Castle Paradox

[Newbie_Power]

In a quest to come up with an OHRRPGCE palette that not only looks great, and solves various problems has led me to create this.

Granted, it's not finished, and needs more feedback, but here are what it's good for:

- Gets rid of unnecessary near-white bright colors.
- Vibrant and colorful without retina burning saturation levels
- Many hues to choose from
- Smooth color ramps allow for great control over contrast, excellent for both maptiles and sprites
- Attention to ensure skin tones are useful
- Non-ugly yellow colors

It is not without cons, of course:

- Small gap in value between black and darkest shades of color (though this shouldn't be too big of an issue)
- Green ramps similar in color (trying to think of a way to solve this issue to give distinguishable hue from other colors)

I will continue to work on this palette to fully optimize it, but feedback would be welcome.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Bob the Hamster]

That is nifty!

When I have finalized it, would you be willing to offer it as an alternate palette to be included in the Import folder?

[Moogle1]

I like it.

One problem I see offhand is a common one I've had with the other default palettes: no red-yellow scale. The original default had a small one, but the new one requires you to hunt for them. You've got some decent oranges here, but no real high-saturation orange. Since fireballs and fire spells and such are common in the RPG milieu, a red-yellow scale is useful to have. My suggestion is to replace either half of one of your many green scales or your powder-blue-to-white scale.

I'm curious why there's exactly one blindingly bright yellow, and I still think there are too many whites/whitelikes (I count four, although only two are really white), but this looks like a really nice palette overall.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Blue Pixel]

I'm guessing the 1 bright yellow is just there for fire graphics, but i'd have to agree on you with the lack of fire colors. Also, why is everything so desaturated? It's not nessisarly bad, but not nessisarly good eather.

[Bob the Hamster]

This reminds me, I would love to see a master palette that focuses on scales of 8 colors instead of scales of 16 colors. I notice that when I draw sprites for Wandering Hamster I often find myself skipping colors when making my 16-color palettes.

[Lucier]

i like this palette a lot!


with genesis' palette i kind of just changed it as i went until i found all the colors i will need for the game. i kept the mini color schemes (the ones going vertically) and just made those into colors i thought would be found in real life in nature. mine is really scattered though, i like how nice and neat your palette is.
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insert myspace link here.

[Bob the Hamster]

It would be interesting to write a tool that could go through all your backdrops, tilesets, and 16-color palettes and count how often each color is used.

[Newbie_Power]

[Newbie_Power]

Changes:

- Added the Red -> Yellow color ramp. Thanks to optical illusion, this appears to be a pure orange ramp in the OHRRPGCE editor.
- Changed the previous orange colors to be more desaturated because now the Red -> Yellow ramp gives us the orange colors we need.
- Decided to push the brightest red back and add a couple of brighter, pinkish reds.
- Made the greens more distinct from each other.

EDIT:



Altered some greens to be more useful for grass tiles.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[TMC]

You kept all those pinks? No one is ever going to need so many pinks.

I slightly miss those greens you changed: I think they would have been useful for water. Maybe even a blue-green ramp?

[Bob the Hamster]

Wow! that is awfully cool! I was just trying it out on my 8-bit game. Looks like I accidentally used several colors from the second palette row. it is a good thing I used a master palette with only 16 colors :)

I did notice a bug. If you switch modes while displaying meters instead of counts, it crashes:

[Newbie_Power]

Removed a bunch of unnecessary colors.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Pepsi Ranger]

[NeoTA]

TMC: This is very cool -- and I really appreciate the effort you are going to, it's hugely helpful to me.

You might find the numbers could be more meaningful if you made them logarithmic
('from math import log; scaled_value = log (value, base)'). base = 2 is probably appropriate here. (this might even improve the meaningfulness of the bar representation)

(circular/elliptical representations of magnitude are also pretty effective IMO)

Pepsi-Ranger: Altering TMC's program to remap colors is not too difficult; We could sort of combine the two functions, and do the remapping and then mention which graphics were effected (to help with any adjustments). This kind of thing does warrant a utility of its own, cause it could be made quite powerful really ( autochoose all the remappings, allow you to adjust remappings for individual graphics/colors, possibly even do dithering when the 'nearest match' colors aren't very near). Well.. I don't have time to write such a utility right now.. I'll look at it again when NOHRIO is more mature

(TMC and I are currently discussing how to improve NOHRIO on the ohrrpgce mailing list

Newbie_power: fantastic (in a literal sense) palette
I have to recommend to new palette makers: use 12 color ramps! I only used 15-color in the 'new default' because it looks a lot neater when displayed.. I spent a lot of time carefully optimizing my palette, so it did not suffer too badly from this (getting a fair spread of most kinds of colors, with fair 'crossover-ability' of color ramps). However I do not recommend that.. ramps of 12 are IMO a better workflow unit and can more easily result in a better palette.
(especially if you like 'purity of color' rather than a oil-painting-like effect (the latter being what I regard as the most effective usage of a limited set of 256 colors -- although my palette did attempt to accommodate such preferences to some extent)

[Newbie_Power]

Current take so far. Seems to be working well now. I'll describe the ramps from top to bottom:

1. Metallic grey ramp. Useful for buffering or metallic/gray surfaces.
2. Aged ramp. Originally intended to be another gray ramp but with a different hue for different purposes, but it looks fine on its own.
3. Ugly brown ramp. Good for nature and possibly hair.
4. Red. Good for hair, shirts, blood, using dark reds in conjunction with the pink.
5: Orange/red. Self explanatory, main purpose is for light colors to be skin tone, though the darker colors can be useful as well.
6: Tan. Lighter colors can be used for skin tone.
7: User defined.
8: Brown -> Yellow ramp. Good for deserts.
9: Green -> Yellow ramp. Great for nature.
10: Green ramp. Also good for nature.
11: Red -> Yellow ramp. Gives orange colors, and great for fire effects.
12: Blue ramp.
13: Teal ramp.
14: Half this ramp is purple. The other half is purple mixed with pink.
15: Half is red mixed with pink (dark reds from earlier in the palette work as darker colors for this). Some very light colors just in case.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?