Liberated Palette
For the last few months, I've been working on a large palette for the LPC set. Something that captures the vibrancy of the set and works with the existing color ramps without being overwhelming. At long last-- I've finished it! 128 colors.
The ramps:
Shadows are at 120/255 transparancy, with either true black (#000000) for dark environments like caves, or dark purple (#2a1722) for all other settings. Glass, when transparancy is needed, is a medium gray (#818e97), also at 120/255 transparancy.
Skin color and clothing tests:
Paintings:
And the LPC sample scene, recolored (without transparent shadows):
At the moment, I'm working on getting a branch of the LPC set out in this color palette that's strictly DRM-friendly, using the OGA-By license. It will have a lot less assets than the wider LPC set, but they'll have a more consistent coloration, style and shading. Now that the palette's done, that'll be the next big thing!
And, as always-- LPC character design originally by Redshrike. The king's portrait, the mountainous landscape, and the pale woman's small portrait are by Sharm. The LPC preview scene and assets used to make it are by Sharm. Everything else is my work.
Great effort! I like the vibrant red and yellow ramps, and it looks like it's a lot easier to switch between different hues than it is with the base palette.
That being said, I'm not sure I'll switch over to this palette yet. I'm not convinced by the grass in the example scene (I think it's too bright, and at first glance the darker greens in the palette are less saturated than the existing greens) and it seems to be missing a colour ramp that I tend to use a lot (for instance in my cave tileset posted here). I'll have to fiddle with it a bit; perhaps I'll end up using it most for characters, which may arguably be what easier recolours are most useful for.
So, the nice thing about a 128 color palette is that you can have multiple looks for things like grass.
I've also done a lot of test scenes and variant color testing for different looks and variety, and thus far the finished set has been very flexible.
Agreed, looks very cool! I don't love the greens of the grass either... would you be willing to share other test scenes for comparison?
I guess to elaborate, I'd be interested in seeing different kinds of rocks, dirt, and wood to understand how the new palette looks for those. You've nicely compacted/unified the many many browns and grays but I'd be curious how that shakes out. The paintings are very nice but they're not quite representative of the average scene.
These all look great! They'll work perfect for my game, and will really be useful for defining biomes.
-Sincerely
FiveBrosStopMosYT
This is amazingly diverse for only 128.
Those paintings are great. Are they (will they be) officially shared on OGA?
--Medicine StormThank you!
The paintings are part of an OGA-By LPC branch I'm currently working on, and will be included. I'm probably about halfway through recoloring the other OGA-By assets at the moment. I'm thinking it'll take another two weeks to release the entire kit, if I don't add the extra character animations I've been working on.
BlueCarrot, I'll dig up some better terrain tests, but I'm elbow deep in furniture. It'll take a few days or so. :)
I've been chatting with ElizaWy as she works on this palette, and have used it as much as possible in a project I'm currently working on -- it's done pretty well for us so far. :) Slowly converting my assets that I either created or downloaded before becoming aware of this palette over.
What I find amazing about those portraits is that I had to look twice to really notice that some of them were simple palette swaps. So again, a great effort with great utility!
Now, I've done a quick check to see what my game would look like strictly using this palette. I did this in a cheap and dirty way by taking a screenshot and recolouring it in GIMP. I took two scenes: an outdoor scene and an interior scene inside a dungeon. I did very little manual work or touch-up beyond that, which would be necessary. Also note that I use some colours not in the "original" LPC palette.
As I already mentioned above, I'm not a fan of the greens in the outdoor scene. The base colour works fine (and I like it more than I thought I would), but I think the highlight is just too bright. Going the other way, the shadow is a bit too dark for my taste (especially on the tree).
I think I like the house a tad better with your new palette, probably because the different browns now feel more like a cohesive whole.
Looking at the interior scene, the portcullis and statue look fine in the new palette. The floor and walls are, in my opinion, aweful. The floor can be easily tweaked, of course, so it may just be a matter of finding a more balanced pair of base/highlight colour. The main issue here is that the contrast between the two is just too high (in fact, Gimp's original effort was to make the ground a solid colour, and this was my two-second fix; arguably the contrast is too low in the original).
The walls are going to be a pain. The ramp I used here (which was another quick manual intervention to make all colours use the same ramp) is too saturated for the walls, but the other brown ramps are either too dark or too "grey" for my liking.
I'll continue to play around with it. I suspect I'll end up with some sort of hybrid approach, where I use your palette with a few colour ramps from (my version of) the original palette for things like the grass and cave walls.
Here's another test scene, just a cheap automatic palette conversion with GIMP; no manual edits or tweaks, which I'm sure would improve things. (First image is original, second is Liberated palette). I chose this image because it's large and complicated, and it uses a lot of colors that are not in the original palette, in addition to most of those colors in the original.
