shades are cool

[magicsofa]

3 hours ago, Stupid Bunny said:

All this talk about the colors of hell knights following their function and I still have no clue what colors hell knights are (they’re green, right? Like the megaspheres)

They are light brown, which for red/green blindness is basically the same as green. I have a friend who is r/g blind and I was always fascinated by the difference in perception, I would annoy the piss out of him with questions about what color he thought something was. Basically he learned to guess "green" if things were on the lighter side of brown or "red" if a bit darker. But of course the problem is when something is actually brown, you've been trained to try figuring out if it's red or green, partially due to annoying people like me who think it's really cool and interesting :P

[kwc]

10 hours ago, Xfing said:

I've noticed that most of those WADs indeed target the blues - turning the deep blue of the water texture, the Soul Sphere and the health boosts to a brighter blue. But wouldn't GZDoom work in full color anyhow? I think it's weird to make pinkies and barons gray without changing anything else about them.

I did exactly this with my wad, and got a similar response from MtPain. Black/grey pinkies for seemingly no reason.

The truth is, pink tones were looking weird in certain lighting and it was especially noticeable on pinkies. The real reason for the change was because I didn’t know what I was doing and forgot to add the colormap lump heh.

 

But yeah, better blues are just nicer imo, will probably always use that palette for my Doom stuff.

[Naarok0fkor]

[knifeworld]

12 hours ago, Xfing said:

Lots of newer WADs have altered palettes for some reason, which does make for aesthetically interesting levels, but also seems to needlessly affect monsters, palette-swapping them without changing their functionalities. Why has this idea gained so much traction recently?

Because the original is too limited, especially with the pinks and blues.
Check out Breathless and Stardate 20X6 for palettes that allow for a bigger range of those, there's also NOSP3 that overhauls a lot of the colours and gives the maps a totally different visual vibe.
 

11 hours ago, OpenRift said:

Because it can help your WAD feel more visually distinctive. For example, I really dig the color palette used by Syringe and Arrival with its darker reds.

Exactly this ^ (my emphasis)

[Bauul]

11 hours ago, segfault said:

also truecolor should just be banned from source ports altogether imo

 

That's quite the statement. As someone who just released a mapset that was specifically designed around truecolor, I'm intrigued why you think limiting mappers' options would be a good thing?