DESIGN: telling players apart more easily

[star mouse]

At present, the game uses a single colour to mark each unit as belonging to a team. This runs into problems when there are a lot of players in the game because it can be difficult to tell the teams apart.

What I propose is that we somehow alter the game so that teams can be told apart more readily. I was thinking of changing the units so that they had two reserved colours, which would allow each team to be marked with two colours, not one. If this was implemented, units would be told apart by easily-distinguished pairs of colours, such as blue/blue, blue/cyan, blue/white, blue/yellow, blue/black, etc. The only thing to watch is making sure the same colour pair doesn't appear twice, such as blue/white and white/blue.

An alternative would be to have this two-colour principle on a "flag" with each unit. The unit sprites would retain their single colour, but each of the teams has a second colour associated with it that can be used to tell them apart if it's difficult.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by star mouse
At present, the game uses a single colour to mark each unit as belonging to a team. This runs into problems when there are a lot of players in the game because it can be difficult to tell the teams apart.

What is the problem with using one color. The only problem is that there are only 16 colors reserved for players, if you have more then 16 civs in the game colors that are used on the mini map are assigned to the player, well and that is the problem, so my sollution is more colors for players.

-Martin

[hexagonian]

Much easier just to go into colors.txt and alter the different color settings to your own preferences. Doesn't involve adding any additional colors, or altering the existing source code....

[star mouse]

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
What is the problem with using one color. The only problem is that there are only 16 colors reserved for players, if you have more then 16 civs in the game colors that are used on the mini map are assigned to the player, well and that is the problem, so my sollution is more colors for players.
-Martin

There are a couple of problems:
* The more players there are, the harder it is to find a distinctive colour for each new player. Player colours are generally not large patches of colour, so it can be difficult to tell the nationality of units apart if the colours are a fairly close match.
* Colour blind people can have particular difficulty telling the nationality of a unit at a glance.

The solution of using two colours to distinguish players has these benefits:
* It removes a practical limitation on the number of players that the game and the players can handle. If two colours were used, 64 distinguishable players are possible using only about 10 different colours.
* Colour-blind people will have less difficulty telling players apart because they would just use the ones that they can distinguish.

Colour pairings for 36 players would only need 8 different colours if each team could have 2 colours, but would require 36 colours if only one was used.

[Maquiladora]

I agree it will be hard for someone whos colour blind to tell apart players in a 32 player game, but roughly how many people is that? and how much effort is it to remake the whole colour system?

I tell you one thing i would like, but i dont know how easy it is, when chatting in MP games you can't see the dark coloured players writing over the tiles like sea and forest, especially when its under fog of war, its hard to see. Would be alot easier if there was a plain background behind the text.

[Maquiladora]

And also another thing with the text in the chat window, it goes all botched up when you close it and someone types a message, i think it all scrolls up together and gets squashed, anyway it goes crap.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by hexagonian
Much easier just to go into colors.txt and alter the different color settings to your own preferences. Doesn't involve adding any additional colors, or altering the existing source code....

That's not so easy if you want to modify the colors of the players above player 16 without screwing up the colors of the minimap. So we need more colors for players exclusivly.

-Martin