Suggestion about colors

[kipale]

The idea just came into my mind, and I find it funny that it hasn't ever been used in any RTS-game of my knowing. In spring we have 16 different teams each with different color. Now that makes it really problematic to spot clear differences in those colors, since there aren't that many "main types of color".

Could we have striped colors in addition to the solid ones? I'm a little colorblind (nothing very serious but still quite noticeable) so I rarely even look at the colors in units. Radar blobs I can read much better, but even for those it would be nice if you split the blob in two halves and thus made it striped. Striped text labels wouldn't be a problem either. I'm only worried about the units. Is it technically possible/easy enough to make their coloring striped?

It's still at idea stage, if you decide to bite the hook you can better experience if striped blobs are really any clearer etc.

[CarRepairer]

Unfortunately it probably won't happen as far as teamcolor on units. The patches of teamcolor are up to the texturer of the unit and could be far too small for stripes to be feasible. Whether or not this could work on map icons I don't know.

An alternate idea would be some sort of widget that indicates units by some other means. It would be ugly and intrusive but possible, like some sort of arrow above each unit and small print of the player's name. I often use trepan's "highlight unit" widget which allows you to hover over any unit and hold the meta key (default is spacebar) to see the unit name and owner name. It's useful when enemy units zoom by really quickly and I don't have the patience to check the color of that unit in the player list, or when colors are really similar. See also the "commander name tags" widget.

[smoth]

deal with it in a widget, please do not add this sort of ugly mechanic into engine functionality. Stripes could be done by the texture artist but would be largely difficult to see in game. Maybe some kind of simplified colors widget would help you, adding more colors that you cannot tell apart will of course amplify your issue. So I would try and see about making a simplified color widget.

I did some amount of reading and while your type of color blind will get solved with one solution it may not always suit another type of colorblind. As someone who is not colorblind and someone who is saddened by the loss of color in your world I can sympathize but I do not believe stripes are the answer. please look into a customizable simplified colors widget.

[thesleepless]

i can't see this happening in spring anytime soon, but could go down the path DoW takes where you can customise various colours for your team.

eg. Pick the main colour, trim colour, weapon colour, etc. choose the badge for your team (using your own pics) which gets stuck in various places on units.

for texturing i guess you'd have each different area defined by an alpha channel. now sure how you'd do the badge bit.. maybe you'd have to use specific UV coords?

this way teams can look quite different using the same models and can have a more personal touch.

[smoth]

dawn of war is played at a fixed zoom angle, something projects in spring cannot enforce. This make multiple colors reasonable because the player can see the unit well enough.

[Jazcash]

The solution is simple, Invent some more colours!

[Google_Frog]

If it's a big problem use teamcolors.lua

[hoijui]

we have two ideas so far:
1. allow team-arbitrary-texture (eg stripes with two different colors) instead of only one team-color.
2. allow multiple, separated team-colorable areas (eg kbot head and legs are team-color 1, main body has some team-color 2)

both of these would need some engine work i guess, or maybe be possible with Lua. but other then that, i can not see any negative in this. we can build in an option to let modders or the users disallow this, and stick wiht the old way. this would mean enforcing to set both team colors to the same color.
now if we have small black and white stripes, and zoom far out, it will just look gray, so from far away, b&w and gray team look the same, but this is not really a disadvantage.. its more like:
same when zoomed out, more possibility to differentiate when zoomed in.

[Beherith]

If it's a big problem use teamcolors.lua

Yep, then you only need 3; one for you, one for your allies and one for your enemies.

[Forboding Angel]

try turning on the teamplatters. THat may help

[zwzsg]

Could we have striped colors in addition to the solid ones?

A soft widget can do that.

ideas so far:
1. allow team-arbitrary-texture

Play moar Operation Polaris!

[AF]

A suggestion:

Modify the team colour platters to also be different shapes depending on the team. So team 1 would be a square, 2 a triangle, 3 a circle, pentagon hexagon etc etc

[CarRepairer]

A suggestion:

Modify the team colour platters to also be different shapes depending on the team. So team 1 would be a square, 2 a triangle, 3 a circle, pentagon hexagon etc etc

Finally a good idea. Brilliant!

To everyone else who posted I don't think you understood. This guy is partly colorblind. Changing the team colors around with lua won't necessarily help, nor will tiny stripes on tiny peewee units. And it won't help to depend on modders to re-texture every unit with "teamcolor-A on this part and teamcolor-B on this part" - that's not gonna happen.

AF's idea would actually work.

[Jazcash]

Or when you hover over a unit, it highlights all units belonging to that player very lightly and tells you which player they belong too in a non-intrusive subtle sort of manner ^_^

[smoth]

Or when you hover over a unit, it highlights all units belonging to that player very lightly and tells you which player they belong too in a non-intrusive subtle sort of manner ^_^

like the highlight units widget?

[Jazcash]

Or when you hover over a unit, it highlights all units belonging to that player very lightly and tells you which player they belong too in a non-intrusive subtle sort of manner ^_^

like the highlight units widget?

Yes but with less opacity. Just enough so you can tell which player the units belong but not too much so you lose track of which unit you were originally highlighting anyway. And so it's not too distracting.

Maybe 90% opacity for the unit you were selecting anyway, and then 30-40% opacity for the rest of the units belonging to that player.

I could see this causing some lag though...

[smoth]

well it could be adjusted. so much lua so little time and health right now.

[kipale]

Wow nice I really started a discussion here. Nice ideas everyone. I know some simple solutions like allies green, enemies red kind of stuff. I also have fog of war always on which helps to sort out friends and foes (who remembers which color is ally in which game anyways). More problems arise in situations where for example some ally places a labeled marker in my base ,maybe asks for t2 con or something, and I have no idea who asked for it if I didn't take a look at the chat console when it was placed.

This colorblindness thing isn't really nothing to worry about in normal life (very few of my friends have ever even noticed it), but in games like this I just see 5 types of white/grey/light blue in 8v8 games and they're all the same to me. I don't know, maybe they're all the same to you too. Main point is that I wanted to bring some light to the issue and maybe give the developers some new ideas to think about :)

[smoth]

maybe a point should have the player name written vertically on it? feature request?

[thesleepless]

or a tooltip on mouseover.

also, is it possible to adjust the appearance of the marker points with lua?