Let's talk palettes

[Koko Ricky]

EDIT: Whoever made this original image omitted the second to last row on the Quake palette.

 

This wonderful image shows the main palettes for four classic FPS. Let us discuss how efficient (or inefficient) they were and are. 

 

Doom's palette is bit peculiar in the sheer number of reds it contains. It was smart to include a set of both saturated and duller reds, but there's too many! I think 16 of each would have sufficed, even for high detail textures and sprites. Most of the yellows look similar, awkwardly cutting off at a bright value and transitioning into those iconic goldish/maroon tones. The blues are totally saturated, appearing slightly garish in-game. Somehow through all of this the palette is remarkably pleasing.

 

Duke Nukem 3D's palette is very well organized. We get even strips for muted greens, blues, golds, flesh tones, greyscale, etc. The two bottom-most strips are interesting. I wonder what they're for?

 

Quake's palette really embraces muted colors, and I especially love the dull lavender/magenta strips. It's not nearly as brown of a game as it's made out to be! The yellow-to-maroon strip feels like an expanded version of the equivalent from Doom. Are those colors at the bottom for fullbrights?

 

Quake 2's palette might have a few more browns than Quake, but it also has a gorgeous turquoise strip as well as some sexy muted reds, blues and greens. There are some very small strips of bright green, orange-to-brown and faded red/blue whose use is not clear to me. There's also one monochromatic strip, similar to Quake, which given their reliance on ligjtmaps is an interesting choice. Is the bottom strip for fullbrights?

 

Edited October 9, 2021 by Koko Ricky

[DuckReconMajor]

6 minutes ago, Koko Ricky said:

Doom's palette is bit peculiar in the sheer number of reds it contains.

 

With so many reds, why does red fade so badly into that ugly brown in the COLORMAP?

[Koko Ricky]

6 minutes ago, DuckReconMajor said:

 

With so many reds, why does red fade so badly into that ugly brown in the COLORMAP?

There are no especially dark reds, either for the saturated or duller strips. Once it reaches a certain value, the game interprets one of those browns as being the next darker color. 

[Graf Zahl]

 

13 minutes ago, Koko Ricky said:



 

Duke Nukem 3D's palette is very well organized. We get even strips for muted greens, blues, golds, flesh tones, greyscale, etc. The two bottom-most strips are interesting. I wonder what they're for?

 

The bottommost strip is simple: These are fullbright colors. The one above - no idea.

[Noiser]

Here's one of my favorites, both in palette as in art direction - Heretic:



  
  
I recall when someone said how close Doom Eternal was to DOS games in terms of colors. Heretic comes to mind immediately, one of the most colorful titles since the Wolf3D era. I particularly like how episode 2 uses red as the main theme - breaking expectations when they bring ice after the first levels. I love that bold mix of striking colors (and striking themes altogether).  

But the game also have what was already established in Doom - a selection of browns and grays that gets deliciously gritty on light diminishing. In addition, Heretic also have a cold set of neutral colors (something entirely absent in Doom) and a more useful set of bright purples. Hue shifting also have a major role here: The "blue" goes from dark blue to bright cyan - which looks gorgeous on fullbright assets like projectiles (or the water splash in the picture). You also have green, which is slighly warmer than Doom's counterpart - meaning you can better mix with yellow and create shifting like those on the crossbow arrows [EDIT: My bad, green is the same from Doom].

Enemies also have colors to differentiate their attacks - gargoyles are red, undead warriors have green axes, disciples of D'Sparil uses purple. The Iron Lich have one different color for each of his attacks (blue, orange or gray). Nitrogolens have a yellow aura when attacking, making his homing missile easier to spot. Ophidians are the best ones imo, mixing purple and cyan on the same orb. The weapons are equally exciting and well coordinated - each one have his own exclusive theme that never repeats on another slot. The only exceptions are melee weapons: The gauntlet repeats green and red again (crossbow, hellstaff) and the staff repeats blue (dragon claw). I think they lost the oportunity of using a bit of purple there.

