Magenta Maintenance Issues

[Sapient]

My understanding of magenta as the team color:

It is very useful for avoiding conflicts with unit art, however it has an ugly maintenance downside. The working theory is that we can always find where unit images may appear, grab an appropriate unit configuration file, and apply team coloring. However, I think this may not always be the case; even if it is the case, it creates an unnecessary burden for code maintenance.

There are a lot of places where a unit image may appear with no associated team information, or even worse, no associated unit configuration file. If I understand correctly, Darth has some automated tool to apply team colorings, so it should not be a very time-consuming conversion to magenta-free versions. Blue, red, green, it doesn't really matter, or even need to be consistent (although some consistancy among the same line of units may be desirable).

Personally, I think it would be wise for magenta team coloring to be phased out in the near future (except for units where it looks good as a default team color). This seems to be the KISS solution.

[Eleazar]

My understanding of magenta as the team color:

It is very useful for avoiding conflicts with unit art, however it has an ugly maintenance downside. The working theory is that we can always find where unit images may appear, grab an appropriate unit configuration file, and apply team coloring. However, I think this may not always be the case; even if it is the case, it creates an unnecessary burden for code maintenance.

There are a lot of places where a unit image may appear with no associated team information, or even worse, no associated unit configuration file. If I understand correctly, Darth has some automated tool to apply team colorings, so it should not be a very time-consuming conversion to magenta-free versions. Blue, red, green, it doesn't really matter, or even need to be consistent (although some consistancy among the same line of units may be desirable).

Personally, I think it would be wise for magenta team coloring to be phased out in the near future (except for units where it looks good as a default team color). This seems to be the KISS solution.

It should be possible (so coders have said) to assign any graphic a team and a conversion macro. This may be harder than originally expected, but unless the coders give up on the idea, i think that's a better solution, than what you are proposing.

I don't have a problem with multiple team coloring macros, as long as they are carefully set up to give similar results. i've been meaning to create a {GREEN_IS_THE_TEAM_COLOR} macro for some time because it can be hard to see magenta against red or even some browns-- I just haven't gotten around to it.
However, I don't think i'd support that if I knew we were doomed to have unit images appearing in the GUI that would never be TColored. If units must be shown to the player without TColoring, i think the TColored part should always be the same color.

I don't like seeing pink units either, but you just have to realize that this is a work in progress.

[Sapient]

Do we really want to start adding extra tags in WML (and other files) to point to team color instructions for every place where images are used? I think in some places TC is easier than others, and in those few rare places where it doesn't make sense some decent-looking base image would be nice.

Let me give an example: someone chooses to use art from one of unit images from a mainline campaign for their usermade campaign logo. You are at the title screen, the campaign has not even been defined yet. Thus, there is no unit CFG to read team color instructions from, even if you were to perform a lookup of every unit type and search for tags that use that image.

Although, I agree that using an unaltered base image should be the exception rather than the rule, I think the minor inconveniences of non-magenta base images would be well worth it.

[zookeeper]

I think this could be solved reasonably elegantly with a new WML feature(s). Something like..."functions", which would eventually be useful elsewhere, too.

So, if there was a TColour_image function, it would get used like this:

Code: Select all

campaign_image=TColour_image(1, "units/drakes/Flare.png");

(putting a side 1 teamcoloured drake flare base frame as the campaign_image)

I'd say that would be one potential way, if this issue was to be solved from the WML side.

Code-wise, the function would output a new image into some temp file (userdata/temp/dynamic_generated_image_00001.png or whatever), the filename of which the preprocessor would then insert as the final value of campaign_image, so the workings of the existing image keys would not need to change.

[Sapient]

Zookeeper: seems like a good idea.

But, I still think the easiest solution by far is to use presentable base images. A few precise RGBs would be restricted from the palette, but a wider choice of base color macros would negate even this mild limitation.