Free-to-use improved vanilla COLORMAP?

[Tango]

I've tried looking around a bit for an improved version of the vanilla COLORMAP lump (mainly to improve the fading of the pink ranges near the start of the palette), but I'm having trouble finding something that's free to use. DM2PAL looks great, but unfortunately relies on a modified palette. BTSX fixes the pink range specifically, but I don't want to rip that pieces out of the COLORMAP there because resource re-use isn't permitted for BTSX stuff right now. anyone know of a tuned up vanilla-palette COLORMAP out there that's free to be used?

[garbaged]

Perhaps this? https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/16492-palplus/

 

 

[esselfortium]

Unfortunately it's not really possible to improve the fading of that pink range without also modifying the palette so that you have more suitable colors for them to fade down to. That pink range becomes very saturated in its darker half, so the options are basically to either turn to brown/beige like in the vanilla colormap, or to fade from a mild fleshy pink to a super saturated glowing red in dim areas, which looks pretty odd and unintended.

[Linguica]

You can use one of these I guess https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/74663-alternate-colormap-falloffs/

[Redneckerz]

In relation to this (Which does not really warrant its own thread): It is possible to gain vanilla colored lighting with a modified COLORMAP. See the picture below:

 

 

However, there is not much information available on doing this, beyond Mixmaps and perhaps Inkfoundry noted as tools. Mixmaps is however DOS only and Inkfoundry is not in a compiled state (I ended up with a compiled exe but the size was insane). The effect is also difficult to achieve.

 

I was however wondering if there is anymore information regarding this. So questions:

• Are there other WADS making use of this effect?
• Are there other tools to achieve a mixed tint COLORMAP (AFAIK Slade3 can generate COLORMAPS, but not mixed-tint)?
• Is there more information in general available to this? I am already aware of Fogger that can generate colormaps. Also note that ive already found this.

 

[Tango]

@waveplay I didn't realize PalPlus had its own colormap! awesome, I'll take a look at this, thanks so much!

@esselfortium ah, it's been a while since I looked at the BTSX palette but I didn't realize the nicer fades on the pinks that you did was the result of the palette changes. no worries, thanks for the info!

@Linguica some of those look great, definitely worth a whirl. thanks so much :D

 

[garbaged]

Sometimes you have to use something like XWE or SLADE to actually extract the COLORMAP and PLAYPAL and then put them into your wad.  Wads like BTSX, Congestion 1024 1&2, MKBLUHELL, Sunder...etc, have "custom colors" that have to be manually extracted this way, assuming you have technical permission to do so. 

[Aurelius]

@Redneckerz I was introduced to this quite recently actually. I believe the effect is achieved by taking the top row of the COLORMAP (the fullbright of each of color range) and colorizing it to the desired colored lighting. This way, you can use the highest light level for areas you want the colored lighting to be in. Any sector with a light level below fullbright would never be rendered at that light level, so the effect would not bleed into undesired sectors. Using any other horizontal row would obviously not work, so you'd basically only have that one color. It would however not be much of a degradation since people rarely use the highest light level, or at least could easily just use the second highest increment of 8 for those brightest sectors. Of course, actions that change the light level to 255 (or the light amplification goggles) wouldn't be very desirable unless the express point was to turn colored lighting on or off. EDIT: Thanks to @Scypek2 for pointing out that, in fact, the bleeding is extremely invasive even on low light levels, rendering the entire method practically useless without extensive tweaking.

COLORMAP can be edited with any image editing software, so adding that colorized line would be simple in GIMP, Photoshop or Paint.net, for example. When importing it back to Slade3, it can be converted into a FLAT with the name COLORMAP, which will automatically turn it into the desired format.
 

@Tango Basically what esselfortium said, the original palette just lacks proper colors to fade pinks into darkness without amping up the saturation, which goes against the fact that things tend to "desaturate" when light level is dropped. Sunlust has a very good modification to this pink range as well, making monsters such as pinkies and barons fade much better into darkness.

Edited January 29, 2020 by Aurelius

[Urthar]

As Aurelius said, something like Sunlust is probably your best bet.

I had a quick go and managed this, which fades out reasonably well.

[Scypek2]

5 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Any sector with a light level below fullbright would never be rendered at that light level, so the effect would not bleed into undesired sectors.