Overall, I think this game have a lot of personality. Hexen also have strong and beautiful visuals, but it's too focused on gray or brown-ish textures - which makes it a bit less compelling to me. Both have a great palette nonetheless and are very interesting the way it is.

Edited March 6, 2022 by Noiser

[maxmanium]

I've been experimenting with custom palettes for a bit now. Really, the most annoying things are the hardcoded/default indices for certain colors, such as what's drawn on the automap. Otherwise you'd be able to make a much nicer-looking palette.

[lazygecko]

The palettes available for different types of assets in Tiberian Sun are notoriously inefficient for anyone who has ever been involved with modding the game and creating custom graphics.

 

 

Just look at the amount of nearly identical shades across the different gradients. It's especially frustrating for environmental graphics that use isotem.pal. Notice how there's barely any variety of greens to speak of. This has routinely become a problem for any mods that add more custom vegetation graphics. Popular mods like Twisted Insurrection frequently have issues with trees and foliage that blend in too much with the terrain making things hard to read. There's more than one reason the default tree assets in the game had withered leaves and bright grey trunks and branches.

[Wavy]

5 hours ago, Koko Ricky said:

Are those colors at the bottom for fullbrights?

Yep. The last two rows in the Quake palette are. The second last row is supposed to be for stuff like muzzle flashes and torches but the palette in your post is incorrect, with the second last row being just white. Heres the corrected palette and colormap:

^{Note the colours at the end.}

 

Anyhow, I really love the Quake palette. All the colours work well with each other and fade perfectly.

 

5 hours ago, Koko Ricky said:

Is the bottom strip for fullbrights?

For Quake 2 however, there really isn't any fullbrights. Here's the colormap:

 

^{Note the colours at the end and how they aren't fully bright unlike the Quake 1 palette.}

 

If you want to learn more on how Quake handles it's palettes/colormaps, here's a page on the Quake Wiki that should help: https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette

[Koko Ricky]

Can anyone find the Blood palette? No luck on my end.

[Wavy]

22 minutes ago, Koko Ricky said:

Can anyone find the Blood palette? No luck on my end.

Here:

[Breezeep]

You wana know what palette I like? 32in24's Palette:

 

 

It's basically an improved version of doom's palette, most notably in its blue and red ranges. The blues are a bit brighter, while the reds have been adjusted so that it doesn't fade to an ugly brown-ish color in dark areas.

 

^{(32in24-16.wad, map26)}

Edited October 9, 2021 by Breezeep

[Dusty_Rhodes]

1 hour ago, Breezeep said:

You wana know what palette I like? 32in24's Palette:

 

 

It's basically an improved version of doom's palette, most notably in its blue and red ranges. The blues are a bit brighter, while the reds have been adjusted so that it doesn't fade to an ugly brown-ish color in dark areas.

 

^{(32in24-16.wad, map26)}

That would be a really fun palette and texture pack to work with.

[Aurelius]

11 hours ago, Koko Ricky said:

It was smart to include a set of both saturated and duller reds, but there's too many! I think 16 of each would have sufficed, even for high detail textures and sprites.

 

Interesting thing to note is how extremely detailed the pinky and baron sprites are with their use of all 32 pinks, whereas every other sprite or texture in vanilla use mostly every other or at least much less than the whole 32 range. By translating every two colors into one, it hardly affects the quality of the sprites, and would give room for improving the debatably (some people like it!) horrible pink-to-brown fade.

 

In contrast, even the 32 sat browns are used less extensively for sprites (manc and cyb use the widest gamut, which is still not all browns). So one could argue that the amount of detail in the pinky and the baron is slightly inconsistent with the rest of the assets. Guess id liked their fleshy tones!

 

5 hours ago, Koko Ricky said:

Can anyone find the Blood palette? No luck on my end.

 

You can generate practically any relevant palette in Slade by first creating a new PLAYPAL lump, and choosing the desired game from the drop down menu.

