Making Smooth Doom custom color palette compatible

[entrywayy]

Hello guys,

 

Is there any way to make Smooth Doom (mod for GzDoom) compatible with wads that use a custom color palette (like BTSX, Ancient Aliens, Eviternity, Arrival etc)? I am a total scrub and have no experience in editing mods so far. If anyone feels like guiding me what to do, it'd be cool. If not, it's also cool of course.

[MattFright]

Biggest issue is that the sprites in Smooth Doom are probably .pngs, which aren't affected by custom palettes (though you can achieve a similar effect by just playing on software accelerated renderer, or turning palette filtering on). If you want to make them work with custom palettes you might want to use Slade to convert them all into Doom format images (which are always restricted to palette) in bulk. I haven't looked into Smooth Doom in a looooong while so i wouldn't know, but manual edits MIGHT be necessary if the conversion doesn't go too smoothly.

 

This isn't smooth doom but just to give a heads up in regards to the user interface:

It'll probably show PNG as the current format, be sure to convert them to Doom GFX specifically. The option below the preview is the palette used, Existing/Global being the default. Be sure to assign the converted graphic to Doom palette, or you'll get a black and white mess of nonsense.

 

 

 

If i'm wrong about anything i just said i'd love to be corrected by anyone with more experience than me, though :)

Edited April 19, 2021 by MattFright

[entrywayy]

Thank you for the quick answer mate. I thought it was the opposite, that I'll need to convert to PNG, oops. I will have a look into this when I'm home and try to get it working, thanks for the guide! 

 

Edit: What i tried so far is converting all sprites to PNG(truecolor), no success in WADs which change color palettes. Gonna need to try something else. PNG (paletted) maybe?

@MattFright Almost all sprites in SmoothDoom are Doom Gfx (Paletted) already.

Edit 2: Apparently i forgot to chose "Doom" at the colour options. Maybe that will help, one more try.

Edit 3: Couldn't make it work. The Plasma is bugged somehow and it still doesn't use custom colorpalettes. Well RIP i guess.

Edited April 20, 2021 by entrywayy

[MattFright]

Just loaded it up with BTSX. It SEEMS to be working with the palette, but the animations don't adapt too well to its palette, resulting in this terribleness:

 

It only seems to happen with the shotgunners and zombiemen, and i'm guessing it has got to do with the BTSX palette specifically. Only solution i can see for it is manual edits depending on the palette, which most certainly wouldn't be fun to do.

 

But yeah to my surprise Smooth Doom IS compatible with custom palettes already.

Edited April 20, 2021 by MattFright

[entrywayy]

Guess I'll just use perk's enhanced smooth weapons or none at all. That's actually quite compatible with custom color palettes :/

[Gez]

16 hours ago, MattFright said:

This isn't smooth doom but just to give a heads up in regards to the user interface:

Just to take that image: what you need to do is to look at the palette drop-down boxes here. On the "current graphic", select "Doom", on the "converted graphic", select "Doom BTSX". Save that modified version as SmoothDoomBTSX.

 

Do the same thing for the others, if SLADE does not have their palette just you can add it very quickly by opening the wad in question, selecting its PLAYPAL, and choosing "Palette -> Add to custom palettes" or (for a temporary addition that'll only last until you close SLADE) "Palette -> Test palette".

[entrywayy]

Wow thanks a lot for this information @Gez! Gonna try that later and report how it went. But do I choose Doom Gfx or one of the PNG options?

 

I also have a weird bug when I pull out the plasma gun. I have no weapon model while not shooting for some reason. Some bob problems? When I shoot the plasma i can see the animation. When I stop shooting it's gone again oO

 

Edit: I am working it out slowly but surely ... I'm getting there ... I attached a screenshot of the plasmabug i face. Anyone got an idea? I don't have that bug on other wads tho.

Edited April 20, 2021 by entrywayy

[lokbustam257]

On 4/20/2021 at 11:25 PM, entrywayy said:

Wow thanks a lot for this information @Gez! Gonna try that later and report how it went. But do I choose Doom Gfx or one of the PNG options?

