Tantalizing Palette Problems...

[Joe Capricorn]

Okay, so I am working on this mod and I need Cyan to be one of the colors in the Doom Palette. That should not be so hard, should it?

Well, it is. And I have absolutely no clue WHY it is not working.

And I'm sure it'll be something easy and obvious or something...

But anyway.

First, PLAYPAL...

Using XWE, I managed to not only add a nice Cyan gradient in place of an orange-brown color that will not be used in this mod (Since it's actually based off of a 16 color palette) I also changed the damage-effect color to purple instead of red.

Then, COLORMAP...

After venting my frustrations at the ZDOOM forum, someone sent me a nifty utility that let me add a COLORMAP to my WAD based off of PLAYPAL. It worked the first time. But it doesn't work anymore, for some reason... Hmm.

However, I was able to alter the COLORMAP using XWE. Everything looks like it should work.

And finally... DOOMBUILDER.

The 3D editor shows CYAN in the floors and walls where there should be CYAN, and all other colors are the way they should be.

Here is the problem.

I cannot get those colors to show up in actual gameplay!

Instead of Cyan, it is the original colors that are showing up. Typing idbeholds still shows RED as the damage color.

What am I not doing, what am I doing wrong?

How do I get CYAN to show up correctly in Doom? Specifically GZDOOM?

[Graf Zahl]

Joe Capricorn said:

I cannot get those colors to show up in actual gameplay!
Instead of Cyan, it is the original colors that are showing up.

That's hard to tell without seeing the WAD. Obviously you are doing something wrong but guessing won't help.

Typing idbeholds still shows RED as the damage color.

That's because ZDoom and derivates don't use the PLAYPAL to set damage or pickup colors. ZDoom creates the altered palettes on the fly in order to mix different effects and allow custom colors for powerup effects. However, the red pain/berserk color is not customizable right now. It will always be red.

[Creaphis]

Does it work if you try replacing that brown-orange colour with some other colour? Cyan could be a special case with its own problems. I know that XWE converts cyan to colour #247 (the shade of black that represents transparent parts of textures) when you import bitmaps.

[Joe Capricorn]

Actually, I PMed Graf Zahl the WAD and he told me what the problem was. I just never got around to posting here about it...

I had COLORMAP and PLAYPAL between FFEND and FFSTART markers... moving them outside fixed everything. Simple as that.

I ran into another problem with the cyan flats being scrambled, but that was because I kept forgetting to save them as a "Doom flat". As soon as I did that, everything looked fine.

I then was able to easily fine tune the palette, making the green a bit greener, the blue a bit bluer, the red a bit lighter, etc...

The reason is because this I hope will become a multi-wad series centered around a timeless classic from the early 90s.

[Stupid Bunny]

Ah, yes, I've seen screenshots for it! I subscribe to that forum under a different name (KeegTech.) It's coming along nicely, and I see you've gotten the cyan thingie to work.

Good luck! :)