I will remind you that there's a major reason we don't use a blue colormap over grass for exactly this reason. The water in GFZ is much clearer than the colormap in that shot as well, to prevent the weird blue line you see on the edge of the squares in GFZROCK. The palette is a tool we use for visual consistency, but we have to be sure to use it well or things look bad. Just like anything else, there are both positives and negatives to using a palette. Having to choose your colors more carefully is a negative.
A major reason that'd be
completely moot if we weren't handicapping ourselves to stick with a single 256-color palette.
I mean, I'd honestly hoped that we'd be able to introduce, say, optionally using PNG for graphics like textures and sprites, in addition to the internal graphic format; Software would've just opted for the closest palette entry for a given pixel, while hardware could render the texture as-is. Any hope for
that gets shot down when we're arbitrarily deciding that we
have to stick to the palette at all costs and thus produce abnormalities like the one you're citing. (I mean, there's paletted PNG, technically, but my intention was for there to be a quick format for truecolor textures.)
No it wouldn't. That's the exact reason I used the greyscale colormap example; a standard tint wouldn't have the same effect. You'd just get washed-out grey mush.
You might've missed the part where he
admitted OpenGL's colormaps were broken. If they
weren't broken, you wouldn't get washed-out grey mush, you'd get an end result similar to the greyscale example you'd posted - except instead of limiting it to 32 shades of gray, it could use the entire 256, and preserve subtle details.
Why doesn't Mega Man 9 have true-color support?
Mega Man 9 was designed from the ground-up to look like an NES game.
SRB2's only ambition at inception was just to be a 3D
Sonic game, which only adhered to
Doom's limitations because there was nothing better when development started in 1999 (
Quake wasn't yet open-sourced), and only further stuck with it because (to my understanding) nobody knew how to fix OpenGL's colormaps to produce similar results in true color.
This insistence that the palette limitations were
the intent all along is, frankly, a phenomenon new to this sudden push for a paletted hardware mode. I have never seen
any attempts to justify it before now.
This might come as a great shock to everyone, but we're not the Borg. Individual developers have their own opinions and feelings, and our developer channels often have very heated discussions about the game and what we should be doing. The only problem here is how those opinions were presented, being far more hostile than they should have been. Disagreements are a natural part of any group project.
I'd argue this argument is no more heated nor less civil than any argument we've had in #'dev. We've
always been at each others' throats in there - it's just typically far less public than this.
One more thing: if custom shaders
were allowed, how exactly would they work? Like music.dta, where your game isn't marked as modified when you modify the file containing it? If not, anyone using a truecolor render won't be able to play with anyone using this paletted render.