 

re: Quake palette, I think the lack of diminished lighting introduced in Doom, the inclusion of point lights and shadowmaps, and the generally "darker" shade in Quake made it much more feasible to work with shorter ranges. I also think calling Quake more "brown" than Doom is not accurate, rather it's more desatured in its overall look, and in actuality doesn't have more slots reserved for browns (in fact, Doom has 32+16+8+4+3+2=65, while Quake has 4*16=64). Quake does have more variety in its brown, like the swampy tones of the 2nd row or the fleshy tones of the 8th row.

[Teo Slayer]

Damn, those games are colorful :D

[ReaperAA]

Speaking of nice palettes, I would like to mention Ion Fury's palette

 

Image from:https://3drealms.com/devblog/dev-blog-2-art-ion-maiden/

 

I really love Ion Fury's palette due to how versatile and optimized it is. Compared to many other games, IF's palette has almost every important color represented by having fair number of shades (even purple has a fair decent number of shades while most 90's games don't).

 

The saturation levels are just perfect. Not too overly saturated (like the Blues in Doom are), but still a fair bit more vibrant than the likes of Quake and Quake2. You can create bright/colorful neon enviroments and can also create dark/gritty/dirty enviroments with the palette fairly well due to the presence of two variations of shades of many colors.

 

10 hours ago, lazygecko said:

Popular mods like Twisted Insurrection frequently have issues with trees and foliage that blend in too much with the terrain making things hard to read. There's more than one reason the default tree assets in the game had withered leaves and bright grey trunks and branches.

 

I played that mod a long time ago and I am fairly sure that Twisted Insurrection comes with its own isotem.pal. With that being said, I agree that the palette in Tiberian Sun is overly specialized (which works well for vanilla TS assets but doesn't work well if you try to do something different with it)

[Graf Zahl]

4 hours ago, Aurelius said:

re: Quake palette, I think the lack of diminished lighting introduced in Doom, the inclusion of point lights and shadowmaps, and the generally "darker" shade in Quake made it much more feasible to work with shorter ranges. I also think calling Quake more "brown" than Doom is not accurate, rather it's more desatured in its overall look, and in actuality doesn't have more slots reserved for browns (in fact, Doom has 32+16+8+4+3+2=65, while Quake has 4*16=64). Quake does have more variety in its brown, like the swampy tones of the 2nd row or the fleshy tones of the 8th row.

 

Quake's palette may not be overly brown, but the textures surely were. The palette is only one part of the equation.

 

[Ar_e_en]

22 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Quake's palette may not be overly brown, but the textures surely were. The palette is only one part of the equation.

 

I've often wondered if there existed (or if it could be possible as a mod or TC) a Quake engine game that was more colorful, like something like Chex Quest or The Adventures of Square. Later I found out about that one X-Men Quake engine game that you could only play if you already had Quake installed, it was more colorful (or less brown at least) so it kinda shows that it can be done. That X-Men game probably had a different palette alongside its new textures.

[NightFright]

On 10/9/2021 at 3:28 AM, Breezeep said:

You wanna know what palette I like? 32in24's Palette [...]

 

Thanks a lot for this hint! That's exactly the one I have been looking for since years: A palette which fixes all the issues of the original one without changing the character of the original too much. It's really all about the red and blue tints here, but these make a big difference. Whoever made this one did a really good job.

[esselfortium]

31 minutes ago, NightFright said:

 

Thanks a lot for this hint! That's exactly the one I have been looking for since years: A palette which fixes all the issues of the original one without changing the character of the original too much. It's really all about the red and blue tints here, but these make a big difference. Whoever made this one did a really good job.

Thanks, that's pretty much exactly what I was hoping to achieve with the 32in24 palette! If I remember right, I originally set it up when we were doing a capture-the-flag themed 32in24, which is a theme that (of course) relies heavily on the reds and blues. I wanted to keep them looking reasonably Doomy, but make them easier on the eyes when the entire map is painted with them.

 

And to explain a bit more, the red range isn't actually tinted (as far as I can remember), but it is adjusted to fade much closer to black instead of tapering off at a medium-brightness shade like the vanilla palette does, so as a result it's able to avoid the red-to-brown color glitches that you get with the vanilla palette. The same red range modifications are also in the BTSX palette.