Overall, I think it works well. The bright colors are clearly a strength, so this palette does really well with all of the random colors of houses, doors, etc. in this image. I'm eager to try it with my food sprites, which use a lot of non-standard-palette colors. I also think the grass looks better in this conversion than in Evert's, which seems to be because GIMP is pulling from multiple ramps to choose the closest fit.
The dirt and gray stonework is clearly not working very well in the automatic recolor. I'd have to try manually, since whatever algorithm it's using to pull the best fitting colors is not preserving the contrast well.
Overall, I'm intrigued. I'll have to mess around with it for original pieces and also try manually recoloring some components.
You're right, the grass there does look better (some of the tall glass has lost a level of highlight and is a bit flatter as a result, but I unly just now noticed that when looking for it; anyway, that's fixable by hand). I don't really like "jumping between" ramps because it makes recolouring harder, but perhaps there are ways to combine the different ramps in clever ways. Not sure, I'll have to try it out.
For the trees it depends very much on what particular tree you look at. The tall ones on the top right of the scene look fine, but if you scroll down to the park area below the middle, the tall slightly slanted tree looks fine, but the cherry trees look flat (I think it's supposed to be cherry trees, right?). The shadows on the tree from the shootemup set (https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-a-shootem-up-complete-graphic-kit) are too harsh, but that's the same as in mine.
I think the hedges look oddly flat in the recoloured image, I think the hue shift is too small to make them pop. Might be fixable by hand, but I think it needs a colour that is a blend between the green and the shadow colour to work well that isn't in the palette.
The new palette seems to work really well with the bright colour in the market area, so I suspect it'll work well with the food items too. It's not working too well with the pink-ish house just north of the market (comes out too orange, I think), but that could possibly be fixed by hand (it's missing some shading as well, so clearly Gimp's automatic shader isn't good enough here).
Try this one, Evert--
I didn't recolor the gate on that one, but you probably get the gist.
There really is no way to have a palette and expect a perfect 1:1 conversion of every LPC asset without changing the look a little, granted, but I don't think those look bad either.
No, I wasn't expecting a perfect 1:1 conversion, especially with GIMP choosing the colors; I was just curious how a more complicated scene might look. I think the only way to "understand" a palette is to work with it and see how it affects the results you can produce. It's really hard to get a sense of that from a single small preview image that only uses ~half the colors.
There are also going to be trade-offs, which may or may not be consistent with one's desired aesthetic. I am curious how you arrived at the green ramps you did, for instance. What effect(s) were you able to produce with these greens that you couldn't produce with variations (or the original)? There's some discussion like that on this thread where bart was experimenting with a palette that he wanted to have more bright colors: https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/bright-fantasy-themed-palette
Honestly...? I did not like the original LPC grass-green. I felt like it washed out everything around it and clashed with the characters.
The greens were a combination of painting, adjusting, painting some more, finding games that resembled LPC's general 'look' and color picking / comparing with those, followed by more adjustments, followed by staring hard at Dawnbringer's palette analyzer tool. I also tried reducing the colors of the most basic LPC tilesets, and... there's just too many. It doesn't work.
The other problem was that the set would need to be pretty versitile, since LPC is a bit generic, and you never know what's going to be asked of it. Link to the Past, for instance, also has a bright RPG-ish palette... and half of its 120 Light World tiles are green. I can't afford that, not with a 5-6 shade ramp everywhere. Four green ramps was about what I was able to manage without compromising the rest.
I have more terrain tiles, as well-- updated animated lava, volcanic rock with a red glow between the cracks, an entirely new sand set, and new animated water for said sand (which has gone from yellow to a rich peach and honestly looks ten times better), and a new cliff face inspired by LttP's cliff tiles.
I like how the greens work together in that image (and I love the flowers), but it's one step brighter than what I have now, which I feel is too bright for me. I'm not entirely happy with how the tree comes out (the one in your screenshot looks fine, the one I'm using doesn't fare so well with the new colour ramp).
Recolouring the floor similar to how you did does solve the problems with it (even going down a step on the ramp I was using before helps), but it does come out "cooler" than it was before, which changes the feel. I can't quite get my walls to look "right" with respect to what I was going for there, may need more tweaking.
I guess I really like two of the colour ramps in the original LPC palette that you had to cut out. :) Perhaps it's just a case of it being different and needing some time to get used to it.
At the end of the day, I personally wouldn't mind using your palette with two extra colour ramps, although that does kind of defeat the purpose of the whole exercise...
Something I have not done but thought about many times is that some colours in the original LPC palette are similar enough that it seems you should be able to merge them to an in-between shade. Is that something you've tried at all?
In a different note: you have a LttP inspired cliff? Cool, I personally can't wait.