Palette change

[wesleyjohnson]

I did not imply a disaster. I stated that it will undo much level developer work, and change the levels appearance.
So, who is going to elect themselves to do this total makeover of appearance, and will anyone else be able to re-edit it afterwards.

Each level developer has already tuned the appearance of their map, and some of us spent considerable time at it.
You are stepping on the toes of every level developer in wanting to go back and re-tune the appearance of all their levels. Sorry, I could try find a more subtle way to say that, but I think it is time to say it plainly enough to be sure. Changing the appearance may be desired by you, but those who made the levels may not want their appearance changed.

FreeDoom is not a totally new game, it is a separately generated Doom without the legal entanglements of the original. It is tied to that mission and thus should be seeking to be as close as the "legally separate generation" necessity allows. This mission does not allow FreeDoom to explore all the wad modifications and enhanced lumps that are possible. The PWADs are high priority in the FreeDoom mission that I remember.

I can see a new palette that has colors close to the original, as a legal issue.
A new palette, just to be different, is an entirely different matter.
A new look and appearance, requires discussion as to what that appearance will be and what effect it has on all the PWAD.
A radically different appearance will cause difficulties with existing work.

If we want a totally new game, we can start a new WAD. Call it FreeWAD or something. It can throw off all the encumbrances of having to retain compatibility.

FreeDoom could also have enhancement packs to be downloaded separately.
A dark palette, a different monster mix, a dark music enhancement are possibilities.
There is too much argument about changing FreeDoom, again, every 3 to 6 months.

Lastly, Is this something that cannot be done just by altering your Gamma controls. You can make it darker that way too. DoomLegacy has the Gamma, bright, and black level controls, and other ports have color balancing controls too.

[Mithran Denizen]

wesleyjohnson said:

I did not imply a disaster. I stated that it will undo much level developer work, and change the levels appearance.

How much of your work is honestly 'undone' by shifting the hues of two color ranges slightly? Come on. If you're talking about PWAD authors rather than yourself, then their meticulous work is already more 'undone' in Freedoom by the fact that all the textures look different from Doom's, not to mention that all of their maps are suddenly populated with drastically different looking monsters, some of which look downright stupid by comparison.

Anyway, significantly changing the game's appearance is still the most persuasive part of this idea, because it might help Freedoom stand out a bit more as a valid entity in itself, rather than just being seen as a crappier version of Doom. If people are serious about wanting something that closely resembles Doom and plays like Doom does, then they'll probably just choose Doom, regardless.

So, who is going to elect themselves to do this total makeover of appearance, and will anyone else be able to re-edit it afterwards.

Obviously this thread would be much more worthwhile if Freedoom had some kind of acting 'art director', or at least some kind of artistic direction and/or guidelines. In the absence of such, however, I don't think this discussion can hurt anything. I seriously doubt that anyone will attempt to hijack Freedoom and impose a new palette against community consensus.

FreeDoom is not a totally new game, it is a separately generated Doom without the legal entanglements of the original. It is tied to that mission and thus should be seeking to be as close as the "legally separate generation" necessity allows. This mission does not allow FreeDoom to explore all the wad modifications and enhanced lumps that are possible. The PWADs are high priority in the FreeDoom mission that I remember.

I'd still argue that Freedoom should strive to be as different a game from Doom as possible, while preserving basic compatibility with its map and demo formats. Again, a little more distinctiveness could go a long way toward making Freedoom seem less like "that crappy Doom ripoff that nobody cares about" and more like an actual game that can stand on its own merits.

Nobody is talking about exploring any advanced "wad modifications" or "enhanced lumps", though; we're talking about not copying DOOM.WAD's PLAYPAL lump verbatim. The palette has been in the IWAD (and modifiable via PWADs) since the beginning.

Besides, Freedoom's maps make use of Boom extensions anyway, which is something I recall you fervently supporting in the past, so I'm not sure where this argument of purism is coming from all of the sudden. Seeking to be as close to Doom as legally possible might make more sense if the maps themselves were vanilla compatible, but as it stands, Freedoom can't even be be run under "vanilla" or "chocolate" style engines without the gross hack of having to replace all the Boom maps with vanilla ones. Even so, striving to emulate Doom as close as legally possible will result in, at best, an IWAD that is a Doom knockoff of worse quality. So long as some semblance of internal consistency can be maintained, then the more originality that can be breathed into the project, the better.

