Seems like your wish has been granted, Shambler: link 

 

Hey guys, check this out. You can delete games from your Steam account now!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1150389 

I heard rumours that someone posted in here yesterday, about 20 posts up, that you could actually delete games from your Steam account??

Sounds rad, can anyone confirm if that is actually true?? 

my reading skills are up to par 

yeah hey okay so I was thinking:

there are two rows in the Quake palette which are nearly totally unused.
http://lunaran.com/pics/quakepal.png

One is that weird second blue row that grows in saturation as it brightens, the last row before the fullbright fire row. As far as I've seen, the only stock textures and assets that use that palette row are that one blue dragon stained glass window, and the textures from the dopefish secret. I'm fairly certain everything else that's blue uses the upper sky-blue row.

The other is whichever of the two very similar purple rows you could personally stand to do without. The only significant purple things in Quake are voreballs, runes, the one sky texture used everywhere, and the particles thrown when a spawn explodes. These two rows could easily be averaged/collapsed into one.

My point is, there's essentially two whole free rows of the palette that are up for grabs with minimal changes to Quake. Any mod can provide its own palette.lmp override in its basedir and get whatever mileage out of a partially customized palette the artist feels he needs, without really screwing up any stock textures or assets at all. No special engines required. The only thing that would really need to be included would be replacements for the voreball and end runes which make sure they're the same purple as the sky. (If you didn't mind voreballs and tarbaby dust being some other color you could even have three rows.)

However, there are additional costs: namely, assets for a palette-plus mod would no longer be shareable, because once you move them back to /id1/ or any other mod you'd wind up with blue and purple shit all over. That runs the risk of creating mutually exclusive asset ecosystems, and this community's been traditionally about freely sharing in that regard. Then again, we've all been using textures from Hexen and Alice and sundry sources with bad-to-passable palette conversions for decades and it hasn't turned anyone off, so an additional stock-palettized wad could easily be created as long as the losses wouldn't be too visually egregious. Plus, wouldn't it be nice to be able to use said Hexen and Alice textures with one or two rows of their actual palette brought with them?

Tool support would be a problem: not every common Quake editing app supports custom palettes. QE3 does (getting that editor to actually find the damned palette lump on disk is like obstacle #1 to getting QE3 to work at all), but others don't. TexMex, critically, simply has the stock Quake and Quake2 palettes hardcoded, and mickey vanished from the scene and took the TexMex source with him 15 years ago.

This might all be way too much bother for 32 extra shades of brown (lol), especially when engines exist that load full color TGAs, but it's something I've been thinking about. 

The yellow row is also barely used. So is that sort of aqua greeny row above.

To be honest I have thought about this a lot (I'm actually in the middle of making a new texture set myself). I think the cons outweigh the pros personally.

To get more colours into quake I would simply use TGAs. 

because then there would be a reddit thread where eighty people coordinate to play one copy of a game and then what text_fish said.

Okay, maybe there would have to be a limit on your time played. Similar to getting a refund, but more lenient. 

if I'm being honest I think I would prefer the Unreal engine 1 implementation of pcx textures. Which is basically that every texture has its own unique palette. File size would be much smaller than using .tga files, it would be self-contained with the .bsp file for neatness. 

That would require modified compilers, a new bsp format, and new engine support. 

File size? Really? 

I'm sure EricW would be happy to implement all three. ;)

He's a god-damn wizard you know. 

 

Yeah but I just think its dafter than a box of weasels to have to modify the code of a number of tools, engines and file formats, to support baked-in unreal-style pcx textures, when external TGA support is overwhelmingly superior AND backwards compatible AND available right now :}

Filesize is a non-issue imo. 

We'll agree to disagree. ;) 

Fitzquake / QS already supports actual pcx textures, you could put them in a oak file with your map if you don't like loose files. 

Oak = pak, thanks iphone 

Fifth, been there, done that - halflife bsp.
palettes still suck, as do standard texture resolutions.

storing image data inside your bsps themselves is not good for file sizes, even if they're RLE pcx files.

either way, (gl) engines generally already support both pcx and tga external textures.
If you want to strip the textures from bsps all you have to do is to set all the offset values of your mipmap images to 0 and strip the image data. Its not a problem unless an engine can't load the correct external texture, in which case you'll just get corrupt textures rather than anything crashy. 

palettes still suck, as do standard texture resolutions

Regarding texture resolution, I beg to differ. Quake's pixel vision is a seriously legit art style that would still be relevant if someone wanted to make more colourful, but still retropixelly textures.

If you are one of those heathens that plays quake in GL blurry mode, then ugh. 

hey let's have this argument again 

I play Quake with linear filtering and model interpolation disabled. 

with TGAs, you can always palettize and maintain pixel resolution yourself. at least the option is there either way. 

 

yeah tgas can also be 8-bit if you want to save those precious kilobytes, or want to maintain the retro cred.

Interestingly, initial tests indicate an 8-bit tga is slightly smaller in filesize than an 8-bit pcx. Heh. 

I suggested the compiled in custom palette mostly for the sake of neatness. I never have my maps as separate .pak files because I find it a bit unnecessary to devote a whole folder for 1 map.