Quake palette with no duplicates

[H1CC]

I've had issue with the duplicate colors in Quake's palette as well as three other issues in Quake's palette.
01. That some hues are almost completely unavailable to reach in Quake's palette, namely brighter shades of green, pink, and neon cyan (halfway between green and blue)
02. That dithering images that don't quite fit with quake's palette WITHOUT using fullbright colors is a hassle.
03. That Quake's colors are so heavily... well... dark that you can't really get lighter colors in just plain brightness when you really need them or even want them for design purposes.

Some time ago I created my own personal edit of Quake's 'standard palette' that addressed these 3 issues in the process of removing duplicates.
This palette keeps all the original Quake palette colors as is and keeps exactly one instance of all the 'duplicate colors'... using all remaning palette indices to achieve the hues Quake's palette was 'missing'... and scaled/shaded across these ranges appropriately.
I haven't yet converted it to a workable ''qpalette.lmp'' or even figured out how to get it working for textures yet but the palette work is done.
Screenshots are provided here, let me know what you make of it, and go ahead and ask any questions you want about how exactly I arrived at the specific color values I used for the 'modified' color indices or anythin' else about this...



Highlighted with a red title bar is the modified palette from the original on the left.
Download
Feel free to show me what you can do with it.


I can't really put a readme on this thing 'cause it's so small-scale a mod (as of yet anyway) but you know the drill.
Don't steal credit, don't distribute incomplete, don't sell or otherwise use for profit, otherwise, send it to anyone you want.
I can't really myself credit anyone else's work on this save for the resources used.
Credit goes to id Software and their artists for the original palette, PakExplorer for getting out quake one textures, Wally for readin' .wad files, BSP2WAD utility for gettin' some textures from custom maps from time to time, and Paint Shop Pro 8 for the tools to do the actual palette work.

[gdiddy62]

Interesting, I'll have to try it out.

[adib]

I'm working on a colorful mod, using a texture set I made back in 2004.

I'm using hi-color textures overriding the WAD ones, running the level in Darkplaces. But it's intended to be compatible with WinQuake.

I made a color palette for my textures using Photoshop, that looks like this:



Then I used Adqedit to convert the PAL file to LMP and generate the colormap. No luck at all. The colors are completely screwed.

H1CC, I'd like to join forces to make it work and post a tutorial here. What do you think?

Also, what tools are you using?

[Spirit]

I can't really put a readme on this thing 'cause it's so small-scale a mod (as of yet anyway) but you know the drill.

Yes you can! Please do. Otherwise, how do you expect people to credit the author of that random zip file they found somewhere.

FYI the last row in the palette are special colours, good engines display them in full brightness no matter what. Quake palette - Quake Wiki

One thing you might want to consider is using similarly perceived color changes in your rows. Right now your palette has very different lightless distributions. You can use the HCL or Cie L*a*b color space to get more "logical" (for the human vision) distributed colors.

[Spiney]

adib, the order the colors are in is very important. You cannot simply generate 256 colors and expect it to work. It needs careful consideration as each row has a specific use-case.
I've updated the wiki with the palette files: http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette

[Phenom]

I feel like Austin Powers right now >>
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfYBsuBzulE]Whoopty Do, What does it all mean? - YouTube[/ame]

What does this mean? I've never messed with Quake pallets before.

[adib]

@Phenom, heheh, just follow Spiney's link and read on.

@Spiney and Spirit, thanks for the link. Valuable resource there.

Update! I managed to run my level using this palette posted above. But there is a problem:



Everything is fine under the light, the blues and yellows are correct. But the shadows look ugly and wrong. I believe it's because the colormap is wrong. Maybe this messy palette can't generate a proper colormap. Or maybe Adqedit can't generate a colormap based on this scrambled-colors palette.

Spiney, you are right about the color order and my palette. I tried to manually organize the colors, but it shouldn't be done this way. There must be some method to place my colors over Quake palette, but I still don't know how.

P.S.: nevermind the weapon and HUD, I intend to redesign them as well.

[H1CC]

I'm surprised you were able to actually use palette-modified textures in a map ingame in a Q1 engine of sorts with that palette of yours.
If you want to do well with that I REALLY must stress you remove as many 'duplicates' as you can... it's a palette... you will only need at least one index in your palette for the color you want...
So if you use too few different colors in a sort of 256 total colors your range of different colors you can actually use will be sorely limited.
Just flesh it out with as many different other colors than you need AT FIRST so that way you can still have more different colors for other textures and hud elements and crosshairs and so on...
You gotta have them in specific ordering...
it doesn't matter EVERYWHERE that it be totally ordered out but yes it is one of the single most important things in a '256 color game palette' of any sort that they be specifically ordered...
I'd also recommend that even though your palette is made for a 'bright' design you at least have some more... grimoire... colors in there just in case.
After all even Quake one had it's 'bright' colors for things where it's 'dark and drab and gloomy' colors would not suffice. Turn that on its head maybe? Also as Spiney pointed out bear in mind the last two rows are generally 'fullbright'...

[Mindf!3ldzX]

If you can figure out what colors are being affected in the HUD / Weapon models / leave those unchanged so that they do not break your basic HUD in your average engine of quake.

This is really neat. Quake with colors is wild. So used to browns n more browns

[adib]

H1CC, thanks for the reply. This palette was generated by Photoshop. I just pasted my textures on a big RGB image and converted it to "Indexed", creating a "Local (Perceptual)" 224 colors (256 - 32 fullbrights) palette.

So far I was just trying to make it work. Seems I'm getting close. Now my plan is to try to make some kind of palette converter that can organize these cartoony saturated colors in a Quake palette fashion. Then I'll take care of duplicates, then I'll generate a colormap.

You're right about including darker colors.

You guys are being really helpful. I'll keep you posted.

[Spiney]

I'm surprised you were able to actually use palette-modified textures in a map ingame in a Q1 engine of sorts with that palette of yours.
If you want to do well with that I REALLY must stress you remove as many 'duplicates' as you can... it's a palette... you will only need at least one index in your palette for the color you want...

I haven't actually made a palette myself, but aren't the textures indexed to the palette file? So removing duplicates might mess up some textures? Maybe it doesn't matter much and the improved colormap would still be better.

Also, any mirror for adqedit still up somewhere?
*edit: quake terminus to teh rescue
http://www.quaketerminus.com/tools.shtml

[Spirit]

Correct, that's what happened to the HUD and weapon skin.