If we want a totally new game, we can start a new WAD. Call it FreeWAD or something. It can throw off all the encumbrances of having to retain compatibility.

Taking Freedoom in that direction would make it much more interesting and valid in my opinion, but it seems like a bit of a strawman argument. Nobody here has said anything about disregarding compatibility; we think Freedoom can stand as its own Doom-compatible game without having to ape its palette to the exact detail.

Lastly, Is this something that cannot be done just by altering your Gamma controls. You can make it darker that way too. DoomLegacy has the Gamma, bright, and black level controls, and other ports have color balancing controls too.

None of the ports that I use have any color balancing controls, but even if they did, that's not the point. The idea is to give Freedoom a more unique and consistent look, not to fiddle with engine-specific methods of tweaking the screen.

[edit: minor clarification]

[Quasar]

I think a new palette should be given fair consideration.

[Mithran Denizen]

Just for the hell of it, I decided to try a few of my own quick edits to the Freedoom palette (and thanks, RjY, for pointing out colormap.py and playpal.py, since they saved me from all the tedious work that I was dreading). After five revisions I managed to come up with one which isn't entirely terrible, shown here to the left, with the basic Doom palette on the right for comparison:



Most immediately noticable is that I softened up the blue range, which is what deserves the most attention, in my opinion. I think milder blues fit the freedoom vibe nicely, particularly with FWATER. Also, the projectiles from the plasmagun and BFG replacement look much less harsh.

Aside from that, I made a few other changes which I think fit the game. Next to the blues, the greens have undergone the largest transformation, mainly aiming to make the slime more distinctive, though I could probably get a similar effect without having to desaturate them as much. Browns have been saturated and hue-shifted a bit to give them a subtle 'pop' in places, as have some of the tan, pink, and orange ranges. All-in-all, I think the only ranges I left entirely untouched were greys, along with about half of the reds, though most of the total changes are relatively minor.

Anyway, I'm too lazy to take any useful screenshots right now, but I love how Freedoom MAP18 (I think; the outdoor one with the river visible at the start?) looks under these colors.

A PWAD with the compiled PLAYPAL+COLORMAP is here, in case anyone wants to try it for themselves:

http://www.mediafire.com/?qc7zhayfup7yfhq

I'm not saying that this particular palette is well-crafted enough to replace the current one at this stage, but at least I think it illustrates both how some changes can have a major effect on the game's appearance, while others can have a more subtle effect, all without making the levels look like complete horseshit.

[wesleyjohnson]

I resent you calling all our work "that crappy doom ripoff".
What insults are next.

I dread seeing any colors that "pop", this is not a cartoon like some other video games. Strong unrealistic colors is what I tried to avoid.

There have not been any limitations stated on what the design intention is, or what criteria might be applied. If it is just your opinion on what excites you then I every expectation of seeing it made over to look like some other game you like.

Past experience is that the first person to act does hijack the entire effort.

[fraggle]

I don't think it was intended as an insult, simply a frank and honest description of how many people perceive Freedoom. The appropriate response is not to take offense, but to examine the sources of that perception and address the problems that underly it. I expressed a similar sentiment the other day:

What I would say is that I think the lack of creative direction for Freedoom is actually a deterrent for people that might be interested in contributing. I get the feeling that informally Freedoom is something of a joke due to its mishmash of material and isn't really taken very seriously.

Quasar said:

I think a new palette should be given fair consideration.

Me too. I don't buy the arguments that it will break compatibility - I think it's quite possible to come up with a palette that gives a different feel to the game while broadly maintaining compatibility. I don't think anyone here is advocating creating an entirely new palette from scratch (which would break compatibility).

[Mithran Denizen]

wesleyjohnson said:

I resent you calling all our work "that crappy doom ripoff".
What insults are next.

I'm sorry that you took what I said as an insult, but I'm not trying to disrespect anyone's work at all, and to be honest, I don't personally see Freedoom so much as "that crappy Doom ripoff that nobody cares about", myself, but that's how I sense it's generally regarded in the wider Doom community. Aside from qualms about some overly derivative textures and a lack of internal consistency, I like Freedoom a lot. I do see plenty of potential for improvement, though, by which Freedoom could actually become something that people want to play for its own sake, instead of only when they don't already have doom(2).wad handy.

I dread seeing any colors that "pop", this is not a cartoon like some other video games. Strong unrealistic colors is what I tried to avoid.

