Palettized Programmer Art

Through my time of editing textures, I've always taken great pleasure in complaining about how the classic Programmer Art textures lack, among other things, any kind of sane palettization.

For anyone that is unfamiliar with the term, a color palette refers to the number of distinct colors that are used in an image or texture. When opening a texture in an image editing software, you can usually have it reveal the palette.

I had discussions with different people about the reasons for the lacking palettization, because in some cases (for example the Pumpkin) the palette would actually function. To this day I haven't found a definitive answer, but I suspect artifacting from improper file or texture compression or texture editing using "broad stroke" tools that are not fit for pixel art (like brushes, gradients, etc.)

So instead of continuing to complain, I took it upon myself to review every single texture from before JAPPA took over the texture design for Minecraft and tried my best to improve upon them, where possible. Changes and fixes include:

• Proper palettization
• Palette revision (e.g. using the same wool-colored palette whenever wool colors should've been used)
• Cleaning up rogue pixels
• Revising dirty-looking or smudgy textures

There are a few textures that I either haven't changed at all or for whose I have simply elected to use the JAPPA versions with changed palettes. That generally happened, when my patience for the Programmer Art shenanigans ran dry (when a texture uses 2000+ distinct colors, I cannot repair that, I'm sorry...), most notably when I was attempting to fix up the infamous pre-1.13 horse textures. One important concession I had to make was not changing the banner_base.png, because for some reason it would lead to extremely weird artifacts appearing on the banners in-game. If you have any idea as to why that might happen, I'd be glad to update this texture in future aswell.

Additionally, I want to give a little bit of insight about what I'm gonna be (or planning to be) up to in future. First of all I would like to direct your attention to my Discord server, where I show off and also host my texture projects, Modernity Addon Hub. On there I have been creating Vanilla-Tweaks-esque texture addons for the JAPPA-style textures, but since I now have finished this project, I will also start giving (Palettized) Programmer Art more attention. On that note, I plan to revise JAPPA's textures in a manner similar to this project in the future aswell, as I noticed that JAPPA has never touched a good number of textures or has used imperfect palettes in some cases. If any of that piques your interest, feel free to come over to the server and chat with the folks there :) I will also, in due time, port this texture pack to 1.13.2, aswell as adding support for mods like Et Futurum Requiem and Village Names, that backport features from later Minecraft versions to older versions. If you have any mod that you would like to see palettized or ported to, let me know on the Discord.

Lastly, if you feel that my texture work is worthy of your financial support, I will eternally greatful for that. While texture editing is fun, at times it can also be incredibly annoying, especially when you're putting a specific project off for a while.