glowing eyes in the dark

[Eric Vaughn]

Hey,

I've figured out a way to make enemies have glowing eyes in the dark. The problem is that I don't quite know how to execute it.

I was looking at the COLORMAP.lmp in XWE and was observing the way colors get darker as they go down. Then it occured to me that there must be some way to make specific colors in the PLAYPAL.lmp avoid the darkening effect that rebuilding the colormap undertakes. If I could make a color, or even colors, stay the same color regardless of the amount of light in a room, then all sorts of crazy things could work, like glowing eyes, computer terminals, etc...

I opened up my hex editor to have a go at COLORMAP.lmp but it's way too confusing at the moment to find what I am looking for.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Cheers.

[kristus]

That's quite limited. Since then you will have lots of fullbright dots all over the place.

[printz]

Keep the color you want fullbright at the same brightness on every colormap except invincibility. This has been done in Quake - last 32 colors are fullbright.

[Enjay]

Strife has actors with fullbright pixels already too (Acolyte and Reaver red eyes IIRC). My guess is that they are done by the method suggested.

[kristus]

Yes, but in those cases they made the colormap from scratch. And could set those colors aside and not be used by othre resources.

But if you would make the imp's eyes glow with this method. You would get a lot of glitter in the blood and lava etc textures.

[Eric Vaughn]

Not necessarilly, if you made the color just right, but different, if you know what I mean.

[Enjay]

Regardless of how you do it, kristus is right. The palette entry will have been used somewhere else in the game somewhere - and so will be affected.

[Scuba Steve]

What if you replaced the violet entries?

[Linguica]

I am sure there is at least one color in the Doom palette which is never used in the actual game, considering the Doom palette only has 249 individual colors.

[david_a]

Way back when at the dawn of the source port era, I remember somebody writing a lengthy article about how many colors Doom really had. If my memory was correct, it was Kurt Kesler talking about making a new port (never materialized, obviously). I think he came to the conclusion that Doom only had roughly 200 unique colors - the rest were either unused, exact duplicates, or so close that they might as well be.

I can't find Kurt's homepage, let alone the original article. Does anybody else remember this?

EDIT: Kesler, not Kessler. That would be why I couldn't find his page:) I'm looking through the internet archive to see if I can find the article.

EDIT2: No luck. I think it may have had something to do with the Doom Special FX Shop, an old project from back when we had TC-specific executables. I'm guessing nobody else really cares about this ancient Doom history anyway... ;)

[Linguica]

I remember that article too and I tried to find it to no avail.

[Phobus]

Well, if you were using a source port that supports additive translucency, and are making your own monster, you could have little fullbright projectiles being shot out of the eyes of the monster to make the light effect.

[TheDarkArchon]

Ling: 247 is never used but XWE uses that to represent transparent areas.

[david_a]

Linguica said:

I remember that article too and I tried to find it to no avail.

That's too bad...

He proposed that the engine he would write would rearrange the colors of existing resources as it loaded them to free up those 50 (or whatever number) palette entries. The free entries would then be used to fill in some of the "holes" in the palette so that red doesn't fade to black instantly (for example). It was a neat idea and I've always wanted to see it in action. I've read on the forums where people have lamented the limited nature of the Doom palette and tried to alleviate it somewhat by replacing it, but there's only so much you can do without touching the existing resources.

[Anders]

david_a said:

He proposed that the engine he would write would rearrange the colors of existing resources as it loaded them to free up those 50 (or whatever number) palette entries. The free entries would then be used to fill in some of the "holes" in the palette so that red doesn't fade to black instantly (for example).

There really is no need to muck around with the palette for that nowadays, just use a 32 bit mode instead. It's suprising that so few (if any?) ports do this in software mode.

[Ultraviolet]

Anders said:

There really is no need to muck around with the palette for that nowadays, just use a 32 bit mode instead. It's suprising that so few (if any?) ports do this in software mode.

But they you can't make the eyes glow. :P

[david_a]

Anders said:

There really is no need to muck around with the palette for that nowadays, just use a 32 bit mode instead. It's suprising that so few (if any?) ports do this in software mode.

I can't think of a single current port that allows more than 8bpp in software. DOSDoom did, but EDGE dumped the software renderer entirely. Randy has mentioned the possibility of 32bit support in ZDoom for a while but obviously that hasn't happened...

I don't think there's much hope for either a 32bpp software renderer or this "palette fixing."

[esselfortium]

Anders said:

There really is no need to muck around with the palette for that nowadays, just use a 32 bit mode instead. It's suprising that so few (if any?) ports do this in software mode.

The 8-bit color is a big part of Doom's appearance; the tiling of flats is made much less obvious by the fact that they get muddy as they get farther away from you, so that it actually looks like the flat itself is changing. Same goes with wall textures. This is why I think most OpenGL ports look kind of flat and lifeless.