Freedoom is already full of bright, cartoony, unrealistic colors and graphics (as is Doom itself), and many of them look great, so I'm not sure what your point is here. What else are the (awesome) player sprites if not bright, cartoony, and unrealistic?


In any case, aside from the blues and greens, most of the changes to the above palette are so minor that it's honestly hard to even notice them at all unless you're specifically looking to compare with the current palette. Did you even try it in-game before commenting? The greens are rather desaturated and dull, so you might even like it.

There have not been any limitations stated on what the design intention is, or what criteria might be applied.

Well there isn't really any stated artistic design direction being applied to the project as a whole, so I'm not sure what you mean here. If you're referring to my intention in devising the above palette, then yeah, I basically ran through all the Freedoom maps ad taedium and tweaked the color ranges in ways that seemed to fit the existing sprites and textures.

If it is just your opinion on what excites you then I every expectation of seeing it made over to look like some other game you like.

I think the same argument could be applied to everything else in the project, though; artists and level designers all create and submit the kind of stuff that they personally like, which is about the best you can expect here, given the absence of real artistic guidelines at this stage. I'm not sure why you're accusing me of ripping off another game's appearance, especially when Doom is my favorite game, and considering that Freedoom's main palette is currently identical to Doom's.

In any case, I'm not trying to force anything down anyone's throat by any means. I'd just feel like an idiot to be advocating a new palette without actually putting in any effort to create one myself.

[jute]

I've taken some shots using Mithran Denizen's palette, which I like. I also agree with his and fraggle's statements above. I would be happy to see this palette, or a tweaked version of it, included in FreeDoom.
http://www.jeshimoth.com/fdp1.png
http://www.jeshimoth.com/fdp2.png
http://www.jeshimoth.com/fdp3.png
http://www.jeshimoth.com/fdp4.png

[RjY]

I am vaguely amused by all this talk of making a new unique palette, and then the actual changes proposed are exactly the same blue-desaturating and green-brightening as all the fashionable modern megawads have done. Then it adds a nice helping of yellow flourescent highlighter pen... But that's just opinion and not what I want to talk about.

—

It's all very well loading a pwad with a new palette on top of Freedoom, but what happens when Freedoom is actually *built* with the new PLAYPAL in it? I think there is a lack of awareness of how deutex converts gifs to doom patches which I tried to draw attention to in my last post. I said:

Also, gifs don't store indexes into the PLAYPAL lump, they have their own palette. Consider what will happen if the PLAYPAL lump does not match the palette of all the gifs in Freedoom's source tree when Deutex tries to build the wad.

So let me try to explain a bit better.

If you put a new palette in, you have to convert every single graphic to use it, else deutex has to do a nearest-colour approximation and it won't get the same results as loading a new palette from a PWAD.

Take blue (rgb #0000ff) for example. In (free)doom's palette this is colour number 200 (starting from 0). The pixels in the patch lumps are still colour 200 even if you load a new palette that changes colour index 200 from pure blue to something else.

However Freedoom's build process (i.e. deutex) doesn't see colour indexes when it loads a gif to be converted into a doom patch - all it gets is a graphic image with blue pixels in it. Indeed, a large part of its job is, given some raw colour, to find the index of that colour in the palette.

So it tries to find blue in the palette. But in this proposed new palette #0000ff doesn't exist. Therefore deutex has to find the index of the colour in the palette that is the nearest approximation to pure blue. This will not be index 200.

Here is a comparison of Freedoom with test-06.wad loaded on top of it on the left, and Freedoom actually built with test-06.wad's PLAYPAL lump on the right.

Notice the one on the right is very much darker and has lost a lot of the range of blue shades. The water graphics use colours from Freedoom's original palette, which has darker blues than the new proposed one. So the blue shades in the water have all been compressed to a smaller range of shades at the dark end of the blue range in the new palette.

Assuming anyone's manageed to read this far, do you see what I mean now? This is why I think replacing the palette is a bad idea. The build process depends on it. All the graphics that have been made in the past 10 years for this project depend on it. You can't change it without serious pain.

[esselfortium]

That shouldn't really be that big of an issue. A few minutes with a lump editor could easily get all the graphics exported in the modified palette without any color conversion being done.

[jute]

RjY said:

I am vaguely amused by all this talk of making a new unique palette, and then the actual changes proposed are exactly the same blue-desaturating and green-brightening as all the fashionable modern megawads have done.

