[The Watchtower]

During my Blast Radius playtesting, ck and me were talking about palette respawns once again, and how it doesn't work bosses aside in the vanilla game, despite the several uses of pal21 respawn troops especially in the first 3 episodes.

Now I'm thinking again, basically all those red liztroop spawns in the game are "straight in your face" ones, where you can clearly see the same flashy animation that is also used by the red troop's teleport. For example in Hollywood, that weird respawn in the cinema chairs look like some kind of introduction for the red troop, similarly to the one at the backdoor. Then there is a second one from both routes in the main lobby before you can get the shotgun. I mean, the troop spawns in flashy style, and can use the same flash later on.

Similarly, the straight into your face respawn troops in Red Light District (in the bar shooting the girls), Death Row (in the church), Launch Facility (at the start), The Abyss (near at the end with the deep abyss), and several others in Incubator, Warp Factor do the same. The most common respawns are not straight into your face, and none one them are using palettes. I didn't check beyond mid-episode 2, I guess this whole concept had been lifted later on, but this is a trend that is not a coincidence.

[Reaper_Man]

FWIW looking in the source code, the lack of palette transfer from RESPAWN to the enemy it spawns is intentional. In the case of the Liztroop, the palette is always forced to 22 if it isn't already set. However for all enemies, it doesn't check for the palette of the spawning RESPAWN and apply it first, so the Liztroop sees a default 0 palette. This is not the case for bosses, which does check if it was spawned by a RESPAWN and if so, transfers its palette to the boss. Because this behavior was never changed between 1.3 and 1.5, we have to assume they wanted to enforce this behavior, and because EDuke tries to maintain compatibility, that's why this behavior persists. Thankfully you can work around this using Events

As for the Liztroop Captains, I would guess the opposite - RESPAWNs were already using the TRANSPORTERSTAR effect, and they added in the Captains after having the "in your face" spawns as a way to change up gameplay dynamically.

[ck3D]

Reaper_Man, on 18 February 2023 - 08:08 AM, said:

In the case of the Liztroop, the palette is always forced to 22 if it isn't already set.

Oh no way, so that explains the whole blue uniform in the base .art and editor, green uniform in the game pseudo-mystery. I'm trying to remember how the troopers looked in every possible port now, off the top of my head Duke Nukem 64 still had the blue ones even in game. Now I can imagine that they only gave the Liztroop base sprites a blue uniform so that it would be palette friendly and wonder if that means they ever actually had plans for the blue ones (or other colors), but realistically the green swap sounds more like a quick afterthought to help convey 'trooper' in the enemy's aesthetic (and also completely polarize them in reference to the red ones on the color wheel).

[MrFlibble]

ck3D, on 18 February 2023 - 10:33 PM, said:

wonder if that means they ever actually had plans for the blue ones (or other colors)

It was quite a widespread practice for sprites with swappable palettes to use some kind of default "neutral" colour in the data files, which might not coincide with any colour seen in-game for those sprites.

For example, in StarCraft the remappable areas of units and buildings are in gradients of some pink-purplish colour in the game data, which is never used in any player colour scheme.

In Red Alert, all units and structures have the gold colour in the game data, like GDI in C&C, even though this is not the default colour scheme for any side in the single-player campaign.

in Daggerfall, all player paperdoll clothes that have colour variations are blue in the game data (although that is one of the colours which appear in the game).

I also have a vague memory of some game where the remappable colour was a slightly lighter or darker version of one of the colours used in-game, but I cannot remember it right now.

[jimbob]

i remember raiden in MK being like green or red, despite that not being his natural color.

[edit] wich i realise has no bearing on duke whatsoever... but anyway.