The WIP Thread

[Siggi]

Please tell me how this effect works... I think I could really use this

I don't think any current Doom source port can do it. I'm basically just adding a variable to the hue value of each pixel that is rendered. The value slowly increments per render call. I'm also adding a value based on darkness, so when stuff changes in brightness it also changes in colour.

[esselfortium]

Now with a new palette applied! Yummy!

And yes, we're talking about a new palette here:


Boy is it going to be a pain to convert everything to it.

Edit: 76 Textures done, 464 to go..

You've got at least five nearly-identical shades of red in there, a pretty excessive number of light grays, and I also somehow doubt you're going to be needing twice as many shades of magenta/purple as you do of nearly any other color. (Some of the magentas and purples are nearly identical to one another, even.) A bunch of the light tans and light oranges can probably be merged together, too.

And we decided on a new palette simply because doom's palette is ass.

Your replacement seems similarly wasteful.

[Blox]

The magenta I have in plans to do some fancy stuff with, while the purple is just a very pretty color.
Though it'll have to be edited into textures whenever there could be use for it, since there are no purple doom textures. (Due to the whole five colors it has of magenta.)

And while this may not be a very strict palette without any wastes, it does achieve to be fancy.
Though the biggest "ass" thing about doom's palette is that quite a bunch of colors don't nearly have anything near a full range of colors, which we kind of tried to avoid here.

[esselfortium]

I'm not judging your choices of colors, I'm just telling you that you have some extremely wasteful ranges in there. You aren't going to benefit from a bunch of nearly-identical shades of red, for instance: you could merge them into one or two and the difference would be negligible.

[Blox]

Let's just say that everyone has their wrong feelings of conservation.

And here's a very rough demonstration of the colors (because looking at a palette is boring):


Edit: Forgot the ice one. Fixed. And yes, that's a shameless Hexen ripoff. ;p

[Csonicgo]

And while this may not be a very strict palette without any wastes, it does achieve to be fancy.
Though the biggest "ass" thing about doom's palette is that quite a bunch of colors don't nearly have anything near a full range of colors, which we kind of tried to avoid here.

Just from 30 seconds of observation I see several redundant/suffering colors and ranges. I highlighted a few of the ones that suffer from so much "middle" range. I'm sure there are many more I have missed, and a lot more optimization that could be done here, especially on the pink and tan ranges.

see the dark areas I highlighted? there's not so many of those as there are heavy middle-range, which makes for a huge drop-off in color information. You need a lot more dark and a lot less middle and bright.

EDIT: hurr, that's what I get for typing before I make my image. The highlighted dark areas need expansion, the highlighted purples are redundant, and the pastels at the bottom could use some shrinking, too. the Areas to the left of the highlighted red could be made into one color entry altogether.

[Blox]

You may want to check your monitor with those results, because all except the lightest white-magenta and the white-skin ones are actually quite legitimate.

The yellows and greens do need more blacks, as do the blues (which just kind of happened due to lack of tweaking. "Oops". Though it's not as bad of a fix as offsetting the entire god damn colormap.)

The reds were kind of a consequence of my own conservativeness, though the palette will definitely have some more darker shades once we're done. (I <3 shadows.)
Now let's see..

[Amuscaria]

You don't need to to blacken every range of color in order to get adequate shades. Generally speaking, shading with black is bad for artwork as it makes it look very unnatural and throws off the contrast and makes it flat. To shade, painters skew the shadows towards red or green. Assuming we just wanted to use red as the shaded tint, you can darken you yellows or greens simply by shading their darker shades towards red => Shade yellow with brown/orange, shade green with a greyer version of green or brown, blue with grey or purple. Using all tones of pure color makes things look very cartoony. Unless that's your goal. But since you're referring to a doom mod, then I cartoony might be ok. BUt just for a heads up next time you want to maximize your palette.

Another problem I see with your palette, depending on how you save your sprites, is that when you paste them them similar shades of color are going to vanish. From experience, when you paste things from Photoshop into MS paint, anything color that has a RGB value that is less than 8 units different, when two other values are identical, will be treated as the same color. Your reds aren't going to show up when you paste in your sprites. If you don't use MS paint to save your graphics, then it might be ok. I'm not sure if pasting within photoshop itself is going cause color loss.

Finally, you have A LOT of bright values, but not much in the darker range. Normally this is fine, since shadows should show less detail, but you're going to get really patchy looking shadows on your graphics.

[Blox]

I've personally never had any problems with pasting in photoshop (though the grayscale de/conversion it has is very much lossy), but taking care of expanding the darks is on the list.

The whole Fade-To-Black parade is more to keep a vibrant look to it, and fortunately most of the major colors actually change along the way to the highlights/shadows.
Magenta turns night purple, green gets more saturated, and others are kind of intentionally monotone (like red and icy).

[MG_Man]

From experience, when you paste things from Photoshop into MS paint, anything color that has a RGB value that is less than 8 units different, when two other values are identical, will be treated as the same color. Your reds aren't going to show up when you paste in your sprites. If you don't use MS paint to save your graphics, then it might be ok. I'm not sure if pasting within photoshop itself is going cause color loss.

The solution of course is to not use MS Paint

I don't get why you would anyways if you're using Photoshop. Does nobody know about the pencil tool?


Also, taking another opportunity to mention that ZDoom renders HUD/weapon sprites in true color.

[Gez]

Not on Mac or Linux.

[Blox]

Smoothed some stuff:

[esselfortium]

The desaturated pinks (third ramp from the right) are going to look unnatural ingame with that colormap, as the saturation increase in the dark will be very noticeable, especially on monsters. (Try it on a Demon)

This is why Doom's colormap turns abruptly to brown rather than fading into the darker half of the skin-pink range.

[Amuscaria]

I don't get why you would anyways if you're using Photoshop. Does nobody know about the pencil tool?
Also, taking another opportunity to mention that ZDoom renders HUD/weapon sprites in true color.

My tablet isn't very compatible with PS-CS, and the program is way too bloated for just sprite editing. The pencil tool in PS doesn't work like like the one in ms pain with my tablet. I can't just dab to put single pixels down, I have to drag the tablet. Also, it tends to crash when I use the bucket tool for some reason. :/

[Siggi]

Not sure I want to know what ms pain is.