 

I also have a weird bug when I pull out the plasma gun. I have no weapon model while not shooting for some reason. Some bob problems? When I shoot the plasma i can see the animation. When I stop shooting it's gone again oO

 

Edit: I am working it out slowly but surely ... I'm getting there ... I attached a screenshot of the plasmabug i face. Anyone got an idea? I don't have that bug on other wads tho.

Try change the load order, put smooth doom on the last, or if you use drag and drop, make sure to drag BTSX files, not smooth doom. If it works, it should looks normal

 

[lokbustam257]

On 4/20/2021 at 11:25 PM, entrywayy said:

 But do I choose Doom Gfx or one of the PNG options?

I recommend you to choose PNG truecolor, since if you want to use the modified file with other wads that have custom pallete, you can just use that file without opening SLADE and convert graphic and such

[Spendoragon]

@entrywayy asked me to help him with this. We managed to resolve his plasma rifle sprite issue, which was completely unrelated. It turned out to be an issue introduced loading SmoothDoom through GZDoom.ini's Global.Autoload for some reason. Launching through batch file or ZDL resolved it. That aside, I recall being disappointed that SmoothDoom wasn't compatible with BTSX, and I had given it an attempt back then. Realizing that this palette doesn't play nice with other graphics, I figured someone else would make a compatibility patch someday. I'm not sure if that ever happened, as evidenced by this thread, and I had nothing better to do today so I decided to work on it.

 

On 4/20/2021 at 7:52 AM, Gez said:

Just to take that image: what you need to do is to look at the palette drop-down boxes here. On the "current graphic", select "Doom", on the "converted graphic", select "Doom BTSX". Save that modified version as SmoothDoomBTSX. 

 

Do the same thing for the others, if SLADE does not have their palette just you can add it very quickly by opening the wad in question, selecting its PLAYPAL, and choosing "Palette -> Add to custom palettes" or (for a temporary addition that'll only last until you close SLADE) "Palette -> Test palette". 

 

Following this method, this worked for a majority of other palettes and a considerable amount of SmoothDoom's sprites. Unfortunately, not all of them were as elegantly converted. I may be missing something obvious that makes this process a lot easier. Pro modders, let me know. The BTSX palette was otherwise a little bit extra (much like the rest of my post) and the conversion wasn't as straightforward for the remainder of the sprites, resulting in all blues becoming purple and other anomalies, with the most notable example being the soulsphere sprite:

 

Spoiler

Original, Doom Format, Doom Palette:

 

Converted, Doom Format, BTSX Palette:

 

Converted, PNG (Paletted), BTSX Palette:

(Kind of reminds me of Stardate)

 

Converted, PNG (Paletted), BTSX Palette,

then Colour Remapped:

(There's a couple of pixels and colors slightly off, I tried)

 

The resulting file is PNG and is larger than Doom format, but it works. Some of the sprites I had to convert to PNG (Paletted) format using the Doom 1024 palette and then converting it a second time to BTSX palette so the end result would be this familiar light blue instead of purple or a duller blue. I have no idea why. GLDEFS and DECALDEF were modified to reflect the color of the sprites.

 

 

 

 

The result is a .pk3 that can be loaded after SmoothDoom.pk3 in GZDoom to play BTSX E1 and BTSX E2 with SmoothDoom without palette issues.

 

Download:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/2ovr1hb72q6dw04/SmoothDoomBTSX.zip/file

 

Edit: Less fluff. I can't tag properly. @lokbustam257 Now I see your post. Did I just do a lot more work than I had to?

Edited April 23, 2021 by Adun
internal screaming

[Spendoragon]

50 minutes ago, lokbustam257 said:

I recommend you to choose PNG truecolor, since if you want to use the modified file with other wads that have custom pallete, you can just use that file without opening SLADE and convert graphic and such

Apparently I still don't know how to use SLADE properly when I could have saved myself the trouble of colour remapping if I exported from btsx_e1a.wad in PNG (Truecolor). Thanks for helping me to realize that. :v

[entrywayy]

I want to leave a big, fat thanks to @Adun!! Probably never would've been able to play through BTSX with SmoothDoom. Thanks man! What a genius!

[DriveAngrier]

Mediafire link is dead. Thanks for explaining how to do the palette swap here. I was able to get it working with that.

Edited May 28, 2024 by DriveAngrier