[Koko Ricky]

On 10/8/2021 at 7:40 PM, Wavy said:

Here:

Ah, the Blood palette! There's a really interesting blue selection: The third row is so dulled as to almost be grey, but is slightly blue; toward the middle you have some faded sky blues and next to it an intense gradation from deep blue to cyan. That's pretty peculiar compare to the blues from the other palettes. I love the muted yellow fading to orange, the orange to brown and the lava-ish yellow-to-red. However, there are a few strips that rub me the wrong way. I really don't get what the red-to-brown strip accomplishes, or why the last two rows have so many shades of a very similar tan! A pretty similar range is already covered near the top, twice, with two overly similar flesh gradients. Very odd.

[Cage]

On 10/9/2021 at 10:07 AM, ReaperAA said:

Speaking of nice palettes, I would like to mention Ion Fury's palette

 

Image from:https://3drealms.com/devblog/dev-blog-2-art-ion-maiden/

Thanks! I think it's worth to mention that in Ion Fury's palette I have incorporated the lessons from two palettes I've made before it:

Supplice palette - which was my first attempt at optimising similar colors together to gain more variety of hues, as well as incorporating something that I was always missing when making artwork using the stock Doom or Duke palette - often not having an in-between color between the gray and a saturated hue (like blue). Not having the colors fade into muddy gray or brown like in stock Doom was also a goal. This was created for ZDoom's software renderer at the time, but Supplice is fully hardware now - however, all the artwork in game uses only these colors.

 

 

There's also this palette - for an untitled Build game project I have attempted on my own, didn't work out obviously, but plenty of it idea/design wise went into Ion Fury. I don't remember if this predates the Supplice palette or not - There are some attempts at optimisation here, but I can see quite a few shortcomings of this palette, unlike the one for Supplice. This is also before the Eduke32 engine used extra transparency/blend tables, so the last colors are not only fullbrights, but also only ones that use additive and multiplicative (the gray range) transparency (all done the old school way through shade/transparency tables) - these were meant to be used for effects and computer displays and faux lightmapping done through sprites. The general idea was to create a look between Duke3d and Quake 1.

 

 

 

There was also Hacx 2.0 palette, but it's nothing special aside from somewhat fixing the "gray" fade of the stock Doom palette, replacing Doom's blue range with something less saturated and adding a new blue-gray which was very derivative from either Hexen's or Heretic palettes. (Or maybe even from Cyclones? Can't remember but for certain it was from a Raven game)

 

 

Edited October 12, 2021 by Cage

[ukiro]

If I hadn't sunk so much effort into the vanilla Doom palette with OTEX I would absolutely love to make my own. On the other hand, only after all that work with OTEX am I experienced enough to design a good palette, I suppose. The one for Ion Fury does a lot of the stuff I would want to incorporate, but I think I'd have a couple more desaturated ranges, to enable some of the stuff id did for Quake II's textures.

[SaladBadger]

Here's a palette I have some mixed feelings about. Descent 1. It feels like it could be so good, having a reasonably wide selection of ranges, but what's with the weird seemingly random contents of the first 3 rows? (it almost looks like it's generated from the colors used by the cockpit graphic). Two rows of grays, and then a varied selection of different colors. 2 purples, 2 blues, 3 greens, 3 yellows, two reds and an orange, and that kinda weird tanish color. The problem I see is that due to those 3 rows being wasted by the cockpit colors, many of the ranges get crunched pretty tight, leading to some messy fades in the colormap.

 

Though for all it's faults, at least it's about 10x better than the highly redundant, unordered, machine generated palettes that plague Descent II:

The first 6 rows for all Descent 2 palettes are the same, but the color choices are so weird. Why is there no true grayscale range? Why are even the colors common across all palettes unordered and machine generated? Why is an almost entire row taken up by dark colors that are almost impossible to perceive? why does the water palette have so many colors that are basically black? The game probably would have looked tons better if more care was put into making the individual palettes.

