Colormap reguest

[Medis]

Hello,

There is a lot of threads in zdoom / doomworld forums related to colormaps.
They are all fixing one sorta bad made doom colormap.

I tried every single one of them.
And there are two victorious.

1) Contrast3.wad also known as PalPlus
+ Fixes completly blending in darkness and overall improves visibility on today's LCDs

- Colors are gone (which is not so bad, but could they be back?)

2) BTSX ... The team after this. did awesome super-job while they designed their own pallete...
It fixes all duplicated doom colors and merges same ones...

And now what I'd love to do or have but after decades i never managed or figured out to do this.... is a colormap that sorta merges those.

A colormap that :
- Fixes blending like contrast3.wad does while no saturation incrases in darkness. While colours that are lack of dark shades get GREY (yes grey, not brown... because thats what u will naturally see in dark... no colors, no brown, but grey!)

- Frees colors like BTSX.
But for 3 options
1) even more wider grayscale for improved visibility,
2) extra color tone (lets say new purple hue)
3) or extended other tones so they better blend

Is there someone who has any tiny idea how to generate those? Because heck i would do i have no idea what for such guy.

[Urthar]

Here you go, something I was playing around with recently.



The last colour should be left unused for ZDoom, so replace it with cyan when you convert your graphics, and then put the original dark red back in afterwards so it gets used in the colormap but otherwise remains free.



Grays and oranges are trunicated and altered, and 8 greenish-browns are darkened and desaturated. A bit of the BSTX red browns extend the fire range, and some adjusted Quake maroons are added.

I haven't tested this palette yet, so I imagine there'll be some degradation of various flats and textures.

[Medis]

Looks super cool, thanks, couldn't test though (slade somehow hates importing palletes, so if u can post WAD later it would be nice), anyway this doesn't seem to be vannila compatible? And I am pretty sure the last colour is used in doom2 titlepic... It's like a dance between eggs... BTSX used duplicated colours but patched all actors that were using it. The Contrast3 used all colours that could be used without graphic patching...

[Urthar]

Uploaded the palette in a WAD file:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/4e87modcf5r07ue/PALTEST.wad

You would have to convert the entire set of DOOM graphics like BTSX. I haven't tested it yet myself, but it was designed with vanilla graphics in mind so it should make a reasonable job of it.

At the end of the day, you can only tweak an 8bit palette so much. There's always going to be trade offs.

[Urthar]

I don't want to get too distracted by this, but did a bit of testing and made a better version. Here's a WAD with converted vanilla graphics included:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/w22c6pvqqf7vwvv/PALSWAP.zip

You should be able to drag it straight onto the Source Port of your choice. It still needs a bit of attention in the grays and yellows, and there's still a touch of colour bleeding that I'm not entirely satisfied with, but it does a good job of making Pinkys stay pink.

[Medis]

Now that is mastermind's work!
Super-cool! You really managed to get pinky remain still pink in darkness (wow).

It's just I *though* that making it gray-scale would be easier due wider amount of shades => every color would get grey and there would be no detail loss (except color which human doesnt see in darkness anyway)... so you wouldn't have to use the desaturated pinky's but its still best solution i've seen so far.



See the purple line in half on floor? Not fault but it happens on everything causing slideshow of whole colormap... So I though gray shades would get rid of this completely.. is it good or bad idea?

[scifista42]

PLAYPAL and COLORMAP are 2 different things. PLAYPAL defines which colors are available, and COLORMAP defines how colors fade into darkness. It's possible to replace a COLORMAP without replacing a PLAYPAL, and vice versa, but your "colormap request" seems to be actually a request for both PLAYPAL + COLORMAP. Urthar made you a PLAYPAL manually, and presumably used SLADE3 to auto-generate a COLORMAP to match that PLAYPAL, but the COLORMAP could also be manually edited to improve the color's fading, without a need to modify the PLAYPAL at all.

[Medis]

Original paypal is very bad, it contains many duplicated/same or very similiar colors. So patching is in place, generated colormaps like slade3 can are somewhat bad and unaccurate. So what Urthar made is awesome piece of work.