I am amused by all this talk of making a new game only to use the exact palette, down to the last color index, of another game. And really I haven't seen those minty greens in any megawads. Since the palette in question clearly does not break compatibility, and since it is very unlikely that correcting the color conversion issue would entail "serious pain", do you have any other objections to a tweak of FreeDoom's palette?

[Mithran Denizen]

If changing the source graphics themselves isn't desirable, might it also be possible to leave them as they are, convert them to patches and add them to the IWAD under the current Doom palette, and then insert a new Freedoom palette later during the build?

The benefit of this method would be that the Freedoom palette could be tweaked over time as needed without having to touch any of the graphics themselves, which could stay in the Doom palette and hence ensure that the new one is still generally compatible with Doom's.

I honestly haven't taken a particularly close look at the entirety of the Freedoom build process, but I can't imagine that it'd be particularly difficult to do this, though I'm probably mistaken, and it admittedly sounds kind of kludgy.

[Jon]

myk said:

You could say that more so about all of Freedoom's new graphics which often don't look great alongside stuff made for DOOM in a PWAD. The palette difference would be consistent along all the resources, new in Freedoom and old in the PWAD, so its incompatibility would be lesser than that of the new graphics that can clash stylistically. That is, someone downloading Freedoom and trying a mod with it will more likely notice the differences between the graphics from one and the other than any effect from the palette, which will only be more evident to someone trying the same mod with DOOM.

I see two artists (jute, essel) giving arguments in favor of trying a new palette, and two coders (jon, fraggle) which helped initiate the project years ago without much concern about artistic quality, as if it would come up anyway. That quality may indeed be arriving, but with proposals by artists that may ask for changes to allow it best.

That's a reasoned point.

(I always feel like adding a disclaimer to my posts: "I don't actually work on freedoom anymore! Perhaps my opinion isn't worth that much?")

I think the only way to advance the discussion would be for an active Freedoom committer to weigh in with their opinion.

[fraggle]

RjY said:

It's all very well loading a pwad with a new palette on top of Freedoom, but what happens when Freedoom is actually *built* with the new PLAYPAL in it?

I did wonder about this issue, but figured it was a problem that could be addressed later if necessary.

[wesleyjohnson]

I tried adjusting the palette before. After a week I realized that touching any of it involved checking every single texture and recoloring any where critical colors got damaged. I gave it up as a impractical.
I cannot find the forum post now, but I thought I had discussed it with fraggle.

Yes, the blues in the current palette are not satisfactory. That is where I started too. But the medium blue has to stay put because that is used by COMPBLUE which needs to look like "IBM blue" (a medium blue).
It cannot be allowed to become "baby blue", which is what happens when the blues are shifted lighter.
What I ended up with could only shift a 3 or 4 blues lighter, and it had to be very non-linear too.
The necessary blues are: sky blue, medium blue (for COMPBLUE), very dark blue for near darkness, and a graduation to darkness for each.
There is not enough palette to introduce more.

Touching any of the reds produces a pink somewhere. Cannot change blood red, and the bright red has to stay put for the red lights.

Everybody who contributed textures and levels to FreeDoom have already picked the tone and color they wanted. The palette may have been limited, but if they wanted a "baby blue" they would not have picked "medium blue". This is a game with twitching corpses and dark dungeons. Evenly lightening it up is not appropriate. Every visibly lighter color is going to have to be examined in every texture and every level to see what damage it does. It would be disrespectful of texture and level contributors to ignore the effects upon their work.

[RjY]

esselfortium said:
That shouldn't really be that big of an issue. A few minutes with a lump editor could easily get all the graphics exported in the modified palette without any color conversion being done.

Thanks, that is a good idea and I'm sorry I didn't think of it. I think it will still be a lot of tedious work to copy all the re-extracted graphic files back into their proper places in the tree, and check everything, though.

jute said:
I am amused by all this talk of making a new game only to use the exact palette, down to the last color index, of another game.

Haha, very funny. Good use of sarcasm and parodying my post, that part of which was probably rather rude and for which I apologise.

And really I haven't seen those minty greens in any megawads.

It does not have to be identical to make me think "oh this is just the same thing they did in blahblahblah.wad".

In this case I was immediately reminded of 1024clau.wad. Even though its green range had more of a yellow tint than a cyan one, it's the same base principle.

Since the palette in question clearly does not break compatibility, and since it is very unlikely that correcting the color conversion issue would entail "serious pain", do you have any other objections to a tweak of FreeDoom's palette?