 

That doesn't seem right at all. I just tried this, and even with light level 144, almost halfway down from 255, the color can still bleed through thanks to gun flashes and fake contrast. And of course it gets even worse with higher light levels.

[Aurelius]

@Scypek2 You're right. Had a run myself and the bleeding is pretty bad apparently (if only I had actually tested it before posting :P). I thought about it only on a theoretical level, and didn't take into account all the other things such as fake contrast and gun flashes that mess up the otherwise linear fade, not to mention gun flash sprites (and other fullbrights). Thanks for pointing it out, I edited my original post to guide people away from my misinformation.

One could then argue it's quite sensible why it's not discussed much further, since the bleeding effect is so strong even on lower light levels that it's effectively useless as colored lighting.

Edited January 29, 2020 by Aurelius

[Gez]

16 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

Are there other tools to achieve a mixed tint COLORMAP (AFAIK Slade3 can generate COLORMAPS, but not mixed-tint)?

SLADE doesn't have COLORMAP tweaking tools at the moment, but it does allow you to edit COLORMAPs as graphics, so you can technically use the pixel pushing tools.

 

Or open in a dedicated image editor.

[SilverMiner]

I think BTSX has the best palette and the colormap setup. I think it will be ok if you use them.

 

Colormap is not counting like a texture or something, right?

 

IMO, there is a logical chain:

 

BTSX is a mod for doom community. Community means communism. Communism means there is no copyrights. There is no copyrights means everybody in the community is free to use other's wad resources.

 

Got it? :D

 

Me to myself: stop thinking like a commie!

 

Edited January 29, 2020 by SilverMiner

[Rainne]

Colormap tweaking gains a new level of importance in Hexen since, even in vanilla, you can swap out for different colormaps on a per-level basis. A few levels use FOGMAP instead of the normal COLORMAP to create a foggy ambiance: it fades out to light gray instead of black, and it doesn't fade linearly: things stay fully 'bright' for longer, then relatively quickly fades to gray, then remains there for the rest.

 

I used Fogger to generate a different one, and tested it in vanilla (Chocolate) Hexen, and it works. Pictured: a quick map using "ICEMAP" (fading toward RGB 64,80,96) for a chilly ambiance. So you can probably use arbitrary lumpnames, and arbitrarily many custom colormaps; just name them in MAPINFO.

 

Won't work as-is in a truecolor rendering system since it skips the colormap and does its own color processing, although ZMAPINFO can specify the fade-to color directly, so this should let you use custom fades in either type of render.

 

One implication of this is that things can't get darker; making things "darker" just makes the fog thicker instead. And even then, it's not volumetric: a "dark" (foggy) sector in the middle of "bright" (clear) sectors will just affect the associated flats and sidedefs, and sprites within it, but won't obscure anything behind sector. But lowering the lightlevel does serve the same purpose in either case: reducing visibility.

 

Edited January 30, 2020 by Rainne

[Redneckerz]

On 1/29/2020 at 8:00 AM, Aurelius said:

@Redneckerz I was introduced to this quite recently actually. I believe the effect is achieved by taking the top row of the COLORMAP (the fullbright of each of color range) and colorizing it to the desired colored lighting. This way, you can use the highest light level for areas you want the colored lighting to be in. Any sector with a light level below fullbright would never be rendered at that light level, so the effect would not bleed into undesired sectors. Using any other horizontal row would obviously not work, so you'd basically only have that one color. It would however not be much of a degradation since people rarely use the highest light level, or at least could easily just use the second highest increment of 8 for those brightest sectors. Of course, actions that change the light level to 255 (or the light amplification goggles) wouldn't be very desirable unless the express point was to turn colored lighting on or off. EDIT: Thanks to @Scypek2 for pointing out that, in fact, the bleeding is extremely invasive even on low light levels, rendering the entire method practically useless without extensive tweaking.

COLORMAP can be edited with any image editing software, so adding that colorized line would be simple in GIMP, Photoshop or Paint.net, for example. When importing it back to Slade3, it can be converted into a FLAT with the name COLORMAP, which will automatically turn it into the desired format.

That's exactly why i am looking for more information and more practical examples. The effect is difficult to set up and achieve, but given the picture, i think it has a lot of merit. We see vanilla pushing projects more and more, from Doom4Vanilla to Doom Zero, so more information regarding advanced COLORMAP effects is something very desirable, i feel.

