New PLAYPAL proposal

[Donowa]

already made a pr for this: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/pull/1368#issuecomment-2101849335

this is a palette that i and ugljesa11ugi made (i did the bulk of the work, ugljesa11ugi did the blue and red ranges before me)

the main things i wanted to do making this were to implement hueshifting (tints yellow in light and blue in dark, common principle of pixel art) and minimize the amount of tones taken directly from the id palette

Edited May 9 by Donowa

[Shepardus]

I'm skeptical that this is an improvement over the original palette and not just change for the sake of change. It feels like everything has a bluish or yellowish tint and is overall less vibrant. This may be fine for the base WAD, but it significantly affects the look and feel of PWADs, particularly those with custom textures but not custom palettes. Some WADs where the difference is obvious and, in my opinion, not for the better, are My Soul Trapped in a WIN98 PC (the whites and light blues in particular), Doom 2 Reloaded (the black and white tiles in MAP11), Oceanside (feels like L.A. haze rather than sunny Oceanside), DIY (heavy reliance on solid colors means it's very noticeable when those colors are changed), Rio de j4neiro (again, lots of solid colors; blues are the most jarring change, but red also turns to orange and magenta looks like pink) and Pina Colada (MAP10 sky among other things, TBH I'm surprised this WAD doesn't have a custom palette).

[SilverMiner]

What's actual status of playpal?

Has Freedoom been using a non free asset playpal all the time? Or is it really free to include anywhere?

[Donowa]

3 hours ago, Shepardus said:

I'm skeptical that this is an improvement over the original palette and not just change for the sake of change. It feels like everything has a bluish or yellowish tint and is overall less vibrant. This may be fine for the base WAD, but it significantly affects the look and feel of PWADs, particularly those with custom textures but not custom palettes. Some WADs where the difference is obvious and, in my opinion, not for the better, are My Soul Trapped in a WIN98 PC (the whites and light blues in particular), Doom 2 Reloaded (the black and white tiles in MAP11), Oceanside (feels like L.A. haze rather than sunny Oceanside), DIY (heavy reliance on solid colors means it's very noticeable when those colors are changed), Rio de j4neiro (again, lots of solid colors; blues are the most jarring change, but red also turns to orange and magenta looks like pink) and Pina Colada (MAP10 sky among other things, TBH I'm surprised this WAD doesn't have a custom palette).

ugljesa11ugi did the blue ranges transitioning into cyan, that wasn't something i did

i made the magentas pink ao that they can transition smoother into the fleshy pinks, and as for the reds i was thinking of tweaking the hueshift for the red ranges in particular since i didn't like how quickly they faded into orange/purple

also, i made the flesh pinks get less saturated down the color ramp (along with making the browns more red in hue) so that they could transition smoother into brown on the colormap

Edited May 9 by Donowa

[MrFlibble]

I like the idea of a new palette, but indeed on the screenshots there's a noticeable leaning into blueish colours, as if someone took the original images in the vanilla palette and added a blue tint, similar to how some displays allow to reduce the amount of reds, greens or blues in their presets.

 

Generally, I'm not entirely sure if it can be at all accomplished to alter the palette in some meaningful way outside of just a few tweaks without breaking PWAD compatibility. Will be happy to be proven wrong, but so far it seems like a custom palette would work best with resources created for such palette from the start, but this just contradicts the idea of Freed∞m being PWAD-compatible.

[Jayextee]

6 hours ago, Donowa said:

(tints yellow in light and blue in dark, common principle of pixel art)

Whereas it may be common in pixel art, I'd say it's not the wisest "principle" (to wit, personal caveat, it's more of a trend) to implement in a game that itself darkens to black; whereby we should assume that lights are white as the exact opposite of black.

[Lila Feuer]

Tbqh I adore the way this looks as just an alternate look to Doom and would hate if this was lost for being rejected.

[Donowa]

54 minutes ago, MrFlibble said:

Generally, I'm not entirely sure if it can be at all accomplished to alter the palette in some meaningful way outside of just a few tweaks without breaking PWAD compatibility. Will be happy to be proven wrong, but so far it seems like a custom palette would work best with resources created for such palette from the start, but this just contradicts the idea of Freed∞m being PWAD-compatible.

i've tried to make this work with pwads without glaring flaws (like making 247 pitch black and having the flesh pinks still transition into saturated red)

as for the hueshifting, i had the lighting system of doom in mind when i made it and was intentionally trying to make it tint blue in the dark and yellow in the light (which can make texture choices pop a lot more and create a striking contrast between dark and light areas). i will however acknowledge that i might've gone a little too far in some places (like with the red tones)

 

another reason why i decided to add this type of hueshifting was to try and help the game have a more unique visual identity compared to doom, which would help to shake the perception of freedoom being "dollarstore doom"

Edited May 9 by Donowa

[MrFlibble]

3 hours ago, Donowa said:

i decided to add this type of hueshifting was to try and help the game have a more unique visual identity

Again, I like this idea quite a lot, but, like I said above, I wonder if this can be truly realised, considering that Freed∞m assets, especially textures, are made in a similar visual style to those in original Doom, so they are effectively intended to "work" with the vanilla palette.

