True color texture packs?

[Blastfrog]

I was thinking, all those texture packs with custom textures, why not distribute them as true color and let the mapper convert it to indexed? Custom palettes seem to be getting more and more popular, so I figure true color sources would be useful to use the textures under any palette.

[RaphaelMode]

Egregious Ease of Experiencing Everlasting Egregore Expenditures sure will be truecolor. It doesn't seem to work with any palette in fact.

[Shadow Hog]

I'm more annoyed that some of the texture rips from other games on Realm667 are pre-converted to the Doom palette, which is great if you're making a map for a source port that doesn't support true-color textures, but frustrating if you're making a map for one that does, and didn't want the information loss from the source data that's inherent to palette conversions.

[plums]

I agree that having non-paletted images would be nice, especially for wads using custom palettes. But converting true-colour images into indexed ones and not having them look awful can often be a major part of the process of making textures. Especially with a palette as wonky as Doom's.

In theory you could have both true-colour and indexed images included but that might be too much extra work for people to bother with.

[TehRealSalt]

How would it be extra work? I'm thinking it would be easier to only do true-color, and not bother indexing it since ZDoom automatically palettes it for you (not that a pre-indexed version isn't useful, especially for other source ports). If you have an indexed version, then you most likely would also have a true-color version too. It would be just an extra set of files you insert in the wad.

The only cases I can think of where a true-color version would be not worth it is if the texture was from the start designed to be in the Doom palette (I've made some textures that look bad when not paletted, so it is possible), or if you're really picky about space, but neither of those are really because it's more work. Space is also typically a non-issue nowadays too, because of our Computers of the Future.

[plums]

I don't know how other people do it but when I make textures it's not a case of working in true colour until the very end and then converting to a palette. Rather I tend to work with the image in a way that will look OK when it's paletted, and often convert parts of it into Doom's palette and then mix those with other layers... there's also a lot of just playing around with colours etc. and trying things to see what will look good and what won't. In most cases it's probably possible to have a high-colour image until near the end but I would have to do things in a way specifically for this end goal, which is why I said more work.

ZDoom's auto-indexing is also quite simple, just a basic undithered RGB match, which definitely doesn't look as good on all images as other colour matching plus being able to dither, etc.

I 100% agree with Shadow Hog about the pre-paletted R667 textures though, and I think it makes sense to distribute the true colour (or non-Doom-paletized) textures when converting to Doom's palette is the last thing done, and done with just a simple SLADE conversion or whatever.