The coloured lighting you've got going on there is nice and complementary. Other things that can ruin the effect include full colour textures, which obviously don't bother with the palette files. So be careful with those skyboxes. On the other hand, you could even go far as restoring the red tones in the palette if you wanted to remake Schindler's List... 

Continuing the proud tradition of Preach Double-Posts, I thought I'd mention two things about "wasted" pixels in the quake palette - a topic that came up just three, four days ago. So I've got some explanations for how you might get two identical palette entries, notice, but not care. The easy one to explain is the red duplicated entry. It isn't really wasted, because one of them is fullbright and one isn't!

But wait, even the other "wasted" pixel isn't really wasted. True, both entries are the same shade of brown and neither are fullbright, but there is an important use for each of them. Remember that the "runs" of 16 colours are used for the changing colours on the player skins. So it was necessary to have the same dark brown in two places on the palette to let the palette shifting work. You could argue that they didn't need to be exactly the same colour, but either they are similar enough to make no real difference, or they're so different that one of the runs would look odd. 

I'm not sure, the colormap still has to work from the palette and would have slightly less banding if the duplicates were put to good use. 

In my post on this earlier I said there was 5% wasted colors, but I don't know where that percent sign came from. I meant to just say 5. That doesn't count the red since, as mentioned, one of them is in the fullbrights. 

Yeah, I probably should have said you could get some value from tweaking them. It's just that they're all in the "dark brown" range of the palette, and quake already has that pretty well covered, so the benefit is marginal. It's not like you can use them to add a proper saturated green range, or purple fullbrights or something.

The way that quake has multiple matching ranges of dark browns bites back if you try and create exciting palettes. I was messing about last night, trying to create a set of lively, bright colours to ruin the quake atmosphere with. Although the colours were tropical and lovely, they clashed in a bad way. On lots of the previously brown textures, adjacent pixels coming from different palette rows had changed in tone and value a lot. This resulted in lots of very noisy textures which looked ugly. 

I recently tried doing a more colorful palette, more vibrant and brighter ranges. Problem is for a lot of stuff textures use multiple ramps so it's slightly messed up in places, and the skintones don't look that hot.

http://www.spiney.me/files/etc/palette.lmp

But you really need to design your textures to your palette for it to work well, not the other way around...

What would be really usefull is some tool that could take a 16*16 bitmap and turn it into a palette file. Would be less of a pain in the ass than having to use QME. 

i think palette.lmp is just a RAW file with a .lmp extension. So you can make it with photoshop. 

Yeah, I've successfully saved a 16x16 RGB image to RAW format using GIMP and it works just right. 

So you can make it with photoshop

Afaik PS can't save RAW files without headers attached :/ 

Drive-by tip...

palette.lmp = Photoshop .act file (Image -> Mode -> Color Table -> Load/Save)

Careful with indexed images in Photoshop though, I recall some versions reversing the palette order on some types. 

Was talking about making Quake readable palettes, not applying a palette to an image. 

Which part of "Save" was confusing? 

The "Load/" part? The part where it reshuffles all the colors? The part where it's not actually raw rgb data? 

Heh, I was trying to say PS's .act palette format is exactly the same as palette.lmp (and where you access that in PS).

The other was just a warning about a weird problem I encountered years ago when doing Quake & Quake2 texture work in PS.

/me goes back to lurking... 

interesting... i always assumed .act was ascii rather than binary format. 

hows it going?

Any progress to your maps? 

Shots from my latest base map, which will be neat and playtested, i promise:)

1 2 3

This will be my last attempt in base style for a while, there�s more quake to be mapped. What do you think? 

But on shot 2, you could swap the floor textures to make the sunken tiles red. That would look a little bit better. 

done. 

Nuff said. 

it looks ok.

It's kind of flat looking floor plan, I like a map with some sweet Z-Axis. It looks like you're very early in the development stages but some nice details in shots 1 and 2, shot 3 looks much earlier and unfinished.

I liked your other base map so I am looking forward to this. 

 

Yeah its kind of early in development, flatness of floors...
Z axis action is already there, have no ss by now.

Ricky, knew you like it! Heavily inspired by Stark Monstrosity, i can tell. 

some more shots.

Heavily under construction by now, as you can see..

1 2

I like it very much atm...;) 

is one of my all time favourite maps that I play very often.
If this is your inspiration then I am truly excited!