Edited October 12, 2021 by SaladBadger

[Graf Zahl]

1 hour ago, SaladBadger said:

Here's a palette I have some mixed feelings about. Descent 1. It feels like it could be so good, having a reasonably wide selection of ranges, but what's with the weird seemingly random contents of the first 3 rows?

 

(it almost looks like it's generated from the colors used by the cockpit graphic).

 

That's almost certainly what it is. They apparently created the cockpit with its own palette and later merged these colors into what they decided on for the level textures.

 

[Faceman2000]

14 hours ago, ukiro said:

If I hadn't sunk so much effort into the vanilla Doom palette with OTEX I would absolutely love to make my own. On the other hand, only after all that work with OTEX am I experienced enough to design a good palette, I suppose. The one for Ion Fury does a lot of the stuff I would want to incorporate, but I think I'd have a couple more desaturated ranges, to enable some of the stuff id did for Quake II's textures.

I was under the impression that OTEX had one because of all the teals in Eviternity. Does it use a different texture set than regular OTEX? I thought they were one and the same.

[ReaperAA]

5 hours ago, Faceman2000 said:

I was under the impression that OTEX had one because of all the teals in Eviternity. Does it use a different texture set than regular OTEX? I thought they were one and the same.

 

OTEX itself does not come with any custom palette. OTEX can be used with the vanilla palette. Eviternity however, in addition to using OTEX, comes with its own palette file which alters the blues to be less saturated and greens are changed to teals.

[ReaperAA]

15 hours ago, SaladBadger said:

Here's a palette I have some mixed feelings about. Descent 1. It feels like it could be so good, having a reasonably wide selection of ranges, but what's with the weird seemingly random contents of the first 3 rows? (it almost looks like it's generated from the colors used by the cockpit graphic). Two rows of grays, and then a varied selection of different colors. 2 purples, 2 blues, 3 greens, 3 yellows, two reds and an orange, and that kinda weird tanish color. The problem I see is that due to those 3 rows being wasted by the cockpit colors, many of the ranges get crunched pretty tight, leading to some messy fades in the colormap.

 

Though for all it's faults, at least it's about 10x better than the highly redundant, unordered, machine generated palettes that plague Descent II:

The first 6 rows for all Descent 2 palettes are the same, but the color choices are so weird. Why is there no true grayscale range? Why are even the colors common across all palettes unordered and machine generated? Why is an almost entire row taken up by dark colors that are almost impossible to perceive? why does the water palette have so many colors that are basically black? The game probably would have looked tons better if more care was put into making the individual palettes.

 

Even if we exclude the issue of the first 3 rows, Descent 1's palette is still not that good. If you look closely, you will notice that many of the colors fade to black or very near to black. Then there is also 6 shades of grey in the penultimate row which makes no sense to me considering that similar greys are already present in the 4th row

There is LOTS of room for optimization in D1's palette.

 

Still better than Descent 2's palette. D2's palette just makes me barf. The worst palette I have ever seen. Why are there so many cyans/teals? WHY!!!?

Edited October 13, 2021 by ReaperAA

[SaladBadger]

To be fair, Descent 2 has 6 palettes, one for each world. That one's optimized for the water world, hence all the teals. If you look at the lava world, there's more reds. And brighter cyans for some reason.

Oddly the fire palette is the only one which feels like it had any human intervention in, but it's still eh. The rest look very much like they were machine generated by sampling the textures used in each level and picking a palette, but the machine doesn't know what kind of optimizations a human would do.

[Woolie Wool]

Qbism did a software renderer for Quake II that incorporated leileilol's colored lighting from Engoo and colored lighting works with Quake II's palette amazingly well:

 

[ReaperAA]

1 hour ago, Woolie Wool said:

Qbism did a software renderer for Quake II that incorporated leileilol's colored lighting from Engoo and colored lighting works with Quake II's palette amazingly well:

 

I really wish that Yamagi quake 2 port had the option of color lighting software renderer. Those screenshots look really nice