Friend or Foe Team Platters
Posted: 09 Sep 2011, 00:27
I like very much trepan's gui_team_platter widget for easily distinguishing units from different teams. However, in games with many players (e.g.: 2 alliances with 8 players each one) it can be difficult to distinguish friends from foes due to the amount of team colors to remember. I slightly modified trepan's widget so that platters of our alliance units have a diamond shape instead of circular:
Things that I don't like about this fix:
- when zooming out, team platters may be so small that it can be difficult to distinguish circles from diamonds, and
- when zooming out even more, triangles are drawn instead of units along with their platters, independently of whether they are friends or foes (and both friend and enemy commanders and kogrots are all represented by the same robot icon); this is not consistent with the widget purpose,
Indeed, Spring distinguishes between teams and alliances, but we can only choose a different color in order to distinguish different teams; there is no feature for distinguishing different alliance units but we are to remember the colors of each team, which can be difficult for games with 16 players or more. An easy solution would be to use polygons with different amounts of sides per alliance, though I don't think that feature would be easy to distinguish when having many alliances (distinguishing heptagons from octagons? moreover, 32-side polygons already look like circles...). Anyway, usual games are either FFA or comprise 2 alliances only. In the former case, team colors are already unique for each alliance, and in the latter case we can simply use circles and diamonds. Perhaps somebody can come up with a different platter feature which better distinguishes between different alliances, even when there are many alliances...
Other solution is proposed by very_bad_soldier
http://widgets.springrts.de/index.php#105
This widget allows for defining colors for specific players and locally using them in all your games (e.g.: you can choose red color for your own units, but only you will see them as red). Yet we are faced with the problem of recalling multiple colors, and we are to choose colors for specific players. Unless we always play with the same people, we will have to be defining new colors each time a new player comes in...
- when zooming out, team platters may be so small that it can be difficult to distinguish circles from diamonds, and
- when zooming out even more, triangles are drawn instead of units along with their platters, independently of whether they are friends or foes (and both friend and enemy commanders and kogrots are all represented by the same robot icon); this is not consistent with the widget purpose,
Indeed, Spring distinguishes between teams and alliances, but we can only choose a different color in order to distinguish different teams; there is no feature for distinguishing different alliance units but we are to remember the colors of each team, which can be difficult for games with 16 players or more. An easy solution would be to use polygons with different amounts of sides per alliance, though I don't think that feature would be easy to distinguish when having many alliances (distinguishing heptagons from octagons? moreover, 32-side polygons already look like circles...). Anyway, usual games are either FFA or comprise 2 alliances only. In the former case, team colors are already unique for each alliance, and in the latter case we can simply use circles and diamonds. Perhaps somebody can come up with a different platter feature which better distinguishes between different alliances, even when there are many alliances...
Other solution is proposed by very_bad_soldier
http://widgets.springrts.de/index.php#105
This widget allows for defining colors for specific players and locally using them in all your games (e.g.: you can choose red color for your own units, but only you will see them as red). Yet we are faced with the problem of recalling multiple colors, and we are to choose colors for specific players. Unless we always play with the same people, we will have to be defining new colors each time a new player comes in...
