This section will outline how to use and make new colormaps for use in the various source ports. All tutorials by Rellik_jmd.

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CONTENTS:

1. Creating colormaps with cmaptool
2. Creating colormaps with Inkworks

This tutorial is for using colormaps with BOOM and other sourceports. The Inkworks program can however be used to modify pallettes for the original game as well. This tutorial uses Wintex and DEEPSEA to work with the data lumps.

Creating colormaps

One of the best features of TNT's BOOM and the other sourceports is the use of alternate colormaps. Now you can have all kinds of colored lighting and other effects. I have included a .wad file containing the colormaps from BOOM sourceport as well as a few of my own, the link is in the tutorial.

Creating colormaps with BOOM's cmaptool.exe (program by J Flynn)

For this tutorial you'll need: cmaptool, wintex (for cutting/pasting the data lumps), DEEPSEA (for moving renaming the lumps), and a graphics program that lets you change the colormap of an image.

Available from the Team TNT website is a bundle of editing tools (it may also come with BOOM, I'm too lazy to check) and amoung them is one for making custom colormaps. Here's the full procedure to make, for example, a colormap that turns everything red.

Step 1. Generate a copy of the original DOOM colormap. Open a DOS window and run the cmaptool.exe to see a list of options. Type: cmaptool /g and the program will generate a clean bitmap file of the DOOM palette. This is what it looks like. These are all the colors DOOM uses to draw everything in the game.

Step 2. Modifying the colormap. Now though we're just going to make a red colormap, I'll show you how to preview what your game level will look like with any new colormap before you even create the colormap itself. First take a screenshot of your level where you'll be using the new colormap. Open the image up in your graphics program (I use CorelPhoto-Paint 3.0) and open the utility that lets you modify the pictures colormap. As you can see in the illustration below, I know pretty much exactly what the room will look like with the new colormap before I even really start the work. Handy, huh?

Now just do the same thing to the doomcolr.bmp you did to the screenshot and the results should be very similiar if not identical. Save the image as something like "redcolor.bmp" in the same directory as cmaptool.

Step 3. Add the .bmp file into a PWAD as a data lump. In the DOS window, type cmaptool red_cmap (which is the name of the .lmp file that will be created) redcolor (which is the .bmp file we just created that the colormap is generated from). This will result in a file called red_cmap.lmp being created.

This is where it gets a little anoying, but luckily for you I've saved you the grief of creating a blank datalump entry which you would then overwrite with the colormap. In the colormap.wad available here I've included five blank entries so all you have to do is open up the wad file in Wintex, click on any of the blank entries, and add the lump by selecting the .lmp file you created with cmaptool. At this point, technically you're done as you could just use BLANK1 as your colormap name, but it's easier to keep track of things when you personalize them.

To change the name of the colormap open DEEPSEA and go to EDIT, then RENAME / MANAGE PWAD LUMPS. Select your wadfile (colormap.wad in this case) and click on the Blank1 entry. Now just click RENAME and name it anything you'd like, though it's best to make it something that describes it's actual function.

Creating colormaps from fade tables with Inkworks

For this tutorial you'll need inkworks, wintex, and DEEPSEA.

I should note that the colormaps created with Inkworks don't work the same as real colormaps, but instead depend on the brightness of a sector and the distance from the player as they are calculated from a fade table. It is however a useful way to create color fades, fog and smoke, and smoother transitions from plain sectors to colored ones. See the above tutorial on how to make real colormaps.

Creating and saving color maps into a wad.

Now that you have the program, open a DOS window and run it. It is a fairly simple interface, but if you want to create colormaps used in other wads the only thing you need to use is the "Distance Fade" slider. Clicking the mouse on the slider will bring up a window where you simply use the three slider bars to adjust the amount of red, green, or blue. Say for example you want a colormap to change everything red. Slide the red bar all the way to 255 and hit done. It will calculate the fade table and then bring you back to the main window. Go up to "File" and click on "Export to WAD". In the Filename box you can use whatever name you'd like, I'll use "red.wad". Now our colormap is in a wadfile and almost ready to go.

Now start up Wintex and open "red.wad". In it you'll see two lump entries: PLAYPAL and COLORMAP. The one we want is COLORMAP, so for the sake of ease just open up my "colormap.wad" and copy the entry out of red.wad and paste it into colormap.wad. You're not done yet, as the COLORMAP entry is useless aslong as it isn't between the C_START and C_END markers in the wadfile. Now save colormap.wad and close down wintex.

Open up DEEPSEA and go to EDIT, then RENAME / MANAGE PWAD LUMPS. Select your wadfile (colormap.wad in this case) and click on the COLORMAP entry. Then go to move and move it anywhere between the C_START and C_END markers. Now rename it to whatever you'd like and you're done!

Footnotes

Cmaptool: website here, download here.

Inkworks: download here.

Wintex: download here, tutorials here.