I may strongly dislike the modern fashion of wads that change the palette, but that is just my opinion and clearly I am the only one who has it. Thanks to esselfortium's point I will concede that the pain will be less serious than I originally thought.

Jon said:
I think the only way to advance the discussion would be for an active Freedoom committer to weigh in with their opinion.

In a literal "who used git to commit this patch into the repository" sense, I am the most active recent committer, and I think it's pretty obvious what my opinion of changing the palette is. But I only make patches, not decisions, and I would also like to hear from someone higher up the pecking order.

[wesleyjohnson]

I contributed MAP09, MAP13 as of three months ago, and a spider-demon, and I worry about all the colors I picked wandering. On the spider-demon, those colors were picked from a much larger graduated color palette, then quantized into the closest palette colors. Graduated color painting was used. It is not a reversible operation.

Were you meaning only texture contributors perhaps ??

[hex11]

Wow, what a can of worms. This sort of major change should have been done much earlier, in design phase. And btw, this new palette is still very obviously derived from Doom. I'm not so sure it's going to really buy much in terms of legal protection. Sure, you can say it's not an exact copy, but that can also be argued for a slightly modified Doom sprite, texture, or map. Is this an exercise in fooling ourselves?

[Mithran Denizen]

Well, the current base lump which is used to generate Freedoom's 13 other palette variations and colormap during the build process (playpal-base.lmp) seems to be simply Doom's PLAYPAL lump ripped straight from the IWAD, identical down to the byte, though only the first 768 of those bytes seems to be actually taken into account when rebuilding the PLAYPAL and COLORMAP lumps that go into freedoom.wad, anyway.

With that in mind, this isn't really a legal debate, in my opinion, but an aesthetic one, though I do think that anything which differentiates the look of Freedoom from Doom (such as the proposed dehacked string replacements, for another example) might make the project less of a potential target for legal action in the first place.

[Jon]

hex11 said:

Wow, what a can of worms. This sort of major change should have been done much earlier, in design phase. And btw, this new palette is still very obviously derived from Doom. I'm not so sure it's going to really buy much in terms of legal protection. Sure, you can say it's not an exact copy, but that can also be argued for a slightly modified Doom sprite, texture, or map. Is this an exercise in fooling ourselves?

I recall the legal discussion about PLAYPAL concluded that it wasn't copyright-able. I may recall wrong, but I'd ask that anyone wanting to discuss the legal stuff dig up the old thread on the subject (after reading it, of course!)

[fraggle]

Jon said:

I recall the legal discussion about PLAYPAL concluded that it wasn't copyright-able. I may recall wrong, but I'd ask that anyone wanting to discuss the legal stuff dig up the old thread on the subject (after reading it, of course!)

I refer you to my comment earlier in this thread.

[fabian]

fraggle said:

I refer you to my comment earlier in this thread.

Do you mean that sentence in Latin?

In this context, I wonder why the lumps/cph/misc-lumps/playpal-base.lmp file has a size of 10kB and contains all 14 palettes if only the 768 byte sized base palette is needed to generate the others.

[fabian]

Mithran Denizen said:

A PWAD with the compiled PLAYPAL+COLORMAP is here, in case anyone wants to try it for themselves:

Unfortunately, that download link is broken. Does someone still have this PWAD with the changed palette available somewhere? I'd love to check it out myself and see how Freedoom looks with it.

[fabian]

fabian said:

Unfortunately, that download link is broken. Does someone still have this PWAD with the changed palette available somewhere? I'd love to check it out myself and see how Freedoom looks with it.

Alright, I somehow managed to recreate the palette from the image posted in
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1007754.
(Please feel free to ask for the code if you are interested.)

It is available here:
http://greffrath.com/~fabian/moddedpalette06.zip

If you're asking me, it's looking plain great. It gives the game a fresh new feeling without changing its visual appearance too much away from Doom.

[Gez]

fabian said:

Alright, I somehow managed to recreate the palette from the image posted in
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1007754.
(Please feel free to ask for the code if you are interested.)

You wrote code for that? SLADE 3 can already import images into palettes.

[fabian]

Gez said:

You wrote code for that? SLADE 3 can already import images into palettes.

Damn, yes, I wrote some C-Code using libjpeg for that... :/

[andrewj]

fabian said:

Alright, I somehow managed to recreate the palette from the image posted in
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1007754.
(Please feel free to ask for the code if you are interested.)

Thanks fabian.

I see it mainly changes the green, blue and yellow ramps. I like the new greens and blues, but not the greenification of the yellow colors.