Default teams colors

[Viliam]

It would be good to accommodate (as well as possible) various kinds of color blindness. I don't know much about it. (except i know a surprizing number of partially colorblind artists) If Kyle.nn or someone else could post some useful information about how various kinds of colorblindness works, and how common the various types are, we could deal with this better.

I have no personal experience with color-blindness, but I'll try to write what I read about it:

The light-sensitive cells in human eye are "rods" and "cones". Rods are more sensitive to light (they can detect a single photon of light), and they provide black-and-white vision. In the dark we only see gray colors; and we percieve blue colors as light gray, and red colors as dark gray. People without correctly functioning rods are "night blind", they cannot see in darkness.

Cones need more ligh to function, they provide color vision. Average humans have three kinds of cones, sensitive to three different wavelengths. That's why our color scheme is three-dimensional; for each color our brain receives 3 values from 3 different types of cones. (The three-dimensional color system reflects the nature of the human eye, not the nature of colors per se. Two different colors that happen to produce the same reaction for each cone type, will be percieved by average human as the same color, though someone else may be able to see the difference -- just as two different color can appear like the same color in black and white picture. Some birds and butterflies see 4 or 5 dimensions of color.)

Color blindness means that one or more types of cones are not functioning correctly. Most frequent is the inability to distinguish green / yellow / orange (brown) / red part of spectrum. This is because one cone type detects blue color, one detects green color, and one detects green-yellow color. (The last one is often labeled as detecting red color, but the perception of "red" color is actually a perception of "much closer to green-yellow than to green-only".) If any of the last two is missing, or one is mutated towards the other, one cannot distinguish the "green and above" colors -- this makes about 6% of male population. (The important gene is on the "sex chromozome"; males have one copy of it, females have two copies; females are color-blind only if both their copies are wrong.)

Some web simulators of color-blindness:
http://vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php
http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/
(the "anomalous green cones" is the most frequent form of color-blindness)

[turin]

Anomalous green is, IIRC, much, much more common than anomalous blue. That means that green-red colorblindness is more common than blue-yellow. So we probably shouldn't worry about the latter nearly as much as about the former.

Another option would be to have a preferences thing allowing you to change the team colors if they were indistinguishable to you.

[scott]

How do color blind people cope with unit sides right now?

Honestly, I don't see the wisdom in making the thing an exercize in accessibility for 6% of the male population.

If this is why team colors are being implemented, then carry on, otherwise we should try to first meet the original goal of providing an attractive and intuitive side method of distinction. THEN we can move on to accomodating color blind people. Then fully blind people. Etc.

[guest]

http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/

Inputting the 216 colour palette (6*6*6 r*g*b value combinations) gives interesting results. Looks like the possibilities are a bit limited. (See e.g. http://www.lynda.com/hex.html for more information on the 216 colour palette.)

However, having the default team colours WML-configurable (in something like colors.cfg) could work. That way colour blind people could just create another colors.cfg, and plug it in, to replace the colors with what they prefer.

The team-colors shouldn't be imposed on them from the one hosting the game, in that case. How to deal with this - well, I am not sure.

And what to do with team communication? "Is blue moving?" "Red seems to be a good player... I think we should maybe attack the others first..."


EDIT: Come to think of it, there's actually two different issues here.
1) The default team colours. (The topic of this post.)
2) If that isn't distinguishable enough, what can a colourblind person do?


My post above is on topic 2). And I guess it could be made so that a person can have a preference override_colours="true", which would mean that no game-host-specified colours would be used. The person would lose the communication based on colours, but if the player names were better visible in the game, that wouldn't be a problem.


On 1) I'm rather noncommitted. Best way would probably be to have:
- a reasonable default selection of 10 (not 9) colours...
- out of a palette of 16-20 colours.

I don't think saving them per person makes sense, because it's useful to know the turn order based on the default colours. (If there was an other way to see the turn order (the status table doesn't do in fogged games), I wouldn't object to saving personal "used colours" in preferences.)

[Emmanovi]

Anomalous green is, IIRC, much, much more common than anomalous blue. That means that green-red colorblindness is more common than blue-yellow. So we probably shouldn't worry about the latter nearly as much as about the former.

Another option would be to have a preferences thing allowing you to change the team colors if they were indistinguishable to you.

... but .... surely .... OAB???

I agree, I was only aware of red/green. It is much more common than any other. I have a friend who is red/green colourblind, though it hardly affects him.

[Dobob]

Well, I did a little research and I've found that I actually have Protanopia, the rarest of the red-green color blindness. But I've found that both people with protanopia and deuteranopia (1% of male) can't see color at 492 nm and 498 nm respectively, and see them white instead. What are these colors : cyan. So that's why I've always found cyan on my old trusted Turbo Pascal 6.0 compiler so close to white...

How do color blind people cope with unit sides right now?

When I chose team colors, I must avoir having both a yellow and a green teams. If I can't (like in campaign), I must look very carefully to distinguish them (take a few seconds each time I want to know which side a unit is on).

Honestly, I don't see the wisdom in making the thing an exercize in accessibility for 6% of the male population.

It shouldn't take much time to adapt to most color blind people. Just make hard to distinguish pairs as far to each other in the "default" order (like yellow-green and white-cyan). If green/cyan are somewhere like 7/8th position, it would make all games with 6 sides or less more enjoyable for me and others.

My color order suggestion would be something like :
- red
- blue
- yellow
- white
- black
- I don't know, maybe pink, purple or violet
- green
- cyan
- ...

[Darth Fool]

Ok, all default team colors are now defined in team_colors.cfg. You can change them at will

edit: the format for the team_rgb is

Code: Select all

team_rgb = red_team, green_team, blue_team, red_max, green_max, blue_max, red_min, green_min, blue_min.

If people (who don't have svn access) come up with their own better versions of the color ranges and want them to be considered for use in the default, post the revised team_colors.cfg here.