 

On 1/29/2020 at 3:00 PM, Gez said:

SLADE doesn't have COLORMAP tweaking tools at the moment, but it does allow you to edit COLORMAPs as graphics, so you can technically use the pixel pushing tools.

 

Or open in a dedicated image editor.

But here is the catch: Is there a Doom specific program that works on mixed-tint COLORMAPS? How does one make a mixed-tint COLORMAP anyway? I am well aware that there are several COLORMAP generators out there (Linguica did quite a few using FreeDoom's COLORMAP script) but there is very little practical work to be found regarding mixed-tint COLORMAPS and vanilla colored lighting, for the reasons stated above.

 

On 1/29/2020 at 7:43 PM, SilverMiner said:

I think BTSX has the best palette and the colormap setup. I think it will be ok if you use them.

If Esselfortium and others are properly credited, yes. It might be that it comes with a ''Do whatever you like'' kind of clause, but its best to assume that the respective author likes to be credited. Its little work anyway. :)

 

On 1/29/2020 at 7:43 PM, SilverMiner said:

 

Colormap is not counting like a texture or something, right?

AFAIK, no.

 

On 1/29/2020 at 7:43 PM, SilverMiner said:

 

IMO, there is a logical chain:

 

BTSX is a mod for doom community. Community means communism. Communism means there is no copyrights. There is no copyrights means everybody in the community is free to use other's wad resources.

 

Got it? :D

 

Me to myself: stop thinking like a commie!

 

 

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, but ill just go ahead and say that this sounds rather strange. If its an internal joke, do know that others likely do not get this.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

On 1/29/2020 at 11:43 AM, SilverMiner said:

BTSX is a mod for doom community. Community means communism. Communism means there is no copyrights. There is no copyrights means everybody in the community is free to use other's wad resources.

 

Got it? :D

 

Even if I sort of understand what you're saying, it's not applicable in the case of BTSX. The text file specifically states that the authors do not want any of the BTSX resources to be used by anyone, until the series is completed and a full release has been made. Granted, I don't think this is legally binding, it's a matter of respecting others' wishes. 

[Scypek2]

52 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

But here is the catch: Is there a Doom specific program that works on mixed-tint COLORMAPS? How does one make a mixed-tint COLORMAP anyway? I am well aware that there are several COLORMAP generators out there (Linguica did quite a few using FreeDoom's COLORMAP script) but there is very little practical work to be found regarding mixed-tint COLORMAPS and vanilla colored lighting, for the reasons stated above.

 

I don't think any colormap-specific program would be as good as simply exporting the COLORMAP as an image and using an image editor to do whatever you want to it. You can then turn it back into a COLORMAP by converting it to "Doom flat" in Slade since that's the same image format.

 

I did it once before, to make very different-looking darkness!

[Linguica]

Making your own COLORMAP is super easy. Extract the base COLORMAP as PNG, take the top line and stretch it to cover the whole image, then add a new layer with a color gradient and add a blending mode. Re-import to SLADE, convert using "Doom flat" format (not Doom gfx) and it will Just Work.

 

 

 

 

redmap.wad.zip

 

Other resources:

 

• @jmickle66666666 once made a manually ramped COLORMAP https://www.dropbox.com/s/f7omdm0w1c3vtyg/new_colmap.wad?dl=0 and mirrored here new_colmap.wad.zip
• Once @Jon was messing with trying to do "colored" lighting in vanilla Doom with colormap tricks https://jmtd.net/doom/colormap/ mirrored locally: colhack.wad.zip

 

[Redneckerz]

13 hours ago, Linguica said:

Making your own COLORMAP is super easy. Extract the base COLORMAP as PNG, take the top line and stretch it to cover the whole image, then add a new layer with a color gradient and add a blending mode. Re-import to SLADE, convert using "Doom flat" format (not Doom gfx) and it will Just Work.

 

 

 

 

redmap.wad.zip

 

Other resources:

 

• @jmickle66666666 once made a manually ramped COLORMAP https://www.dropbox.com/s/f7omdm0w1c3vtyg/new_colmap.wad?dl=0 and mirrored here new_colmap.wad.zip
• Once @Jon was messing with trying to do "colored" lighting in vanilla Doom with colormap tricks https://jmtd.net/doom/colormap/ mirrored locally: colhack.wad.zip

 

As much as i appreciate these (Jmickle has indeed its own colormap generator), some clarity:

• Does this approach also make one able to use mixed tint maps to achieve the colored lighting effects? Or am i foolishly interchanging words with the same meaning?
• I am used to visual editing, and it seems Inkfoundry does this but in a commandline. Aside from SLADE, is there a visual editor where you can handcraft these?
• The vanilla colored lighting/colormap tricks is what i am after. What are the possibilities there? How many WADS use this? How much of this is actually useful considering the limitations?

