'Colour was too similar to x, and has been adjusted'

Discussion about the game and its default mods.
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BaronOfStuff
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'Colour was too similar to x, and has been adjusted'

Post by BaronOfStuff »

Can we PLEASE have an option to enable/disable this tournament-oriented nonsense, or at least completely get rid of this shit in Single Player Skirmish mode (where it's not at all needed)? I generally prefer using a muted dark blue for my colour, yet with every further release the game seems to make it more and more fucking difficult to do so because it's too "similar to the terrain".

Yes, all that fucking dark blue terrain.

It's getting ridiculous. Can't even spam a load of bots to the same colour when comp-stomping with friends either.

PersianImmortal
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Post by PersianImmortal »

It should just be removed all together. It's annoying as shit.
The host can ask if people to change colors if it's an issue
The game doesn't need to police color rules.

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Prince Blueblood
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Location: Kudus

Post by Prince Blueblood »

And it failed to provide what it should be, people are still love to use that annoying Dark Green colour in temperate map, or that sand brown colour in desert map. It only blocked White-ish colour, but still, it failed mostly...

And no dark blue or Black colour despite they're good contrast? what the heck?
OpenRA Nicks :
- Everything with "Blueblood" inside
- Yuelang (when I speak Chinese, literally)

My Ping might be Red... blame distance and my shitty connection due to which country I lived in...

epice
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Post by epice »

Ok we just remove color pallet and add only pre-selected colors to choose from!

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Graion Dilach
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Re: 'Colour was too similar to x, and has been adjusted'

Post by Graion Dilach »

BaronOfStuff wrote: Yes, all that fucking dark blue terrain.
We call that water over here.

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BaronOfStuff
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Re: 'Colour was too similar to x, and has been adjusted'

Post by BaronOfStuff »

Graion Dilach wrote:
BaronOfStuff wrote: Yes, all that fucking dark blue terrain.
We call that water over here.
Nice try at being a smartass, but the water is light blue.

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AoAGeneral1
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Post by AoAGeneral1 »

The colors were mentioned by a player due to the minimap. Speaking that the colors were hard to determine from terrain/doodads from the player themselves.

While I do agree to some extents about colors being the same, the colors were very samiliar to CNC95 being in the background and this never bothered anyone. (Biggest example being white).

As for matching neutral buildings you can hover over units and the tooltip displays instantly of whom owns it.

As for colors such as green (Tiberium) and blue (Blue tiberium) allow slight shades if needed. Otherwise, I am for adding the option to allow/disallow color customisations to an extent.

winftw
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Post by winftw »

epicelite wrote: Ok we just remove color pallet and add only pre-selected colors to choose from!
You may be joking but I believe having a fixed player color palette actually solves all of our problems.

- Players can't pick the same color
- No color can conflict with terrain
- All colors are visible on the minimap (minimap color scheme needs to be adjusted accordingly)
- Colors can have just the right saturation and brightness to blend in with the rest of the game world (i.e. no more dark murky shades of poop)

Maybe just use westwood's colors because they've probably been chosen by some professional graphics designer.
Each mod obviously needs a slightly different set of player colors because the tilesets aren't the same.

There is one potential problem though. What if there are more players than available colors?
Westwood ignored that problem because you can't play westwood games with 10+ people. Having so many players in a RTS game makes no sense anyway.
But there is an easy workaround:
Every time the amount of players exceeds the amount of available player colors the game could just produce intermediate colors from the existing colors and thus double the size of the palette.

Thoughts?

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Graion Dilach
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Post by Graion Dilach »

BaronOfStuff wrote:
Graion Dilach wrote:
BaronOfStuff wrote: Yes, all that fucking dark blue terrain.
We call that water over here.
Nice try at being a smartass, but the water is light blue.
At least my post was smart, while yours were simply ass.

That being said, a fixed color palette is stupid, limited and a sacrifice. What I'd opt for - and might even look into, depending on my mood - is a switch similar to Warcraft 3: override allies/enemies color with a shade. If you're unaware of this in War3, there's an option there which replaces your enemies' color with red and your allies' to green. Enabling similar overrides with custom defined colors would even make the auto-adjusting pointless as well.

winftw
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Post by winftw »

Graion Dilach wrote: That being said, a fixed color palette is stupid, limited and a sacrifice. What I'd opt for - and might even look into, depending on my mood - is a switch similar to Warcraft 3: override allies/enemies color with a shade. If you're unaware of this in War3, there's an option there which replaces your enemies' color with red and your allies' to green. Enabling similar overrides with custom defined colors would even make the auto-adjusting pointless as well.
I see the limitation as the main strength of a fixed palette. We do indeed sacrifice some freedom of the player but the only thing players have used this freedom for is just abusing it. Most players don't care what their color is.

Openra already has the kind of color switch you describe but its only for health bars. And they get in the way if set to be always visible.

Having player colors be completely client side would be good. So we can have the best of both worlds:
- Auto-pick colors from a fixed palette to avoid ugly and bad colors. This palette could even be completely hidden. No UI or anything
- But also let the player override everybody's colors with a color wheel as he sees fit (since the colors are purely client side)

And btw colorblind people can't tell red and green apart so theres another reason to have clientside player colors.

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Graion Dilach
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Post by Graion Dilach »

You have no idea how much effort it takes to have enough colors on a dropdown list. When Ares added the option to have 16 colors available for Yuri's Revenge, I've poured months into the effort to make all colors distinct enough.

You also ignored that I wouldn't hardcode the actual colors used. You could have yellow for allies and red for enemies, for all I care. Those would be only default values.

Any further level of customization than that Warcraft 3 system is just useless overhead.

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BaronOfStuff
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Post by BaronOfStuff »

Graion Dilach wrote:
BaronOfStuff wrote:
Graion Dilach wrote:
BaronOfStuff wrote: Yes, all that fucking dark blue terrain.
We call that water over here.
Nice try at being a smartass, but the water is light blue.
At least my post was smart, while yours were simply ass.
Might want to brush up on your reading comprehension too while you're at it. I said nice try. There was nothing smart about it, it was just a petty remark from someone taking a break from masturbating over their own ego.

But again, nice try.

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Murto the Ray
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Post by Murto the Ray »

Graion Dilach wrote: And btw colorblind people can't tell red and green apart so there's another reason to have clientside player colors.
That depends on the severity of color blindness. I personally don't have trouble with red/greens in the palette at the moment however i only have a mild case of red/green color blindness. There are also other cases of color blindness such as yellow/purple but that's quite rare compared to red/green. If someone has a severe enough case of colorblindness then they are going to see red as green to begin with so it would make little difference to them as they would likely be used to it; however this may be my ignorance.
Last edited by Murto the Ray on Tue Jul 07, 2015 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

winftw
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Post by winftw »

wtf is going on with the quotes lol :o0:

Further clarification:
In singleplayer if you add bots they get some default colors. If you don't like their colors you can change them.
In multiplayer you can't change the color of other people because the colors are synchronized and everyone sees them the same way.
If it was possible to locally change the colors of multiplayer opponents then the enemy team could be all-red, each opponent could have his own color, etc. And the colorblind would be happy as well because if anyone happens to have a bad color they can change it.

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r34ch
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Post by r34ch »

Although fixed client side colours could fix this issue (as well as colourblindness), just remember that many people on-line talk to others via their colour and not their on-line nicks.

I recall some RTS (later C&Cs?) minimaps having a shaded option, where the minmap can be changed to shades of grey and all enemies are bright red dots. Could be an option over changing the colours of all units on screen.

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