XWE has 2 transparent colors???

[poisonhead]

I've gotten used to using palette index 247 (the cyan color, #00FFFF in HTML terms) as transparent color and guess for the first time I imported an image that has color 251 (#FF00FF) and was surprised that it turned into transparent as well! Please don't tell me to use Slade as I haven't gotten it to run on my ancient computer and I'm (hopefully) nearing the end of building my resource wad and would just like to import a few images with color 251. Can this be done/fixed in XWE or some other program besides Slade? And I'd like to know WHY two transparent colors? Couldn't find anything in quick googling. I attached an image of the colors.

 

Hopefully I haven't got holes in my other images. Got over 30MB of vanilla compatible textures in my wad and only now noticed this.

 

edit: Also noticed that the color in question is missing in XWE's palette remap feature. Is this just XWE stupidity or is there something about the color? (I mean, would the color work in other softs and in vanilla Doom?)

Edited December 23, 2022 by poisonhead

[SMG_Man]

15 hours ago, poisonhead said:

Please don't tell me to use Slade as I haven't gotten it to run on my ancient computer

It still needs to be said for others stumbling on this thread - please for the love of God do not use XWE in the year of our Lord 2022. It is very old, very unstable, and has a lot of problems like mentioned here.

 

15 hours ago, poisonhead said:

I've gotten used to using palette index 247 (the cyan color, #00FFFF in HTML terms) as transparent color

One of many ways in which XWE is just flat out wrong and will fuck things up for you on the conceptual level later on down the line, the doom palette does not contain cyan at all: https://zdoom.org/wiki/Palette

 

15 hours ago, poisonhead said:

And I'd like to know WHY two transparent colors? Couldn't find anything in quick googling.

Unfortunately I can't answer this, but it was something I noticed when I used XWE myself many years ago. The only way around it that I can think of is to open another WAD which already has the graphic(s) properly formatted as-is and copy the lumps/merge it into your main WAD. In other words, you'd probably have to get someone to do it for you with SLADE. Fun!

[Gez]

If anything is a transparent color in Doom, it's palette index 255. It's not technically a transparent color (Doom uses a graphic format that simply skips over transparent pixels, so it can use all 256 colors in the palette) but it was used as a transparent color in the utilities they used to convert their graphics into Doom's format.

 

That's why there are some accidental holes in a few sprites and textures where this color was used. The burning city sky in Doom II is a victim of that.

 

But there are also several sprites that are affected, especially the arachnotron and sometimes other flesh tones:

(Image taken from the Sprite Fix Project thread, though it seems @Revenant100 didn't settle on refilling it with color #255.)

[Quasar]

On 12/24/2022 at 3:25 AM, boris said:

 

Cyan as the replacement for transparency predates XWE by many years. The Doomwiki even has a screenshot from WinTex 4.3 (from 1996) that uses cyan: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/File:WinTex_PWAD_Browser.png

As far as I can tell the tradition started here - https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DOOM_Graphic_Editor

[Edward850]

It's just xwe stupidity. Doom doesn't even have a transparent colour, cyan is just something XWE made up because it didn't support converting images with an actual alpha map, so it used a random colour seemingly not represented in the colour palette which kinda made sense until you change the colour palette.

Using pink I believe comes from Build/duke3d, which is another thing XWE supports and thus how that colour snuck in. The fact that it affects Doom graphics is extra erroneous.

[boris]

2 hours ago, Edward850 said:

cyan is just something XWE made up

 

Cyan as the replacement for transparency predates XWE by many years. The Doomwiki even has a screenshot from WinTex 4.3 (from 1996) that uses cyan: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/File:WinTex_PWAD_Browser.png