I am obviously feeling extremely stupid now trying to explain something and getting a mixed result back, meaning that i either do not get it (Which is most likely) or my explanation is faulty.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Redneckerz
Finish words, Red, Don't obmit them...

[Linguica]

Vanilla "colored lighting" would be a very advanced trick and not one to attempt lightly. No WADs have ever used it seriously to my knowledge and it probably would not work very well. COLORMAP editing in general is not used very often outside of special circumstances. For instance Doom 4 Vanilla has a special colormap where certain "special" colors used for lights and so forth are forcibly kept fullbright no matter the light level. Keep in mind that any custom colormaps will almost certainly not work in GZDoom or other hardware accelerated ports.

 

A while back when I made Instadoom https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/71767-cacoward-approved-instadoom-screw-nofilter-final-woty-edition-released I made the custom palettes by taking a SLADE-exported PNG of the normal Doom palette and applying the real Instagram filter to it, screenshotting the result, and importing it back into SLADE, which has the ability to recognize PNGs for palettes / colormaps. I then auto-generated custom colormaps for each new palette by using a Python script to fade each new palette to "black" where black was the specific color that black was turned into in that palette. There are a lot of nerd hacks one can do with Doom resources since they are relatively simple and we have some good tools to work with.

[Urthar]

One method I've used in the past is to isolate parts of a palette:

Generate a colormap from that in Slade:

And then cut and paste the part I want back into

the colormap of the full palette:

 

 

[Redneckerz]

To my utter hilarity, and found on the ZDoom Discord, Zingot Games has just released a tool called Palette Knife. Which allows you to make palettes visually. You can also create gradients.

 

Not only that, it allows applying tint to your palette:

 

 

 

Videos:

 

 

Would this be of any use to DOOM, let alone achieve the things i suggested? Who knows, but by the looks of it, it definitely seems useful. :)

[Gez]

It's about palettes, not colormaps.

 

By the way, SLADE also lets you create palettes with tints and gradients. Select a tool, select a range, select values, click ok, and then repeat. Some examples:

 

Gradient tool!

 

 

What could we do with it? How about replacing the light blue range with a cyan-to-purple range?

 

 

There you go. By the way, you don't need to use the "existing" range, you can select arbitrary points. You can even select the entire palette if you want:

 

 

But what if we want to modify colors but without replacing them, just tweak a little bit the colors we already have? It's also possible!

 

 

Also available are colorize (change the hue while keeping luminosity), tint (move towards given color), and invert (replace colors with their opposite).

[P41R47]

On 1/28/2020 at 12:09 AM, Tango said:

I've tried looking around a bit for an improved version of the vanilla COLORMAP lump (mainly to improve the fading of the pink ranges near the start of the palette), but I'm having trouble finding something that's free to use. DM2PAL looks great, but unfortunately relies on a modified palette. BTSX fixes the pink range specifically, but I don't want to rip that pieces out of the COLORMAP there because resource re-use isn't permitted for BTSX stuff right now. anyone know of a tuned up vanilla-palette COLORMAP out there that's free to be used?

Look at this one, i use it for soo long that i forget i used it almost all the time :P
 

 

[ReaperAA]

4 hours ago, P41R47 said:

Look at this one, i use it for soo long that i forget i used it almost all the time :P

 

Thanks for mentioning ColdPal but I think Tango already knows about it :D

 

And to be honest, I feel like the reds/pinks in the colormap of ColdPal could have been better (if only I knew about the method Urthar used). Now I am actually tempted to make an update to ColdPal despite it already uploaded to idgames.

 

[P41R47]

10 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

 

Thanks for mentioning ColdPal but I think Tango already knows about it :D

 

And to be honest, I feel like the reds/pinks in the colormap of ColdPal could have been better (if only I knew about the method Urthar used). Now I am actually tempted to make an update to ColdPal despite it already uploaded to idgames.

 

I will go with: please do, my friend! :D
You can always upload it as a new version and let the differences between both versions appealing to those who might search for them ;)