Solid, one-colour textures

[BeenJammin]

There was no issue making floors so I didn't think there would be an issue making my own solid, one-coloured textures. But when I did, I ran into phantom lines and some of those lines were even dotted with different colours throughout. Does anyone have a set of solid, one-colour textures I may use?

[boris]

Like that: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Tutti-frutti ?

[BeenJammin]

Yes, the tutti-frutti effect is what the lines I spoke of are but that doesn't explain the fix!

[boris]

So you texture is 128 units (or a multiple of that) high?

[BeenJammin]

Well, no; but I've never had this problem before. Only my custom textures do it and no one else's custom textures do it, let alone doom2.wad textures. They can be any height.

[gggmork]

I think that happened to me once. Problem might have been that the color used didn't 'conform' to the doom color pallette or whatever. I might be wrong, and don't know how to conform to that pallette if even necessary (maybe save color pallete as bmp from xwe then import that into your paint program or something). Maybe you accidently used the doom transparency color (light blue-ish I think).

[TomoAlien]

Most of custom textures and Doom IWAD textures meet the 128 units or multiplies of it requirement. So yes, your textures MUST be 128,256 or 512 units tall or else it will all screw up!

[BeenJammin]

Wow, totally overlooked the obvious. Somehow my textures arrived at 64x144. All this time I had assumed it was 64x128 and I was thinking the sector height was gauging me.
DING DING DING DING DING I'm so happy I qualify for a post in the "what's the dumbest thing you ever did in Doom" thread. :)

[esselfortium]

gggmork said:

Maybe you accidently used the doom transparency color (light blue-ish I think).

This doesn't actually exist.

[gggmork]

Oh. Whyn't?

[Gez]

Because this is not how the Doom picture format deals with transparency. You can check the palette.

But to make it short, basically, a transparent pixel is one that is not described at all. All 256 colors of the palette are opaque. "Transparent color" is a crutch used by some (well, most) editing software because they do not handle images like Doom does.

[gggmork]

Seeing how purple isn't well represented for doom, say I get a purple flower google image with lots of subtle pixel shading complexity of various purple shades.. I save that as a texture in xwe. Does it just round all the pixels to the nearest match in the pallette, thus pretty much messing up the flower picture? (i think that's what happened to me once).
So like if you want to make new textures (lamely by using microsoft paint), I guess you can only choose colors that are in that pallette if you want them to look right?
In zdoom hexen format, I remember being able to set the red/green/blue value of a light in a room (like have each value change independently & constantly in a loop).
I remember importing images of big bird from google images and they looked fairly ok in doom though, lol.
It might be interesting to alter the pallette so its ALL a single color like purple, but just lots and lots of shades from light to dark. Or even then use acs to cycle this entire pallette from purple to red to orange etc, slowly while playing for ultra rainbow doom™.

[Gez]

gggmork said:

Seeing how purple isn't well represented for doom, say I get a purple flower google image with lots of subtle pixel shading complexity of various purple shades.. I save that as a texture in xwe. Does it just round all the pixels to the nearest match in the pallette, thus pretty much messing up the flower picture? (i think that's what happened to me once).

Yes.

gggmork said:

So like if you want to make new textures (lamely by using microsoft paint), I guess you can only choose colors that are in that pallette if you want them to look right?

You have two possibilities here:
Either stay within the palette (but remember that you can change the palette; or use a port which can display true-color sprites and textures (e.g., GZDoom). But then you have to use another image format than Doom's native format which is necessarily paletted.

[gggmork]

Heh, on that pallette page, I like how the 'make the number white if the background color is dark, or make the number black if the background color is bright' algorithm kinda messed up on the last couple of pallettes.

[Mr.Rocket]

Yeah as mentioned, pretty much all standard DooM wall texture sizes width x height are 64x128, 128x128, and 256x128. Flats are 64x64. Standard Sky is 256x128.
Sometimes it's fun to make textures with a grid/drawing in them, 16x 32x 64x and 128x. ~ just for kicks or testing, not a necessity. ;)

Now to the question, even though it looks like it's already been answered heh.
Before Xwe was invented, we didn't have anything much better than Wintex, well for the most part anyway, there were others of course.

[Creating and converting to the Doom color palette]
What I had to do was, using my paint program (psp7 in this case), I'd load a DooM texture up in it, and then select Colors>Save palette. I would then save the .pal as the name Doom, the paint program will output the Doom.pal. Once I had my Doom color palette I could then load any image in psp and then load my Doom.pal, which would then convert the image to the Doom color palette.

[Resizing and finalizing]
Now that I had the image in the correct color range, I would resize it to one of the standards above.~ for example 128x128. After that, I would save it as .bmp format. ~ and of course give it a name under 8 characters. Finally the image is completely standard/vanilla Doom friendly and ready to be loaded into my pwad via Wintex without complaint. ;)
It's good practice, even though Xwe will auto convert to the proper palette, I still tend to do things the old fashion way^, as I know this method will always work.