Which palette is the best? DOOM's, Heretic's, or Hexen's?

[Spleen]

Every time I try to get started on making a partial or total conversion I get stuck on this question. Which game's palette is the best? DOOM's, Heretic's, or Hexen's? Which provides the greatest versatility and the best colors for making mods? What do you guys think?

Or perhaps it is better to snatch a palette from another game altogether like Strife, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, or Quake?

Or even make one from scratch somehow?

How does ID, Raven, etc. even come up with these palettes?

[Creaphis]

There is no "best" palette - the choice of palette depends on what colour themes will be dominant in your game. If a range of colours will be especially prevalent, then it should have more colours in your palette.

There are already many resources made for Doom's palette, which makes that a good palette to stick to when working on a partial or total conversion - unless you're really replacing everything.

There's a version of Doom's palette with dimmer blues and greens that's been floating around, maybe someone will point you to it.

I don't know what tools were used to build/edit palettes. This is something I'd also like to learn more about, actually, and I'm not sure of the purpose of all the colormap-related lumps in the iwads.

If your plan is to make a TC, you could consider making it for a port that supports true-colour PNG's and avoid the problems and limitations of palettes altogether.

[esselfortium]

Yeah, I have kind of wondered how id Software decided, like, "okay, we'll have 15 of these tans, and 12 of those blues, and 10 of that other similar but not quite the same tan/brown range..."

[Graf Zahl]

The best palette is Strife's. :P

[printz]

I think the best palette is from Doom, not other games -- especially NOT Strife -- because you can well import any graphic from other games and lose little (guys like Gez may disagree but you can just use hardware rendering then for full colour). As for Strife, for example, I imported Demon graphics and I had two issues: most of it turned to grey and dull red, and parts of it were fullbright because of the colormap. Take into consideration the colormap as well when making graphics.

The one lost colour when importing into Doom is cyan, which turns into bright green. Just replace it to greyscale before doing the importing. Magenta is also poor. And there's very little light blue. Try to make it dark. At least with these considerations you can do well still. Fortunately cyan and magenta (purple) aren't that usual in action gaming. Most games seem to use lots of brown, grey and hot red or orange. And a plain blue sky.

[EarthQuake]

I would say Doom has the best overall choice of palette colors, but there is a lot wrong with it. Many of the colors are too subtle, with many indexes being the same color or very close. They could have squeezed much more possibility out of the palette by making it more efficient. Unfortunately, because the color indexes in the stock textures are set in stone, you can't really do this without modifying all the textures.

[myk]

I don't think you can consider the palette without associating it to color mapping, since that defines how the game really looks while playing. I prefer DOOM's combination as it allows rich colors yet also gloomier shadows.

I wasn't as familiar with this difference until I tried making DOOM's color map into something more like Heretic's in the way it works, and that wasn't very satisfying even though it gave some advantages. It would also require changing some of the graphics, as EarthQuake noted, because many choices both in the palette and the graphics were made taking the effect of the color mapping in mind.

DOOM's palette is harder to use, but creates a better environment if used with the proper knowledge. You can't just slap any color combinations on any sprite, patch or flat, but you can use certain bright colors as details and not have them look odd in the dark.

This explains why Heretic and Hexen seem to make simpler uses of color than DOOM. Since in the latter colors blend toward gray (or brown), they don't clash when brightness diminishes.

[Maes]

printz said:

The one lost colour when importing into Doom is cyan, which turns into bright green. Just replace it to greyscale before doing the importing. Magenta is also poor. And there's very little light blue. Try to make it dark.

I can confirm that you need to do some pre-processing with certain colours before importing, especially blue, but exactly what tool did you use that turned cyan into bright green? Both XWE and WinTex always treated it as trasparent when I imported graphics for certain projects.

And using e.g. PSP to convert images to the Doom palette using a higher-quality matching method or dithering generally preserves Cyan, but most colors that don't closely match those in the palette get converted only based on their luminance (greyscale).