 

So if you take vanilla Doom and apply a palette that has similar changes to yours, I doubt that anyone would argue that it has acquired a "new identity" by doing so.

 

Conversely, if you take Back to Saturn X or Ancient Aliens, you might very well say that their visual identity is different from that in vanilla Doom, but it is accomplished by using both a different palette and a set of different textures, tailored to that palette.

 

I can imagine a free IWAD project that would completely overhaul its textures (and use a different palette), but pick and arrange them in such a way that they would still work with vanilla PWADs, or at least with those where no custom textures are used. In fact, that would be a fun project to explore (and certainly not easy to make!), but it seems to be a goal way outside the current scope of Freed∞m.

 

That said, perhaps you can improve on your current version of the palette based on critical feedback from the others? I've not tried it in-game yet, but I can tell that judging by the screenshots, only those with a lot of metal gray seem to be overly leaning into the blueish hue; those where brown is more dominant in the textures, seem fine overall to me.

[ax34]

For some strange reason i like this palette.

Also: does it preserve brightnesses of colors? I think it should.

[Lila Feuer]

3 hours ago, ax34 said:

For some strange reason i like this palette.

It's very Amiga-esque imo.

[Dark Pulse]

18 hours ago, SilverMiner said:

What's actual status of playpal?

Has Freedoom been using a non free asset playpal all the time? Or is it really free to include anywhere?

There really is no such thing as a "non-free asset playpal," because that's not something that can be protected in the first place.

 

All a playpal literally is is an index of 256 colors. That's generic enough that you can't really copyright that, since it's akin to saying "I own copyright over any image that is displayed with these 256 colors," which is absurd.

 

So basically, it's not something copyrightable. Of course, they could choose a different set of colors if they wanted to (that's the entire point of the PLAYPAL, after all), but obviously to maintain compatibility with Doom and Doom 2 PWAD content, that must be identical.

 

Hence the issues being brought up by others in this thread - it'd be deviating from Doom/Doom II.

Edited May 10 by Dark Pulse

[kalensar]

I have a lot of different PLAYPAL made by various folks. I wouldnt mind adding this one to my collection.

SLADE can generate many different PLAYPAL as well. My favorites tend to be Vanilla, PlayPal Plus and  D4V. 

[SilverMiner]

7 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

There really is no such thing as a "non-free asset playpal," because that's not something that can be protected in the first place.

Might sound funny for you, but in my country individual colors can be protected by our trademark/copyright laws

 

[Donowa]

55 minutes ago, SilverMiner said:

Might sound funny for you, but in my country individual colors can be protected by our trademark/copyright laws

 

yeah, one of the other reasons why i made this was because i wasn't sure about if the playpal can be copyrighted in other countries

freedoom is a project that's supposed to be available internationally

Edited May 10 by Donowa

[SilverMiner]

1 hour ago, Donowa said:

yeah, one of the other reasons why i made this was because i wasn't sure about if the playpal can be copyrighted in other countries

freedoom is a project that's supposed to be available internationally

I think there's no need to worry about the doom palette cuz I've seen it distributed within some pixel art programs: free or paid - nobody cares

[Donowa]

tried tweaking the palette to make the hueshifts for the reds and the whites less severe

[Donowa]

tweaked the palette, changed up the grays browns and greens (greens are less saturated thanks to Anonysussy, and the grays are pure gray with little to no hueshifting) as well as tweaking the pinks to work better on the colormap

[Obsidian Plague]

why would we even need this? what's wrong with doom's PLAYPAL?

[Anonymoister]

53 minutes ago, Obsidian Plague said:

why would we even need this? what's wrong with doom's PLAYPAL?

Like they said, there's some chances of risk of copyright infringement and Freedoom's assets supposed to be free to use and royalty-free.

[Donowa]

also the doom palette has some ranges that don't transition as well into others (namely the reds magentas and pinks) as well as some ranges that leave a bit to be desired (like the blues)

[Darkcrafter07]

This looks pretty nice, you know I was working on some levels trying to imitate some Doom Eternal levels and one thing I noticed that Duke Nukem 3D palette gets the job done better than Doom's. After a few days of tweaking in Photoshop and Cyopaled I came up with a modified DN3D palette suited best for Doom Eternal. Photoshop really has some abilities to tweak color ranges with hue-saturation and other effects found in "Image" context menu, of course it affects palette and after a couple of such tweaking lapses it does wonders to match Doom Eternal screenshots better. I thought if somebody could find it nice.

