Problem with Slade

[Leon]

I opened up slade today and I viewed some of my added textures and found that the colour had gone from them. This hasn't affected them in the game, but I want to add more textures but they come up in black and white. When I went to the GFX colours menu it only provides black and white. What happened and how do I fix it?

[Gez]

SLADE uses a greyscale palette by default. The Doom image formats don't store their own palette.

If you look at the toolbar, you'll see there are two drop-down selectors. One is for the "Base Resource Archive", that is to say, which game you are modding. So, set it to doom2.wad and it'll automatically load the resources from doom2.wad, including the palette.

Alternatively, the second drop-down is for palette selection. SLADE comes built-in with a broad selection of palettes adapted to a number of games. The default choice is "existing/global", which means to use either the palette existing in the current archive or, if there isn't a palette there (and there isn't), use the palette from the base resource archive. You can choose "Doom" here.

You'll only see greyscale if you don't have a palette in your mod, don't have a global resource archive selected, and have set the palette selection to existing/global.

Note that choosing a palette other than existing/global in the palette selector will override the current palette, so you can look at how Doom IWAD graphics look like with a different palette. (Usually, like a mess.)

By the way, you'll see that below the Doom palettes are six variants from various popular mods. You can use them to look how your custom graphics would look like with these different palettes.


Finally, when you convert a graphics from a format to another, you'll notice there are two palette selectors there as well: one for input and one for output. You can use that to convert a sprite from one palette into a different one. Like from Strife to Doom. Of course it's all-around better to convert them to paletted PNG rather than to a format that relies on an external palette, but some ports don't support this.