[printz]

Maes said:

but exactly what tool did you use that turned cyan into bright green? Both XWE and WinTex always treated it as trasparent when I imported graphics for certain projects.

I wasn't specifying "pure" cyan (0-255-255), but any lightness of cyan. The colour translation became so clear when I imported the Hans Grosse pictures into Doom: the guns were like oxidized brass, with linear holes in them.

[Spleen]

Thanks for the replies, everyone! It was really enlightening, but just as I feared, the answer is not clear cut...

Maes said:

And using e.g. PSP to convert images to the Doom palette using a higher-quality matching method or dithering generally preserves Cyan, but most colors that don't closely match those in the palette get converted only based on their luminance (greyscale).

Are there any free utilities out there that can do this just as well (I heard XWE doesnt do as good a job as PSP :P) - for example is there some way to get GIMP to do this? I don't like pirating and I'm not too rich either.

[Enjay]

My guess is that a lot of people still use PSP 7.04, the last version before Jasc software were taken over and PSP became quite a different program. Anyway, there is a "try before you buy" version of 7.04 and, other than a nag screen, I don't think it is limited.

But I suspect that the Gimp can do it pretty well too. I just don't know how to do it.

[Maes]

printz said:

I wasn't specifying "pure" cyan (0-255-255), but any lightness of cyan. The colour translation became so clear when I imported the Hans Grosse pictures into Doom: the guns were like oxidized brass, with linear holes in them.

Spleen said:

Are there any free utilities out there that can do this just as well (I heard XWE doesnt do as good a job as PSP :P) - for example is there some way to get GIMP to do this? I don't like pirating and I'm not too rich either.

Makes sense: any shade of colour including "light cyan" that doesn't have a close counterpart (this includes a lot of violets, certain skin tones, blues, and many light greens/yellow) will get reduced to the closest thing available, which generally happens to be some shade of gray (although I've seen green artifacts myself).

If there is enough demand, I can throw together a freeware tool that automatically reduces images to any specified palette using different algorithms, and includes preemphasis/preconditioning of certain colors.

I'm not sure what parameters PSP, Wintex and DEU use for color reduction (without dithering), but there are several possibilities (minimizing the RGB norm, closest chrominance, etc.)

[Gez]

printz said:
because you can well import any graphic from other games and lose little (guys like Gez may disagree

I'm famous? OH SH-

[LexiMax]

I was always partial to UDM3's color palette.

[Creaphis]

AlexMax said:

I was always partial to UDM3's color palette.

Does it change anything besides the blues?

[EarthQuake]

Greens are yellower.

[Udderdude]

I think the palletes used fit the game's art style. Just try converting sprites from DOOM to Heretic/Hexen and you'll see what I mean.

Also Heretic/Hexen palletes have a different layout, but are so similar they might as well be identical.

[Grimm]

I can tell you with a certainty that Strife's is the worst. Blah.

My vote goes for Doom, but the different palettes do tend to work best with each game's art style...

[esselfortium]

EarthQuake said:

I would say Doom has the best overall choice of palette colors, but there is a lot wrong with it. Many of the colors are too subtle, with many indexes being the same color or very close. They could have squeezed much more possibility out of the palette by making it more efficient. Unfortunately, because the color indexes in the stock textures are set in stone, you can't really do this without modifying all the textures.

If you're doing so for ZDoom or another port that supports using color translations on graphics, you could potentially create a translation from the original palette's color ranges to your new ones, so that iwad graphics would be converted over to it without needing to include copies of any of them in your wad.

I think Doom's palette generally allows for the best compromise between color variety and good looks ingame (as opposed to, say, Hexen's palette which seems to turn graphics into grainy blackness where dark colors are needed). Strife's palette is also really nice, but is much more specialized: they picked a few color ranges and gave each of them enough shades to be able to fade smoothly.