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Colormap question

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 23:08
by scientist
This is my first post on this forum so "Hello everybody".
Anyways, I've been working with zdoom for years but just recently looked into Gzdoom. I was interested in using 3d models in zdoom.

I've been working on a map which uses a custom colormap (for artistic reasons :) ). see the screenshot in regular zdoom:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/70150143/zdoom.png
(It's a work in progress, just go with it :) )
The ultimate goal is to have a custom black and white 3d monster walking around in there. I think that would look incredible 8)
The problem is that Gzdoom doesn't seem to use the custom colormap entry. see the screenshot in Gzdoom:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/70150143/gzdoom.png

In short: "It there a way to have GZDoom use the colormap entry?"
I hope this all makes any sense.
thanks in advance,
Scientist

Re: Colormap question

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 23:52
by Gez
scientist wrote:In short: "It there a way to have GZDoom use the colormap entry?"
Unfortunately, not.

The COLORMAP lump is originally a lookup table (LUT) to affect palette colors depending on light level. It exists so that the software renderer doesn't have to compute the effects of darkness and distance on the scene on-the-fly, which would have been prohibitive back in the days when processors had names like 386DX and worked at clock rates of less than 75 MHz.

GZDoom doesn't use the COLORMAP lump for two reasons: first, its render is not palette-bound (so darkened reds do not need to turn into brown like in software), and secondly the renderer can and does perform light diminishing on the fly.

You can, however, make your monster black and white through other means. You can change its render style, you can modify its sprites (including via the TEXTURES lump so you don't need to actually bundle sprites with the mod), you can apply a custom hardware shader on it (which will mean the mod won't work as intended on older computers, but then they can always use ZDoom instead), and so on.

Re: Colormap question

Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 12:41
by scientist
Hey man, thanks for the reply. Sad to hear it. Looks like I'm going to have to rethink things :/.