Colormaps (and generating them)

[Blastfrog]

I've been considering the possibility of picking Koliko's Adventure back up. I'm completely redoing the graphics though, to refocus on my original goal, and that was to have colorful 16-bit platformer style pixel art.

Anyway, I've been wondering what the best way to manually generate a colormap is, besides just creating a gradient to black. I vaguely remember someone posting a link to a page with some HSV based algorithm that was supposed to be more accurate and in tune with the human eye than plain RGB gradients.

Still, my main focus is keeping the colors generally the same, and not letting them get washed out.

[Maes]

There was an entire thread dedicated to this:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/57786-interesting-feature-that-never-made-it-into-doom/

Read it, it's very informative ;-)

There was even a download of the utilities id wrote and used, but it went down with megaupload.

Fear not, for it's in idgames too.

If you want to see the utilities code used in a real-time Doom application, check out the HiColor branch of MochaDoom, which includes portions of them.

[esselfortium]

Load it as a paletted raw image into Photoshop or the image editor of your choice, and use the pencil tool.

[Blastfrog]

This is what I've come up with:



Anyway, Essel, how did you generate the warping liquid flats in KDiKDiZD? Did you use some utility to do it, and if so, which one? I ask because I want to try the same effect with my own flat.

[PRIMEVAL]

Sodaholic said:

This is what I've come up with:



Anyway, Essel, how did you generate the warping liquid flats in KDiKDiZD? Did you use some utility to do it, and if so, which one? I ask because I want to try the same effect with my own flat.

http://zdoom.org/wiki/ANIMDEFS#Warping_graphics
Slade3 can do this in Animdefs :)

Wait, is it the same warping effect or a different one? Never played KDiKDiZD..

[esselfortium]

Sodaholic said:

This is what I've come up with:



Anyway, Essel, how did you generate the warping liquid flats in KDiKDiZD? Did you use some utility to do it, and if so, which one? I ask because I want to try the same effect with my own flat.

Joe (formerly of Team Eternity) wrote up a custom utility that generated them using ZDoom's flat warping code. Nowadays I use a combination AppleScript & Photoshop Action to do the same thing in a far more customizable way (and which can create seamless animations with however many or few frames as I want).

Also, that colormap probably isn't going to work as well as you're hoping. In many cases, it looks extremely unnatural when colors become significantly more saturated as they darken. This is the reason why Doom's light reds (pinks) just turn to tan instead: even though it's not as smooth a transition, it keeps skin from glowing in the dark.

[Blastfrog]

PRIMEVAL said:

http://zdoom.org/wiki/ANIMDEFS#Warping_graphics
Slade3 can do this in Animdefs :)

Thing is, I'm going to be layering multiple images together, so this wouldn't work. Besides that, Koliko's Adventure is for Boom, so I couldn't even do that if I wanted to.

PRIMEVAL said:

[url]Wait, is it the same warping effect or a different one? Never played KDiKDiZD..

Same effect, but KDiKDiZD is for vanilla Doom, meaning that it had to be done before hand and not realtime.

esselfortium said:

Joe (formerly of Team Eternity) wrote up a custom utility that generated them using ZDoom's flat warping code. Nowadays I use a combination AppleScript & Photoshop Action to do the same thing in a far more customizable way (and which can create seamless animations with however many or few frames as I want).

I have a copy of Photoshop as well. Think I could have a copy of those Photoshop Actions to warp stuff with (or at least Joe's utility)? I'd definitely appreciate it if you did. :)

esselfortium said:

Also, that colormap probably isn't going to work as well as you're hoping. In many cases, it looks extremely unnatural when colors become significantly more saturated as they darken. This is the reason why Doom's light reds (pinks) just turn to tan instead: even though it's not as smooth a transition, it keeps skin from glowing in the dark.

That's true that it does look unnatural, but I don't mind, given the art direction for my project. It's supposed to be cartoony and surreal, so the effect would actually do more good than harm. If I were doing a project with a more serious, less cartoony tone, then I would certainly use a more proper colormap.

[Gez]

Maes said:

There was an entire thread dedicated to this:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/57786-interesting-feature-that-never-made-it-into-doom/

There's an unsolved mystery still in dcolors.c.

/*
=====================
=
= BuildSpecials
=
= Red and gray colormaps
=
=====================
*/

The gray colormap, okay, it's the inverted map used by invulnerability. But the red colormap? What was it ever meant to be?

The Doom alphas (0.2, 0.4, 0.5) do not have special colormaps at all, only 32 light levels. The Press Release Beta has a green and a gray colormap, using the green for light amplification. Afterwards, it's only gray and then a fully black thing because the 34th colormap isn't created but the colormap lump hasn't been resized.

[EarthQuake]

I'd put my money on the berserk. It was added later, right?

[Maes]

^ Not added later, but they decided to reuse one of the "reddened" pain colormaps instead. No idea what their original concept was too...in that other thread I speculated it might be a black & red or all-reds inverted luma palette as in invulnerability, but for whatever reason it was discarded.

[Blastfrog]

Actually, never mind about that utility/PS Action thing, Essel. I managed to find a way to do it myself.

Anyway, here's what I managed to come up with, 60 frames. Took me about 2 and a half hours to make, given how tedious the process was.

[EarthQuake]

Oooh, pretty. But er, do you really need that many frames?

[Blastfrog]

EarthQuake said:

Oooh, pretty. But er, do you really need that many frames?

For it to be as smooth as it is currently, yes. Don't worry though, it only totals up to 240kb.