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40oz

Brown.

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Last couple of days I boldly asked myself what the fuck it is that makes brown the ideal color to use in doom. (In addition to many other games) For some reason you can go around recoloring all the textures in doom, but rarely will you be able to find some kind of a pigment that makes a good texture that is other than brown. Good mappers can make a good map using anything but brown textures, however it's very easy to make a good map using strictly brown textures.

Quake is heavily praised for having good textures. Half of them just being old Doom textures modified to look all scratchy, gritty, and muddy. Somehow anything brown can make something simple look very inviting.

I found myself playing Slipgate Project several different times. The maps alone aren't even that good. They're not bad, but they are plain. Rooms will rarely feature more than 5 or 6 sectors at a time. However every room is loaded with a wide variety of brown. Somehow the brown visual aspect adds to it's replayability. I don't know how its done, but it is.

I know a lot of people heckled the shit out of tormentor667 for his lackluster choice in colors. The truth is that he has pretty good mapping talent, but he merges it with the weird magic of brown that can make a shitty map look good.

Come to think of it, if there was a project that recolored all the graphics in doom to brown, including textures, flats, monster sprites, HUD weapons, everything else that's left, (Minus heavily saturated things like fireballs, cacodemons eyes, lights, etc.) overall the end result will probably look much better than before. Actually, the "Darkbase" textures are merely original doom textures made to look old and rusty.

So I spent quite a bit of time pondering why brown is "in". Arguably, I don't think it will ever be out. I think brown is a sort of "lazy" way of creating variety. If you think about it, if you grab a bunch of water color or oil paint, dump em in a bowl and mix em together, you get a dark murky brown mess. So the way I see it, by using distinct saturated colors like WOLF3D for example, you get a lot of agitation due to the dramatic switches in color. When you use brown, you still use all those same colors, but they are much easier to mold together to form an environment that helps people feel comfortable but still impressed. Brown is a happy medium of all pigments, and so when used alone makes less color look like more. Every distinct color can be used with brown, as long as there is brown in between the distinct colors to mold them together.

So long story short, I find use of brown to be the "lazy" method of creating a visual that includes the most colors with the least amount of work. I'm pretty sure I've hit the nail on the head, but tell me what you think.

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In the real world dirt, sand and dust are brown and lights are yellow tinted. That makes us used to brown.

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You did pretty much hit the nail on the head. In art, using muted colours (browns and greys) is the easiest way to show contrast. The more saturated colour becomes, the more colours you have to add to complement one another. If you have the time to do it, no problem, but if you're working on a video game, and you have limited time and space for textures, it's just easier to work with a neutral colour scheme.

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JohnnyRancid said:

I know a lot of people heckled the shit out of tormentor667 for his lackluster choice in colors. The truth is that he has pretty good mapping talent, but he merges it with the weird magic of brown that can make a shitty map look good.

Wait, I thought it was all the hallways...

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I'm not a big fan of brown textures. I'm even less of a fan of brown games. Quake is often criticised for giving the impression that the entire world is brown. The criticism is justified IMO. It was a major detracting factor from Quake for me.

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DOOM II has a good deal of brown texture options. Even the initial sky is brown. DOOM has some, but not that many. If you make brown-themed stuff in DOOM it comes out rather limited.

The add-ons of each game also tend to show the difference.

The id guys must have chosen more brown for DOOM II: Hell on Earth because the browns provide an earthy set of hues.

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I agree, there is a lot of brown. Even in the "hell-based" levels there is mostly brown. Just look at Map30. The slime is brown-colored, the walls are brown-colored.

Maps 26 and 27 is also EXTREMELY BROWN.

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Yeah, Doom 1 as a whole was much more colorful than Doom 2, though some of Doom 2's maps did use a lot of brightly-colored stuff anyway. The weird bright techbasey areas of The Chasm come to mind.

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I prefer the GSTONE green, COMPBLUE blue or ROCKRED1 red. Brown's too cheap. I don't care that "brown means all colours in one...". Doom 1 looks quite nice really. And Quake sure could have been more colourful.

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I HATE all the brown textures. The best parts of Quake featured those rare blue textures. Whatever happened to the rich blue walls of Wolfenstein?

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printz said:

I prefer the GSTONE green, COMPBLUE blue or ROCKRED1 red. Brown's too cheap. I don't care that "brown means all colours in one...". Doom 1 looks quite nice really. And Quake sure could have been more colourful.



someone asked if there's a tax on colors back then. how fitting.

brown makes good textures indeed, provided there's enough detail. it makes things look darker, grittier, which is exactly what doom needs. one can also use shades of gray, olive/dark or pale green, sandy gray/yellow, but what's bright blue or red without looking out of place? i found that bright blue texture from doom odd, bright red would be lava or something glowing hot, but usable only in surreal or deep hell maps.

