Doom colors no longer limited?

[gothgirlxx96]

I've been making new textures and sprites for Doom for about a year and a half now. I use photoshop and always made sure to set the correct color palette by going to Image>Mode>Index Color and selecting the Doom color palette which was loaded into photoshop.

A long time ago I experimentally tried not using the Doom color palette just for the heck of it, and of course when the image showed up in the game the colors were muddy and ugly.

But recently while putting in a new sky I accidentally forgot to fix the color palette for Doom format, and was surprised to see bright new colors show up in Doom that I'd never seen before!

I went ahead and started throwing in new textures with all the brightest most varied shades of color I assumed could never show up in Doom, and there they were, in the game, just as sharp and punctual as they appeared in photoshop.

I had no idea this was possible. Did I miss some update or something? I use GZDoom by the way.

Also, is there any "Danger" in uploading a WAD to the internet with colors outside the Doom palette? Will they not work on other peoples' computers or with other ports? (Obviously not danger, just muddy colors on other people's computers)

[Gez]

redcrow said:

But recently while putting in a new sky I accidentally forgot to fix the color palette for Doom format, and was surprised to see bright new colors show up in Doom that I'd never seen before!

[...]

I had no idea this was possible. Did I miss some update or something? I use GZDoom by the way.

Yeah, here's your explanation. GZDoom is not palette-bound. I also suppose your images are in PNG or another such format rather than Doom's native format which is necessarily using the game palette.

For information, if you load it in ZDoom instead, the images will be loaded correctly as well, but the renderer will be forced to use the closest match from the palette, so for example light blue colors will turn into fully desaturated greys. If you load it in a port which only supports Doom's native image formats, then it will entirely fail to load: you'll get ugly nonsensical pixels in the best case, a crash in the worst.

[gothgirlxx96]

OK, so then there IS such a danger in releasing a wad with the forbidden colors. But here is another question:

GZDoom is fairly recent I think, and new ports are made every now and then while old ones die out. I used to use Zdoom and before that some other port I can't remember back when I had XP.

Do you suppose that as the years and decades pass there will no longer be a doom palette really? Like say in five years or so it really won't matter, because everyone will pretty much be using the most recent port which will display all colors possible?

If not then I guess I ought to be careful and make sure to use the doom palette.

[tempun]

redcrow said:

Do you suppose that as the years and decades pass there will no longer be a doom palette really? Like say in five years or so it really won't matter, because everyone will pretty much be using the most recent port which will display all colors possible?

I don't think so. First, there's always Chocolate Doom. Second, no port with the classic software renderer supports true color textures currently, and there's no indication that this will change. Even ZDoom, the go-to "advanced" port, promised it for years and never implemented it. Current Eternity Engine just outright crashes when it encounters a PNG.

[Gez]

redcrow said:

GZDoom is fairly recent I think, and new ports are made every now and then while old ones die out. I used to use Zdoom and before that some other port I can't remember back when I had XP.

GZDoom's first version was released on August 30th, 2005. Not that "fairly recent".

redcrow said:

Do you suppose that as the years and decades pass there will no longer be a doom palette really? Like say in five years or so it really won't matter, because everyone will pretty much be using the most recent port which will display all colors possible?

Some ports aim to add features; others aim to preserve the game unchanged. You shouldn't expect that at some time in the future all ports will be GZDoom because that's just not the design goal of any port that isn't already GZDoom. :p

redcrow said:

If not then I guess I ought to be careful and make sure to use the doom palette.

Or just say your map require GZDoom. Or you can keep the truecolor textures in a separate file and put palette-bound ones in the main file. People who play with GZDoom can load both files together to replace the paletted graphics with the truecolor ones, and everyone is happy.

tempun said:

Second, no port with the classic software renderer supports true color textures currently, and there's no indication that this will change.

You should take a second look at DelphiDoom. It had a new version relatively recently, too.

[Gez]

tempun said:

Current Eternity Engine just outright crashes when it encounters a PNG.

Maybe not for long now...

It might be only to take PNG screenshots, but I wouldn't be too surprised if support for PNG images as sprites, patches or textures get added eventually.

[NiuHaka]

You could always make textures etc. for the Doomsday Engine if you don't care how many people play your wads. Doomsday is every artists dream for things like this.

[Wagi]

Why is it that attempts to add truecolor rendering into Doom's software renderer is so rare? I can partially understand with ZDoom, seeing how there are so many features and quite a few things will probably break if 32-bit rendering is added... but with more conservative ports it can't possibly be that hard. Right?

[NiuHaka]

Wagi said:

Why is it that attempts to add truecolor rendering into Doom's software renderer is so rare? I can partially understand with ZDoom, seeing how there are so many features and quite a few things will probably break if 32-bit rendering is added... but with more conservative ports it can't possibly be that hard. Right?

I'm assuming that its just more work than its worth. I'm also assuming that most people who are concerned with having more colors than the pallet provides would just use one of the source ports with more bling.

[Gez]

Wagi said:

but with more conservative ports it can't possibly be that hard. Right?

The point of a conservative port is to be conservative, I'd say.

Besides, if you truly went for 32-bit rendering, you'd have to sacrifice a few seldom-used but nonetheless existing Boom features, namely TRANMAPs.

[Wagi]

Besides, if you truly went for 32-bit rendering, you'd have to sacrifice a few seldom-used but nonetheless existing Boom features, namely TRANMAPs.

Well, how do GL ports deal with those types of features?

[Gez]

They pretty much don't. Which makes it important to keep PrBoom+ in eight-bit mode, otherwise you'd lose this feature entirely in the most important "Boom standard" port.

[DaniJ]

Just because current GL ports don't really attempt to support things like colormaps, tranmaps and the playpal like the vanilla software render, it doesn't mean that its not possible. I can think of ways to support them all in GL with sufficiently-recent hardware present.

Most of the GL renders in use by DOOM source ports today were actually designed long before things like shaders became available. Its only really GZDoom and the early ZDoomGL betas which make any use of shaders at all (and even then its "only" for things like dynamic lights and screenspace effects like the invulnerability palette).

[NiuHaka]

I don't have any modding experience with anything other than Doomsday Engine but with the Doomsday Engine you can create pk3 files that will load your wads with textures that contain the entire RGB spectrum. I don't know, you could always try that... But I said that already so now i'm repeating myself.