Noir palette

[RSSwizard]

experimenting with this, inspired by a doom palette
red and gray sin city style noir

[RSSwizard]

ohhh...
this is coming out REAL good...

[RSSwizard]

In Noir RED usually means something full of Passion, Noteworthy, or something Real Dangerous and I think I cut a good balance here. That's the reason Green is red and a little bit of Blue is, but the golden range (strip #2) is definitely Red. Seems in many cases things that are green are really dangerous in x-piratez, and also if grass wasnt red it would be gray and would be hard to distinguish.
(edit: gameplay screen)

[ontherun]

very good experiment, bravo! Fonts are also very futuristic and cool, might these be a mod to download?

[Berggen]

I would love this palette for the night vision options.

[efrenespartano]

experimenting with this, inspired by a doom palette
red and gray sin city style noir

Excellent experiment! It definitely gave me Sin City vibes. Any plans on making it a submod and release it?

very good experiment, bravo! Fonts are also very futuristic and cool, might these be a mod to download?

It's the Condensed Font, grab it from here! Quite interesting to use, although a bit difficult to read on smaller screens.

[RSSwizard]

Condensed Font is excellent and I won't play the game any other way. But it has an error I can't fix where the large text is maybe one or two pixels too high and it makes options (we can now research) in the research menu get clipped. I think even compressing the Large Text by truncating 1 pixel off the bottom of it might fix it well enough. Otherwise the only way condensed font can get better is if shading is added to the small text the same way default (amiga) text is in X-P

For the Noir palette unfortunately it cant be used just for night mode because that simply monochromes almost everything to one range of 16 colors on the palette. If you want some effect like that just set the night vision color to 0 or such and itll use the greys from the first 16 colors. But it wont change anything except the landscape (personally I often set it to 3 or 4 so the night vision scape looks Green, like actual night vision).

If I release it as a submod (palette) it will actually have a mustard Yellow used for the purple color range, because in Sin City red and dark gray were the primary colors... but occasionally for something obscene or devilish it would be a potent Yellow. That was missed on the doom version of the palette (I think on the doom palette the place to put Yellow would be the five or so colors dedicated to Purple, so it would put a yellow arcing around cacodemon fireballs). Maybe also the golden color used for the archvile fire. Im not the author of that palette though.

[Fugazza]

Quick question since you're CLEARLY talented with color and graphics... Can you... make a colorblind compliant palette? Just asking

PS: This Noir palette is AMAZING! Maybe I'm partial with the condensed font, but the color scheme? Sweet!

[RSSwizard]

Quick question since you're CLEARLY talented with color and graphics... Can you... make a colorblind compliant palette? Just asking

Id absolutely be able to but im not exactly sure how color blindness works or what people see when they're looking at a color they don't pick up on. For example I have the reverse of color blindness when it comes to Ultraviolet - I can immediately tell if im looking at UV even though humans aren't supposed to be able to see it.

edit - one problem I just noticed thinking about it is our monitors and tvs do not actually have saturated Yellow color. So I probably couldn't actually do it. If someone can't see Red or Green then all they're supposedly going to see on the screen is a bluish grayscale image which may be more bluish if the other channels are diminished. Although its a trick of the eye and our brain we see good yellow and gold and brown tones due to mixing colors that doesn't work on someone who can't see red/green because the yellow is not authentic.

If I made a palette with yellow and blue colors I think they would then honestly just see an even more blue shifted palette than usual. The reason why they see bluish colored everything on tvs and monitors by the way is they see brightness where the red/green is but no color at all, but blue is a component of pixel brightness, so its always there except in predominantly red/orange/brown/yellow/green tones and saturated versions of them (less saturated more greyish versions have Blue so would appear bluish).

Someone who cannot see Yellow or Blue will see the red and green and thus have more color available to them. But this is the rarer color blindness type unless ive got it backwards. For them most things will have a muddy brown kinda look I think except for colors that are explicitly red or green... blue lends brightness only and maybe not too much of it. The color they see is probably hellish looking.

