Graphics Another take on CGA Doom!

[MugMonster]

I know, this concept's been done before.  Previous takes, such as the one deathz0r has in the idgames archive, were way too dark, presumably because they weren't intended to be seriously playable, which is the main difference I wanted to tackle.  and then there's @NihalRahman123's which looks very aesthetic but isn't intended to be faithful to the 4-color format.  earlier this week while watching a dev stream for The Crimson Diamond, a point-and-click game being made with an EGA palette, I got inspired to finally try this. 

 

you might be thinking turning the entire palette into 4 colors is quick and easy, and maybe it very well would be if you were already very familiar with Doom's palette, but for me this was a lot of trial and error.  I did use Nihal's palette as a base before converting everything, I hope that's alright.  to deal with the previously mentioned issue of being too dark, I made the COLORMAP almost entirely the same as the PLAYPAL on every row, which gets rid of the engine's diminishing lighting; well, except for the last layer, I left that black so that sector effects like the dark room at the end of E1M5 would still work, and of course I had to make the invulnerability layer different. 

 

one thing that isn't completely faithful is the damage indicator/item pickup flashes and rad suit overlay, however, I tried to make them unobtrusive by tinting the damage pink instead of red, and the item pickups and rad suit cyan instead of yellow and green respectively.  also, because of how spectres are affected by layer 6 of the COLORMAP, they were very hard to see, so I put in a dehacked marker that I found in a @plums post to make them visible because I couldnt figure out a way to edit layer 6 that would actually make them look better, no matter what I tried they always looked  the same.  admittedly this is unsatisfying, if anyone knows something more interesting I could do with them, feel free to make a suggestion.  the dehacked is included in the wad, but on the very off chance someone wants to try this in a port that doesnt read internal dehacked files, plums' file is here.

 

but enough blabbing, here's the actual mod!  does it look good?  debatable!!  is it actually playable unlike previous true CGA attempts?  it should be, I think!

screenshots taken from DSDA-Doom in software mode, though OpenGL mode looks almost exactly the same, only difference I noticed is it handles the single layer of black colormap slightly differently

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[plums]

Wow that is super noisy. A nice achievement all the same, especially if you're pretty new to playing with Doom's colours. And it is playable, which was your goal.

I think making a proper, "good-looking" CGA doom would require recolouring all the graphics as well as editing the palette, but that's obviously a lot more work.

You could probably do something with spectres too that way, either by dithering the graphic so every other pixel was transparent (would require a lot of Dehacked work as well since it would be a different sprite than the demon; how much would depend on the feature level you want to target) or by using palette swaps so that they were a different colour.

[Aaron Blain]

GIMP has a dithering filter. One could probably set up a batch processing stack that you could run on all the sprites and textures.

 

Just as an experiment, I cranked up the contrast, applied a dithering filter, then swapped the colors by hand.

 

 

Though I guess ultimately the best results would come from a cga shader that could dynamically render brightness/dithering levels in real time.

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by Aaron Blain

[MugMonster]

made a small change to make to the status bar more legible.  trying to decide if I want to take your advice into consideration to improve the look of things.  my goal wasn't really to make something that looks super professional, I just wanted to see Doom as-is in this 4-color palette without the diminishing lighting making it basically unplayable.  I don't really mind the way the monsters look, messy though they are.  I do think some of the health and ammo pickups might need some examining to make them blend in with the environment less.  if I were to expand the scope to include redrawing everything, I would just do sprites and not textures, and I would probably go with putting a black border around them all as a simple way to distinguish them from the background rather than dithering. 

[Doomenator]

 

[ApprihensivSoul]

I don't know if this is possible in the tactics you used, but I experimented with an idea.

The status bar graphics might need to be custom, but everything else could likely be shader/palette. I used Palette 0 and then dithered the heck outta the image.

 

EDIT:

Bootstrapped this into an actual palette and threw it into Doom Retro. I wonder if this might be the direction you'd want to go, with the third CGA palette as the goal?

 

 

Spoiler

Edited December 23, 2023 by ApprihensivSoul