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Sometimes it hard to tell 2 players apart from their colour

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9 years ago
I noticed in games that there is always two or around 4 people that share the same colour like red but its just a little bit brighter or darker and its really hard to tell the difference.

Is there anyway to improve this? on my end for example in settings?
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Skasi
9 years ago
Provide a set of colors that improves this and it will probably be implemented in less than a week.
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9 years ago
I have no idea where to start or even understand how to provide such colors.

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Skasi
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.
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9 years ago
Since I was the last person to modify all of the colours: My goal with the current colour palette was to provide about 6-8 fairly distinct colours, and after that I found there wasn't enough distinctiveness to go around. Sorry that doesn't help 10v10 or 12v12 or whatever, but there are only so many distinct colours that identify as blue/green or red/yellow, that can be easily identified distinctly at a glance..
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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
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quote:
Also we could make a really whitish/blackish/grey. They are the most defined.

What would white and black identify as (red team or blue team)?

quote:
Brown

That reminds me of the other constraint: Player colours must prioritize being bright, so that they stick out from the map both as icons and on the player lists. There are darker colours in that list, but they don't start until the 9th player on each team or so. Brown, for reference, is dark orange, which is enemy colour 3 (light orange, that is).
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9 years ago
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.
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9 years ago
Just put USrankAdminCarRepairer s "custom colours" widget as defautl and viola. It'll fix everything. It will even make teh game easier, as it synces the colours to every player in the game.
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9 years ago
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.
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Well, then someone mix up the both widgets.

Make colours synced to every players, and make them also aliggned by cold (team1) - hot(team2) scheme.
This was asked several times anyway.
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9 years ago
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.
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Skasi
9 years ago
quote:
Better colour distinction won't help when a few units have very little teamcolor on them anyhow.

This has bothered me for quite a while! When new spider models were made I kept asking for "MOAR TEAMKOLOR PLOX KTHZBB" or something along the lines.. anyway, I read (and later confirmed) that WarcraftInSpace-craft-2 has an option for team-color-display-intensity, ZK needs that too! (no the "team color circle below units"-widget is not what I am looking for)
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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).
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Current ''synced'' colours are a bit more complicated. It would need futher investigation, but I'm quite certain that it doesnt just exchange tile with blue depending if a player is THE player or just another player.

Yup, it brings up to the point taht colours need straight rework (becsaue of colours being too similar). But before that we need to decide if cold-ally warm-enemy + slightly synced but unconsitent scheme is more important than cold-team1 warm-team2 + fully synced colours scheme.

I'd go for the 2nd one because I don't think there are many Neanderthals playing Zk, who can't guess taht if himslef is warm, enemy should be cold...
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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).
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The "hot" and "cold" I keep reading. I had no idea or did I ever feel like the color was decided by this.

Anyway does this hot and cold thing really matter. I rather prefer to tell what specific player it is at a glance then not being able to players apart at all.

I think the only thing that needs to be followed is that enemies and allies don't share common color during a game.

Basically you won't find two shades of red on both team. I am all for this hot and cold idea but it sounds like your putting this idea in front of player convenience for the sake of following a guideline.
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9 years ago
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.
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The hot and cold idea doesn't really constrain it as much as it sounds. The range of available colours is more limited by ensuring it stands out from the map and stands out as icons. This part is non-negotiable, excepting a sudden wide-scale mutation in every human eyeball to increase the width of the visible spectrum, and the associated changes to computer monitors.

The cold/warm part only constrains distribution, and helps quite a bit with ally/enemy identification and team identification for spectators, especially at a glance, but isn't strictly necessary. In the current version you can turn that off locally, as the team-based colours are a separate widget.

You say having it off would mean not having two similar shades of red on the same team, but imagine if those two similar shades were on opposite teams, and currently fighting each other. How would you know if your ally is winning or losing by looking at the battle, at least while there is still time to help?

Or just listen to PLrankAdminSprung, who ninja'd me with a better explanation.
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