[Fugazza]

Id absolutely be able to but im not exactly sure how color blindness works or what people see when they're looking at a color they don't pick up on. For example I have the reverse of color blindness when it comes to Ultraviolet - I can immediately tell if im looking at UV even though humans aren't supposed to be able to see it.

edit - one problem I just noticed thinking about it is our monitors and tvs do not actually have saturated Yellow color. So I probably couldn't actually do it. If someone can't see Red or Green then all they're supposedly going to see on the screen is a bluish grayscale image which may be more bluish if the other channels are diminished. Although its a trick of the eye and our brain we see good yellow and gold and brown tones due to mixing colors that doesn't work on someone who can't see red/green because the yellow is not authentic.

If I made a palette with yellow and blue colors I think they would then honestly just see an even more blue shifted palette than usual. The reason why they see bluish colored everything on tvs and monitors by the way is they see brightness where the red/green is but no color at all, but blue is a component of pixel brightness, so its always there except in predominantly red/orange/brown/yellow/green tones and saturated versions of them (less saturated more greyish versions have Blue so would appear bluish).

Someone who cannot see Yellow or Blue will see the red and green and thus have more color available to them. But this is the rarer color blindness type unless ive got it backwards. For them most things will have a muddy brown kinda look I think except for colors that are explicitly red or green... blue lends brightness only and maybe not too much of it. The color they see is probably hellish looking.

Yeah... might be a tricky thing to do. I started to read again about it and yeah... Sorry for hijacking the thread! And thanks for the answer! Again, despite not being able to really appreciate in full the Noir palette, it DOES look amazing!

[RSSwizard]

Actually somehow it reminds me of Laser Squad...

[efrenespartano]

RSSWizard, could we use your Noir palette for the DOOM mod we're making? I think it would be perfect for the late Hell stages. With credits, of course!

Im not the author of that palette though.

Still, you adapted it to the OXC format, innit? who was the original creator?

[RSSwizard]

There's already a noir palette for doom though. The best thing to do in my opinion is use custom color changed textures for those late stages. You can perform a color translation using slade3 and I think you can apply those changes directly to graphics then save them.

Alternative is for custom textures (using photoshop)...
make a custom palette with all the colors you dont want used changed to bright Magenta... probably means anything except gray and red.

now for each texture you're modifying load the doom noir palette and then convert it to 24 bit (this detaches the colors from their indexes)...  now convert to 8bit using the custom palette you made so it sorts the colors to gray and red.

if you end up with any washed out colors on specific textures that becomes an eyesore you can do some things with them in 24 bit to fix it:
- resize the image to maybe 400 or 800 percent and get some sharpen or blur tools or use the airbrush to add detail or accentuate details.
- resize back to 128 or 64px or whatever and then hit it with a Sharpen or Unsharp Mask (at like 0.6 or such)... then convert it to 8bit with the custom palette
- could also duplicate the image, convert one to 8bit without shrinking it and use pattern or dithering to create artificial detail, resize it to normal size... do the previous step with the duplicate... convert both back to 24 bit so you can experiment with layering the sharper one on top of the other then varying the opacity keep converting it back to 8bit to see which combo gives you the best details

(stuff like this takes 5 minutes or some such, for me anyway)

if you don't have photoshop it used to be on Internet Archive but currently the servers are inaccessible (its photoshop 7 which nobody cares about anymore)

[efrenespartano]

Hah seem like you know a lot more about DOOM modding than me!

No, the mod i'm talking to is a DOOM-themed mod for OpenXcom Extended. Basically we collected all the OG assets spread around the community into one, single mod.

[RSSwizard]

old school pixel artist who started with Deluxe Paint 2 in 1994
and started the Doom (addiction) at the same time
and had trouble doing my homework on afternoons in 1995 due to Xcom