Team Color Tweaks

[zookeeper]

Sure my colors are more saturated, but that's inherently required for indentifier colors. You don't find national flags, or sports team uniforms mostly using desaturated, neutral colors. It just doesn't work.

Quite frankly, I don't like most of the units when saturated that much. They just look...bad. The royal guard being the most horrible one.

TC, IMO, can never replace a proper team indicator (the ellipse, some other small icon, whatever). That's why I don't think the TC needs to work that well as the team identifier (sure, it shouldn't be hard to see the team by looking at the unit, but IMHO it doesn't need to be always visible when glancing at a bunch of units). It's more like fancy eye candy for me. But yeah, the ancient lich in particular could be brightened up a bit still.

[Eleazar]

Quite frankly, I don't like most of the units when saturated that much. They just look...bad. The royal guard being the most horrible one.

TC, IMO, can never replace a proper team indicator (the ellipse, some other small icon, whatever).

Why not? I believe TColor works in a lot of other games, even RTSs, where instant recognition is more important than in Wesnoth.

However, after player a few levels, i think i overdid the saturation. It still needs more saturation, just not quite as much as in my example.

[Zhukov]

Apart from black, the saturated colours all look notably worse. Some look horrible. Not quite this bad, but pretty close.
The black looks decent, or at least no worse. The yellow, grey and cyan (the three on the right) are the worst.

I'm no expert on the subject, but I remember Jetryl saying that TC was never intended to replace the elipses. If people want team identification they can turn the big circles on. That said, I play without elipses and have never had any trouble, even when both teams are using the same faction. I can't talk for anyone else, but with the current levels I have no trouble telling the teams apart.

However, you're right that brown and orange are rather too similar.

[freim]

Apart from black, the saturated colours all look notably worse. Some look horrible. Not quite this bad, but pretty close.
The black looks decent, or at least no worse. The yellow, grey and cyan (the three on the right) are the worst.

I agree, they look fine as they are.

[turin]

Quite frankly, I don't like most of the units when saturated that much. They just look...bad. The royal guard being the most horrible one.

TC, IMO, can never replace a proper team indicator (the ellipse, some other small icon, whatever).

Why not? I believe TColor works in a lot of other games, even RTSs, where instant recognition is more important than in Wesnoth.

However, after player a few levels, i think i overdid the saturation. It still needs more saturation, just not quite as much as in my example.

In those games where tcolor makes units instantly recognizable, tcolor is (for the most part) the ONLY color on the unit. The unit is some shade of grey plus red, blue, or green. With Wesnoth, the units have a lot of color that is not the team color.

[Jetrel]

I'm standing firm on my decision to keep a desaturated color set. It just looks better. The primary reason behind the team-coloration was to provide a unified look to factions, and to make it such that the existing colors on units did not clash with the color of their ellipse and flags. It always looked bizarre running around with orcs wearing bright red capes when they were actually on the _blue_ team; this fixes that. It was an aesthetic change, primarily.

We knew going into this that we could never team-color everything, else we'd end up with purple ghosts flying around; further, even if we could, certain units would not look good with anything more than miniscule TC patches (assassins, for example). Thus, given the choice between "extremely identifiable" team colored sprites, and "aesthetically pleasing" teamed colored sprites, we chose the latter, since the former had inherent flaws no matter how well we executed the sprites, and the need is already filled by the ellipses. Thus, identifiability, though desirable, is subordinate to aesthetics.*




However, once the rest of the TC units get finished, I'm game for tweaking some members of the TC set, slightly:

• Black could be deepened to Eleazar's level, so long as I'm sure it won't flatline the definition on some sprites.
• Brown could be brightened, ever so slightly.
• Orange should be made somewhat more vibrant, but again I have to be careful not to break the shading by making the "darkest darks" too bright.

However, you're right that brown and orange are rather too similar.

Yes, he is right about that.



* and with a quick text edit, or with DF's proposed TC UI idea, anyone can choose their own colors if they really don't like these. A "vibrant, identifiable" set (e.g. this one, basically) would be the first candidate for an alternate set.

[Jetrel]

But yeah, the ancient lich in particular could be brightened up a bit still.

a] Color on the undead race is muted more than on other races; again, for aesthetic reasons. Undead need to look scary, and bright colors don't convey a sense of dread. It's the difference between Dawn of the Dead, and Shawn of the Dead.


b] The ancient lich is an extremely rare campaign-only unit, that I TCed only because I had done the lich already and needed to rehash the Ancient version's sprites anyways. There will never be any situation where a player is in doubt as to what side the ancient lich belongs to, mostly because there is almost never more than one on the map. It's like TC on a cockatrice; no one complains about the lack of it now.

