1. Selective translucency. This is something similar to what Legacy used to have (and maybe still does). The old DOS Legacy of about 7 years ago had special palettes or colormaps or something that displayed the torches in a special way - the flames were translucent but the stands were opaque. These special palettes could be applied to any object using dehacked.
What I suggest is being able to specify a range of colours from the palette (like you already do with translations) and then being able to specify the type of translucency to be applied to them. That way, not only could you have torches with translucent flames, but monsters with translucent areas, glass tanks with solid frames...
2. Selective all-bright. Something like this used to exist in Quake1 (I think). Certain pixels were always drawn fullbright. It was a small range of red colours towards the end of the palette IIRC. If you used these on a monster skin (I used them for lights on a gun) the monster could be standing in the dark and all you could see were the bright pixels.
What I suggest is again being able to specify a range of colours from the palette and instructing them to always be drawn at full brightness. That way you could have demons with glowing eyes, lights on things, torches where only the flames glow, glowing green NV Goggles without having to make the rest of the sprite black/near black (as in Action Doom)...
And finally, more a question than a suggestion, is there any reason why full bright sprites cannot always be drawn in their original colours? It just strikes me as odd that when a bright, glowing orange ball of fire passes through a room that just happens to have a blue light on, the fireball turns blue whilst it is passing through the room. Surely the fireball is a light source and should glow its own colour regardless of the surroundings?
38
