Palette (environment)

This page is an exhaustive listing of the 8-bit palette swaps in Duke Nukem 3D.

The data controlling them can be found and modified in the palette data files.

Colors of the base palette

The following plot shows the red, green and blue color intensities of Duke3D's base palette on a 0--1 scale. Base palette colors

It can be seen that it contains six ramps (sequences in which R, G and B all increase monotonically) of 32 colors, three blocks of 16 colors (two of which are ramps), and 16 remaining fullbright colors. Rearranging consecutive blocks of 16 colors by the permutation [0 1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8 13 10 11 12 9 14 15] makes this stand out more clearly: Rearranged base palette colors

Global Palettes

For use with setgamepalette:

ID	Palette	Image
0	Normal
1	Underwater
2	Night Vision Goggles Submersible Slime
3	3D Realms Logo (changed in v1.4).
4	Title Screen
5	Episode 1 Ending
6	Temporary slot for self-contained ANM palettes. Example provided is LOGO.ANM.

Palette Swaps

For use with spritepal, pal, et cetera:

ID	Image	Effect	Description
0 3 9 empty		Normal	Default color Player 1 (ID 9)
1		All blue	Frozen creatures Unavailable menu option Blue lights
2		All red	Blood pool Red lights
4		Full black (including fullbrights)	Shadows
5		Red to brown	Brown Team (Duke-Tag) Exit Level Nuke
6		All reverse green	Night Vision Goggles heat Protozoid Slimer, Protector Drone, and Alien Queen gibs
7		All yellow	Slime splash, FECES puddle Yellow/Brown lights
8		All green	Green lights
10		Blue to dark red	Player 2
11 22		Blue to green	Player 3 (ID 11) Assault Trooper (ID 22)
12 18		Blue to gray	Player 4 (ID 12)
13		Blue and red to dark gray	Player 5
14		Blue and red to dark green	Player 6 Secret Exit Level Nuke
15		Blue to brown	Player 7
16		Blue to dark blue	Player 8
17		Brown, green, orange and purple to blue Blue to green
19		Brown, green, orange and purple to red Blue to green
20		Brown, green, orange and purple to blue Blue to gray
21		Blue to red	Red Key Card Assault Captain Battlelord Sentry
23		Blue to yellow	Yellow Key Card
24		Gray to red Red to gray
25		Green to red

Fog Palettes

EDuke32 includes four fog palettes starting at palette index 26.

Note that lookup.dat can be modified to support more than 25 palette remaps for 8-bit sprites; in this case, the included fog palettes start wherever the first unused palette position is. For example, a modified copy of lookup.dat with 30 remaps instead of 25 would result in the fog palettes occupying indexes 31, 32, 33, and 34 instead of 26, 27, 28, and 29.

They are:

fogpal 26 63 63 63
fogpal 27 63 0 0
fogpal 28 0 63 0
fogpal 29 0 0 63

This gives the fog colors of white (26), red (27), green (28) and blue (29).

Empty Slots

All empty palette swaps, including those without fog palettes, default to pal 0.

If you are using defs to add additional skins or variations to empty palette slots of a model or texture which do not correspond to any palette swap, or fog palettes, it is very highly recommended to begin the indices for your custom variations at palette value #133. This is because modified LOOKUP.DAT and PALETTE.DAT files such as ExtCLUT can contain up to 128 palette entries. These additional values may conflict with your custom feature. The extra four spaces are to account for the predefined fogpals explained above.