Sometimes it hard to tell 2 players apart from their colour

Provide a set of colors that improves this and it will probably be implemented in less than a week.

You can use color charts (example) to provide a list of colors that are easy to distinguish.

Here is a list of currently used colors, you can either expand the list, or improve existing colors. To test your own colors you can create a LocalColors.lua file in the \Spring\LuaUI\Configs directory and make a list just like the example I linked.

Note that many color charts use things like #000000 and #FFFFFF while the local color file I mentioned uses (0, 0, 0) and (255, 255, 255). If this confuses you, there's a really simple list of examples on wikipedia that might help. If you are still confused, let me know and I'll try to explain this.

Well what are the existing colors? I start from there i guess. #



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors:_A%E2%80%93F

Also we could make a really whitish/blackish/grey. They are the most defined.
Brown.

Also what about adding symbols. I would like to have space invader picture on my units :P

We are very limited by the fact that we cannot use colours that are too light (undersaturated) or too dark. Licho in particular insisted on this, we used to have a bunch of light greens and yellows which were determined too hard to tell apart. Since unit icons have black details, you also need a colour light enough that those details are visible, as shadowfury said. This means the 'slightly darker red' is not as dark as it could be.

Car's custom colors won't magically expand the visible spectrum. It also doesn't make the game easier; it makes it harder because you can no longer automatically treat cold colors as allies (and warm as enemies) and instead need to look it up anew every game. Oneself being always teal is also pretty handy.

OT: the colours become hard to tell apart (and duplicated) only with excessive player counts so the issue is fairly minor, not fixable for arbitrarily high player counts and would not exist with sensible limits.

Still working on my Centroid Marker, then you'll have a little less need to look at the colour.

Better colour distinction won't help when a few units have very little teamcolor on them anyhow.

quote: Make colours synced to every players, and make them also aliggned by cold (team1) - hot(team2) scheme.

This goes against the "warm enemies, cold allies" and does not allow for a constant self colour. It also does not deal with the issue of the colours being hard to tell apart.

You can however make the colours synced inside the alliances. Indeed this is already the case: the enemy you see as red, all your teammates also see as red. It is also partially the case for allies: the teammate you see as green, everyone in the alliance except himself also sees as green (and he sees himself as teal). This also applies to spectators (they initially "belong" to an arbitrary team).

I'd stick with the current one on the grounds that:

1) it allows a consistent "self" colour;
2) it allows consistent schemes for ally/enemy.

These two allow you to tell whether a unit is own, allied, or enemy at a glance, which is important. The second system doesn't allow the consistent self colour and requires context to know whether warm or cold is the allies; it might not seem very problematic to figure out the context each battle but I believe it is helpful not to have to. The simplest case here is 1v1 where currently colour meanings are strictly set (red - enemy, teal - self); using the second system would strip them of that. Besides:

3) it is synced for the main purpose of that (enemy colours are consistent among teammates). Teammate colours are as synced as is possible while keeping the unique self colour; for full sync removal of the self colour would be necessary (and sufficient).
4) it is already used.

Colors being too similar is not a problem with color schemes. Changing the colour scheme does not automagically extend the visible spectrum. You cannot get rid of the problem's source: there are only so many colours you can use, so similarity will always be a problem with clusterfuck level player counts regardless of palette choice; all you can do is limit the symptoms (through sensible limit on player counts).

The amount of colours available:
* is limited by various constraints (eg. cannot be too bright or too dark);
* is unaffected by grouping (warm / cold);
* is proportional to colour similarity.

The amount of colours that we can use is therefore very low, about 20. ZK uses 12+1 different colours for allies and 16 for enemies but evidently they are already too similar.

It cannot be helped if the current colour palette has overlapping colours. We cannot create new colours [citation needed] so if colours start being too similar it simply means the player count exceeds the number of easily discernible colours. Play smaller games.