Editing the Doom color pallet

[tubs]

How would I edit the colors in Doom's color pallet to example, change the greens to a more tealish color?

[Redneckerz]

5 hours ago, tuberino said:

How would I edit the colors in Doom's color pallet to example, change the greens to a more tealish color?

You do that with Slade.

[Aurelius]

Here's some quick instructions (I'll edit this later if I messed up something :P):

1. Open doom2.wad and copy paste the PLAYPAL and COLORMAP lumps to your PWAD.
2. Choose the PLAYPAL and export it as PNG (Right click -> Palette -> Export as -> Choose PNG from the dropdown)
3. Open it in an image editor of your choice and do the edits you want. If you're not experienced with palette editing and/or image editing in general, I suggest looking at existing wads with color ranges you like and copying those directly (Eviternity has a teal range, for example). You can export custom palettes the same way you just exported the vanilla one.
4. When you're done, open your PWAD in Slade and right click on the PLAYPAL lump you copied, then import your new palette (Right click -> Palette -> Import from -> Choose PNG from the dropdown.
5. Make sure to generate new palettes (pain, pickup, radsuit etc.) by going to the Palette menu at the top, and choosing Generate Palettes. You can also generate a new COLORMAP, but this depends on whether you actually changed the palette significantly. Changing the green range to teal for example works just fine with the existing COLORMAP.
6. You're done!

[ReaperAA]

Well first of all, you need to know what files(lumps) inside the wads are responsible for displaying the colors in the game. These are PLAYPAL and COLORMAP. The PLAYPAL contains the 14 sets of 256 colors that are displayed by the 8-bit software renderer at a time (only one set displayed at a time and the 13 extra sets are for item pickup tints and blood tints). The COLORMAP lump is used to define how the colors of the PLAYPAL are used. It contains 34 rows that map colors decreasing in brightness within the PLAYPAL palette chosen at that time.

 

To keep things simple for now, we will just keep ourselves to PLAYPAL editing.

 

To begin, you need to download SLADE. It's a wad editing tool. Use this to open Doom.wad or Doom2.wad and copy the PLAYPAL lump. Now create a new wad file and paste the PLAYPAL lump in it and then save it. Once you have done the above steps, click the PLAYPAL wad and you will see this.

 

Then you can select the colors and right click on them to change their colors. Also see the options above the colors (which are shown in the yellow rectangle). Some of these are as follows:

 

1) "Save" and "Revert" are used to save or revert any changes made to the palette.

 

2) "Palette <- 1/14 ->". This is used to move between the 14 sets of 256 colors that are used in doom. To keep things simple, just keep it at 1/14. You can use the "Generate Palettes" option just below it to automatically generate the rest of the sets.

 

3) At the right most are options like "Colourise", "Tint", "Invert", "Tweak", "Gradient" can be used to modify the colors. You can use these to modify all 256 colors of a set or just a few of the colors by click LMB and dragging the mouse to select a few of them. Just experiment with them to get an idea of how things work.

 

4) Once you are done with the changes to a set. Use the "Generate Palettes" option to make the equivalent changes to the rest of the 13 sets.

 

Note that you can also check the PLAYPAL of wads with custom PLAYPAL lumps (like Eviternity which contains tealish greens) for reference. Its not really that hard once you get the hang of it. I learned all this just a few months ago.

Edited March 14, 2022 by ReaperAA