Eternal_palette.zip

[MrFlibble]

@Darkcrafter07, looks nice! I had to re-generate palettes in Slade though, because your DOOM version PWAD did not work for me correctly in FastDoom 0.99 and MBF 2.04, as the palette would become garbled every time a screen flashing event (item pickup, being attacked) happened. Haven't tried out the Duke Nukem 3D one.

 

@Donowa, I tried your new version of the palette, and while it is workable, I think that it needs more tweaking.

 

Here's an example from E1M2 (first vanilla palette, then yours):

• the green stonework on the left has been partially desaturated into grey
• the gradual shading of green on the medikit has turned into an abrupt change from bright to dark
• the shading on the outer rim of the Poison sign has turned into a colour that is more contrasting with the rest of the yellow part
• the shadow on the floor has become less clearly defined and brighter
• the darkened part of the ceiling has become a patchwork of bright and dark pixels

Maybe I screwed up on converting the palette into PLAYPAL and generating the colourmaps, but in this state it is not an improvement over vanilla.

Edited May 11 by MrFlibble

[magicsofa]

8 hours ago, Anonymoister said:

Like they said, there's some chances of risk of copyright infringement and Freedoom's assets supposed to be free to use and royalty-free.

 

There is no risk here. As has already been explained, a palette is just a collection of color values and can't even be copyrighted in most countries. If your country is stupid enough to allow copyrighting colors, it still doesn't matter because nobody ever copyrighted these colors in that country. Furthermore, wow, what a stupid country.

 

On 5/9/2024 at 8:22 AM, Lila Feuer said:

Tbqh I adore the way this looks as just an alternate look to Doom and would hate if this was lost for being rejected.

 

It could just exist as a custom palette. For the average end-user though, I would lean away from including it by default in an IWAD because many people won't even know it is there and because it won't play nice with every PWAD. And, in order to give the option of original palette, you would then have to include that separately with an explanation, which to me seems cumbersome.

Edited May 11 by magicsofa

[Darkcrafter07]

Wow, you tested it so thoroughly, it's not meant to improve vanilla, it's for doom eternal but honestly, duke nukem 3d palette fits eternal theme better, the color balance is different in comparison to vanilla. Sorry if that looked a bit misleading.

Doom_Eternal_palette_comparison.zip

[MrFlibble]

@Darkcrafter07, apologies for the confusion, the screenshots and comments in my previous post are referring to @Donowa's palette, not yours!

 

I've looked at your palette too, it's fairly nice, I like the softer reds, but with Freed∞m's assets (I've tried it with the current IWADs and with some old versions as well), there's a tendency for brown to fade into green for some reason (vanilla palette below yours):

 

On another note, @Redneckerz compiled a list of custom PLAYPALs a while ago:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2180510

I have just tried out some of those, and I think that MBPal is a nice variation on the default palette.

[Donowa]

another thing, i'd consider most of the pwad compatibility examples that you listed to be edge cases, and there's already plenty of assets in freedoom that could be incompatible in very specific edge cases in much more glaring ways (namely textures with text, or the marble faces that depict the freedoom equivalents of the doom 2 monsters) that won't be fixed for the sake of readability in the majority of wads. i don't consider the changes in this proposed playpal to be great enough to fix in its current state, considering how the point of it is to give freedoom a fresher look that still follows the same design philosophy as the textures in fd.

 

Edited May 11 by Donowa

[MrFlibble]

@Donowa, I decided to try a little experiment: I took your latest version of the palette, but used the COLORMAP lump from @ReaperAA's ColdPal.  The result looks much better and removes all of my previous criticisms:

I'm not sure if you were providing your own COLORMAP version, since I've not found it at GitHub, so I had to resort to an auto-generated one by Slade in my previous experiments.

[Donowa]

12 minutes ago, MrFlibble said:

@Donowa, I decided to try a little experiment: I took your latest version of the palette, but used the COLORMAP lump from @ReaperAA's ColdPal.  The result looks much better and removes all of my previous criticisms:

I'm not sure if you were providing your own COLORMAP version, since I've not found it at GitHub, so I had to resort to an auto-generated one by Slade in my previous experiments.

i suppose i could try making a manually edited colormap, but the colormap in current fd is auto generated by a python script, and i have no clue about coding to actually fix it

[MrFlibble]

Yeah, I remember about the script, but from what I can tell the resulting file is nearly completely identical to that from original Doom (I just ran a comparison between COLORMAP lumps extracted from the nightly builds and from Doom shareware 1.9, and there were only 10 bytes different out of 8 704 bytes in either file).

 

My guess is that the entire script's purpose is to avoid including the original vanilla COLORMAP, which is still id/Bethesda property, by generating an analogous-but-free replica. If that is correct, using a custom COLORMAP would effectively remove the need for the script altogether. Or, it could be rewired to produce a COLORMAP lump of your own creation, better suited to your palette.