Team Color Tweaks
Moderator: Forum Moderators
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.Eleazar wrote: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.
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
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 2481
- Joined: July 16th, 2004, 1:47 am
- Location: US Midwest
- Contact:
Why not? I believe TColor works in a lot of other games, even RTSs, where instant recognition is more important than in Wesnoth.zookeeper wrote: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).
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.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
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.
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.
-
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 1113
- Joined: November 29th, 2003, 11:40 pm
- Location: Norway
I agree, they look fine as they are.Zhukov wrote: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.
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.Eleazar wrote:Why not? I believe TColor works in a lot of other games, even RTSs, where instant recognition is more important than in Wesnoth.zookeeper wrote: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).
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.
For I am Turin Turambar - Master of Doom, by doom mastered. On permanent Wesbreak. Will not respond to private messages. Sorry!
And I hate stupid people.
The World of Orbivm
And I hate stupid people.
The World of Orbivm
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.
* 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.
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.
Yes, he is right about that.Zhukov wrote:However, you're right that brown and orange are rather too similar.
* 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.
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.zookeeper wrote:But yeah, the ancient lich in particular could be brightened up a bit still.
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.Jetryl wrote: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.
- Eleazar
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 2481
- Joined: July 16th, 2004, 1:47 am
- Location: US Midwest
- Contact:
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?
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?
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
I don't see a problem with this. I hope it'd be easy to code, it sounds like a reasonable thing to have.Eleazar wrote: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?
-
- Retired Developer
- Posts: 2633
- Joined: March 22nd, 2004, 11:22 pm
- Location: An Earl's Roadstead
It should be easy to code. I will see if I can get it done this weekend.Eleazar wrote:
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?
"you can already do that with WML"
Fight Creeeping Biggerism!
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 760#131760
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 1358#11358
-
- Retired Developer
- Posts: 2633
- Joined: March 22nd, 2004, 11:22 pm
- Location: An Earl's Roadstead
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.Darth Fool wrote:It should be easy to code. I will see if I can get it done this weekend.Eleazar wrote:
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?
"you can already do that with WML"
Fight Creeeping Biggerism!
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 760#131760
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 1358#11358
- Eleazar
- Retired Terrain Art Director
- Posts: 2481
- Joined: July 16th, 2004, 1:47 am
- Location: US Midwest
- Contact:
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.Darth Fool wrote:Ok, as of revision 14104 I have added an optional fourth color to the team color ranges.....
[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.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity