XWE: Removing blue bits

[Acid]

Before people say anything, I'd like to mention two things first:

1) I didn't post this in the XWE forum because I figured that this is where I'd get my answer faster :)
2) Don't tell me to switch to Slade. I use it occasionally, but this question pertains specifically to XWE.

What is the fastest way to get rid of this crap?



I just finished individually cropping out over 30 frames, and I left these in by accident in Photoshop. However, since the extremely slight variation of pure cyan is not recognized in the Doom palette, XWE auto converts is to this ugly stuff. Besides deleting the pixels one by one, is there a faster means of doing this?

[EarthQuake]

Best would be to not antialias the edges of source graphic you are importing. But if you already have it in your wad, you can go to color remap, and look at all the indexes that are that blue color and remap (double click on each one) and set to 247. Then apply it to each graphic with the blue junk. You only need to remap the colors once, but you need to apply it to each sprite (or patch, or whatever). Note that if your images intentionally use blues from that range, they'll be affected as well.

Note that index 247 is not transparent, but XWE treats it this way.

[Acid]

Ah, so 247 is the magic number. Thanks for the tip EarthQuake

[Gez]

Index 247 is black (#000000) in the original Doom palette. Index 0 is also pure black, so that makes index 247 redundant, which is why certain old fashioned programs decided to use it as a transparent color. Then they made it cyan (or magenta for old versions of DeuTex) because it contrasts well with the rest of the colors.

This causes a lot of problems because index 247 is actually used in a few graphics in Doom2.wad, and a ton of graphics in other Doom engine games (Heretic, Hexen, etc.) and dumb programs like XWE or SLumpEd put holes in these graphics when they extract them.

Note that Id Software used a transparent index for importing graphics too, but that was color index 255. This can be seen in the Doom II city sky where two pixels that should be of that color are, instead, holes in the picture. Oops.


PS: In SLADE 3, you could have created a temporary palette based on Doom's, changed an index to actually be cyan, then converted the graphics (without giving them transparency) to a paletted format to force the "near-cyan" colors into actual cyan, converted them again but this time by turning cyan into transparency, and deleted the temporary palette. :p

[Acid]

Thanks for the info Gez. I guess the "dumb" program XWE worked out 247 as a good thing for me though :P

On a separate note for XWE: Is there anyway to add pixels instead of just deleting them>