Palette talk

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Mogri
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Palette talk

Post by Mogri »

Palettes, right? A good palette gives your game a distinctive look, and a bad palette makes it much more difficult to create good graphics. I am dissatisfied with the default OHR palette, and I wonder if anyone is sitting on a good palette that needs sharing.

Here's an excellent 32-color palette. It provides a good mix of hues at various levels of brightness, with a medium saturation that's reminds me of GBA graphics for some reason.

The OHR wiki has a palette page as well. BMR's palette provides nice high/low-saturation variants for each color ramp. I had a hard time getting a good spread of fleshtones from that palette, though, and the high-saturation ramps are a bit too high-saturation in my opinion.

I also have a hard time getting a good red-orange-yellow ramp from a lot of palettes -- this is especially true in the default palette, which throws in three orange hues in the top right as an afterthought.

What's in your palette?
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

I would love to have a few more good palettes that I could add to the "import/Master Palettes" folder in the default install
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

I felt I needed to just plunge in and start doing work on my current game project without taking time to develop a custom palette... and trying to do one mid-development seems like too much of a headache.

However, I did replace one of the seemingly near identical blue ramps with a burnt sienna-orange-salmon ramp:

Image

After I finish this game, I will definitely look into doing a ground-up custom made palette.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

I have been very happy with this palette, which I have been using for Vorpal Florist:
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/JbxnNKz.png">

I find that a full ramp of 16 colors is way too much for me. When I sprite with a full ramp, I am only ever using every 3rd or 4th color in the ramp, so this palette is perfect for me, since it crams in a bunch of tiny ramps.

I could have sworn this palette was in the import folder, but now that I check, it is not, nor can I remember who originally created the palette. I would really like to be able to credit them for it!

I would totally love to make this the new default palette, but I would rather not make that decision unilaterally, since all my previous unilateral master palette decisions worked out poorly ;)
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Short-Ramp Master Palette
Short-Ramp Master Palette
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Last edited by Bob the Hamster on Mon May 18, 2015 9:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Ichiro
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Post by Ichiro »

I've got to try these pallets out in Grafx2 while doing character creation. Maybe also make .pal files compatible with Grafx2 available for download.
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

James, that palette looks next to perfect. Seems to have all of the important colors in one convenient place. Looks like the kind of palette I wish I had been using since Day 1.

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Mogri
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Post by Mogri »

Here's a palette generator I whipped up quickly.

I doubt it's useful for creating a full palette that you will want to use in a game, but it might provide you with something that you can hand-tweak for better results. I will probably update it to make it more interactive instead of simply selecting settings, and I'm dissatisfied at the moment with how color ramping is performed.

The value settings apply to all colors: they will uniformly start at the minimum value and end at the maximum. An exception is made for the first and last ramps, which start with black and end with white, respectively.

The saturation settings are applied randomly; that is, for each color, a saturation value between the indicated numbers is selected.

The duplication intolerance setting is a little unreliable. If you set it too high, then the program will stop trying to find a different-enough color. If the palette takes more than about a second to generate, then your intolerance is too high. Saturation is factored into color difference, so a saturated teal and an unsaturated teal are considered to be somewhat different (although hue is the strongest indicator). All said, the duplication intolerance setting does not do a fantastic job of preventing duplication, but it's better than nothing.

There is no export feature currently, although it's simple enough to paste a screenshot into Paint.

Edit: I've changed the color ramping from RGB to HSV, and it looks much better now. I've also added a hue variance setting, which lets you choose how different the start hue can be from the end hue. You get some colorful ramps at 100%.
Last edited by Mogri on Mon May 18, 2015 11:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TMC »

Oh, that's fantastic. Now I feel like setting the parameters to something crazy and then trying to draw with the hue-shifting ramps it gives me.

Regarding long ramps, I think they're useful when the person making the palette doesn't know whether the person that's going to use it is going to want to use the bright or dark ends of the ramp or the whole range, so accommodates everyone. But 15 or 16 colours is far too much for a palette specialised for a single game. One option would be to create a new default palette with length 8 ramps, but provide 2 or 3 different versions of it which are less/more saturated or brighter/darker.
Last edited by TMC on Tue May 19, 2015 12:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

I really like Vorpal Florist's palette, and I VERY much agree with the sentiment that having 15-16 shades in a ramp is flagrantly excessive and results in a lot of unused shades. I will most likely steal the 8 shades per ramp idea when I get around to making my own palette.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Dang, I wish I could remember who gave me the palette.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

Those three super subdued rows at the bottom remind me of *something*. Are you sure this isn't that one super old palette? It might even still be on the wiki?
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Post by Feenicks »

Here's a few. Probably could stand to be marginally less stingy with the number of colors in each color ramp, but that at least gives me flexibility in throwing in the new ramps I inevitably find I need.

Image
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The NES palette - might be useful to have around
The NES palette - might be useful to have around
NESPAL.png (852 Bytes) Viewed 8791 times
wmaha.png
wmaha.png (1.09 KiB) Viewed 8791 times
newpalette.png
newpalette.png (852 Bytes) Viewed 8791 times
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Mogri
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Post by Mogri »

Gizmog wrote:Those three super subdued rows at the bottom remind me of *something*. Are you sure this isn't that one super old palette? It might even still be on the wiki?
The original OHR palette is on the wiki page I mentioned in the original post. It's not that... or were you referring to something else?
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

No no, not the original OHR Palette. It was when we first got the ability to change palettes, there was one that was "making the rounds" as it were. For some reason I think a Neo was involved, but I might be mixin stuff up 'cause I'm old and I tend to do that. And this one that was making the rounds had a bunch of smaller sections of color like that followed by the three super subdued rows at the bottom. Or it might be totally unrelated and be some newer thing from IRC, but I'd swear I've seen it before.
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Post by TMC »

Hmm, well it's not from Septaweekly
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