[zookeeper]

b] The ancient lich is an extremely rare campaign-only unit, that I TCed only because I had done the lich already and needed to rehash the Ancient version's sprites anyways. There will never be any situation where a player is in doubt as to what side the ancient lich belongs to, mostly because there is almost never more than one on the map. It's like TC on a cockatrice; no one complains about the lack of it now.

Good point.

[Noyga]

Well the problem is some of the colors (blue, green, black, brown) are close to totally unusable on the minimap, i think we need a separate second set of close but more saturated colors for the minimaps.

[Eleazar]

On a technical note:
I posted this on theother thread, but it probably should be here.

Nearly all the TColor definitions use pure white and black as maximum/minimum color values. This hightens the contrast from what the artist paints on the TColored unit. The darkest TColor value is dark, but quite clearly brighter than black. The darkest/lightest TColor values should mostly be replaced with dark/light versions of the TColor.

The color theory that Jetryl boasted of knowing should also be used in the TColor values. The highlight color of blue should be more cyan. The highlight or a red/orange/brown, should migrate closer to yellow, etc.


Noyga has a great idea:
Good idea! Even if we had a a TColor set excessively saturated as my first proposal, there would still be benefit in defining the mini-map values separately. The main values of the "black" and "white" TColors are neccesarilly some form of grey. But looks at the units, and interprets the color as "black" or "white." It would be much easier to see and relate to dots on the mini-map that were pure black or while.

Actually the ellipses should work from the same color definition as the mini-map dots. I'm having a hard time putting this into words, but visually the defining aspect of a given color may be anywhere between the darks (black) mid tones (red, green) or the highlights (white, yellow). The ellipse and mini-map-dot should correspond to the most identifiable color, not the value that's neccesarily in the middle to make the object shade decently.

So the new TColor definitions should have 4 RGB values.
The first used for ellipses and dots.
The next 3 values for unit/flag highlights, midtones, and shadows.

I'm confident this would allow us to define more attrative and useable colors. Hopefully it's easy to code?

[zookeeper]

So the new TColor definitions should have 4 RGB values.
The first used for ellipses and dots.
The next 3 values for unit/flag highlights, midtones, and shadows.

I'm confident this would allow us to define more attrative and useable colors. Hopefully it's easy to code?

I don't see a problem with this. I hope it'd be easy to code, it sounds like a reasonable thing to have.

[Darth Fool]

So the new TColor definitions should have 4 RGB values.
The first used for ellipses and dots.
The next 3 values for unit/flag highlights, midtones, and shadows.

I'm confident this would allow us to define more attrative and useable colors. Hopefully it's easy to code?

It should be easy to code. I will see if I can get it done this weekend.

[Jetrel]

Well the problem is some of the colors (blue, green, black, brown) are close to totally unusable on the minimap, i think we need a separate second set of close but more saturated colors for the minimaps.

This is really good idea.

[Darth Fool]

So the new TColor definitions should have 4 RGB values.
The first used for ellipses and dots.
The next 3 values for unit/flag highlights, midtones, and shadows.

I'm confident this would allow us to define more attrative and useable colors. Hopefully it's easy to code?

It should be easy to code. I will see if I can get it done this weekend.

Ok, as of revision 14104 I have added an optional fourth color to the team color ranges. This will be used wherever there is the need for only one color to represent the color range such as the mini map. Note that this does not include flags or ellipses, since both of those are currently handled by changing the color within the graphic the same way other TCing is done. It is possible to choose a color which is completely different than the color range and be confusing, however this is not recommended. It is also possible to leave the color out all togeather, in which case the first color (the mid range) will be used.

[Eleazar]

Ok, as of revision 14104 I have added an optional fourth color to the team color ranges.....

Ok. i bumped up to saturation on the mini-map colors. I don't expect brown to work much better, but i can't test since i'm having trouble compiling at the moment.

[Edit, Later]

It would be really great if the ellipses would use the mini-map color as their primary color also. White and Black ellipses especially would look better. It feels a little like a kludge, but if the mini-map color replaced the middle color for the ellipses recoloring, that would do the trick.