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jute said:

I HATE all the brown textures. The best parts of Quake featured those rare blue textures. Whatever happened to the rich blue walls of Wolfenstein?


One of my favorite maps in Doom 2 is Map28. It was rich in colors (except for the very beginning of the level, which is lame).

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I think things are more simple. If you want to get the maximum variety in texture kinds with the minimum variation in colour, then brown is the way forward: rock, earth, brick, wood panelling, off-white interiors – instances of each of these kinds can be replicated with a small range of browns. Brown = Variety.

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I agree with pretty much everything said here. I think brown is an awesome color in the first place, as well as being natural (something we're used to seeing) and looking right in almost any situation. But at the same time I like variety, and do get sick of things that are too brown, or all yucky shades of brown with nothing nice in between. One of the reasons I like Suspended in Dusk so much is its tasteful use of brown textures. I believe the same can also be said of grey, though to a slightly lesser degree.

I also like brightly colored maps/areas whether they be compblue/techbase or yellow hellish flesh caverns like map28, or anything that is interesting and immersive, creating a potent atmosphere of its own. I guess the thing with brown is that it automatically looks realistic, due to so many things that it could represent, and the dark tone makes it look shadowy too, lending it even more realism to hide behind, while brighter/cleaner textures have to "try harder" to look realistic or else they just look weird and fake.

I think one of the keys of good mapping is to be skillful yet subtle with the textures, drawing attention to the shape of the rooms rather than the walls themselves. I've realized that many of my favorite maps have rather plain textures, but look deliciously plain (if that makes sense).

For some reason I really, really like the use of brown in one of the areas of Ruma.wad (the part with an indoors computerish keyroom that has an archvile overlooking it). Just felt I had to mention that.

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Brown is the only color range besides Green and Grey that doesn't look like total dookie when used in a room which brightness isn't 128 or 96.

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TBQH I despise brown. but it works. What I would like to see is many varieties of brown and green. humans see Green the best, you know.

(Edit: haha, essel is now a piece of metal. God I hate my title.)

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Borderline depressing. I don't want texturing to limit at choosing shadings of a single colour.

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You don't HAVE to, there are numerous good wads that are brownless. It's just incredibly easy to make a good wad using all brown. I'm experimenting with a wad right now, making my own textures all dark brown, and seeing how easy it will be to turn them into a good map.

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jute said:

I HATE all the brown textures. The best parts of Quake featured those rare blue textures. Whatever happened to the rich blue walls of Wolfenstein?

Well, they're in Map31, but the catch with the colorful textures in Doom/Doom2 is that they start to look like raw sewage at light levels under 192, and I've found myself reverting to browns for scenes that absolutely must be dark because the palette butchering is unacceptable and makes the better-looking textures look worse than the worse-looking textures.

Also, <3 blue Quake textures, but I do think their rarity was part of their appeal, and had the blue/brown ratio been inverted, the browns would have been the breath of fresh air in a too-blue game.

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Good thing there are some ports out there that allow you to be free from the constraints of the palette...

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I'm not a fan of brown, it does look prettyg good in most settings but gets completely overused. I recon that if you got together all great doom wads and then counted all the texturex used over 75% would be brown, its just too much of an easy option. Bring on the grey, thats what I say.

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Enjay said:

Quake is often criticised for giving the impression that the entire world is brown. The criticism is justified IMO. It was a major detracting factor from Quake for me.


IMO the reason why many people feel Quake is "all brown" is not so much the actual in-game textures, but more the rusty brown design of the HUD and the menues.

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Heh, I love drab browns, I find myself never bored of brown. I also like greys and dusty greens... I like the boring colors.

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I've been thinking of experimenting with colors. I was thinking of making a map with black startan textures and red COMPSTA style textures for computer terminals.

I've also never used any of Nick Baker's recolored Red tech textures. I never imagined red being a good tech color but then again I've never seen any maps really use it either.

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Personally I find bright, saturated colors like red to work best as highlights used against more subdued surroundings (grays, tans, browns, khaki-greens, or whatever), rather than as a main theme. Some well-placed bright lights and computers in an otherwise dark-ish area can look really great if you do it right and work out a good color theme.

Though of course that depends quite a bit on exactly *how* bright and saturated it is, and there are plenty of cases when darker/subtler reds, blues, and greens can be used more extensively as part of a map's theme.

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This thread has prompted me to take a glance through all my released maps and see just how many of them are brown, heh. I never really thought about it before, but it's actually it's quite a few.

My most used colour schemes almost always appear to be some combination of either brown or grey as a base colour with red, green or blue to highlight. Sometimes green as a base colour too.

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