Do not add new colors - discussion

Femboy

I propose we should add new colors. I understand the concerns of them being too similar. After some feedback, we definitely want to avoid having too many colors that will become an annoyance for our players.

Here is my idea of what colors should be added/changed. The biggest focus on this color scheme is the lack of similarity between the colors / visibility.

Also @Uveso, sadly, being accessible isn't a possibility since either we'll run into very similar colors everyone can see or we can have different colors that the color blind cannot differentiate. I'm not sure how we could balance both issues (we would need at least 16 different colors and I'm not sure which colors would work for every color blind person since there are different types of color blind)

FtXCommando

@zeldafanboy said in Do not add new colors - discussion:

@gorton

Why? We already have multiple variations of colors like green or blue, just refer to players by their name or position instead of color

Plenty of maps where you can't refer to position and plenty of names that aren't easy to refer to. Not to mention most of the time if you refer to a name you need to cross reference it with color or hover over the color on the map to see where the guy named is.

Also, again, no one says the current FAF colors are awesome and perfect. It not being perfect is not a justification to extend the problem.

BlackYps

I think we should approach this from getting names for the colors first and then see how many we get, instead of making color variations without regard how you would refer to them in game.
Colors that come to my mind are: blue, teal, purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, white. Using "dark" as a qualifier gives us 18 colors total. (dark white is grey and dark orange could be brown)
So unless you have ideas for additional color names that people that know english only as second language would use intuitively, I think we should limit us to 18 colors.

maudlin27

I'd prefer reducing to 16 and focusing on better contrast between them than adding new colours. The downside of someone having only 1 colour to choose in an 8v8 game feels outweighed by the issue of not being able to easily tell apart or easily refer to very similar colours.

Femboy

@maudlin27 I'm pretty sure we can have both. I do think it sucks having so little colors to choose from.

Keene

The default colors are bad enough with my colorblindness but with the new list of colors half of those colors have one or two or three others that I struggle to differentiate.

I don't think these should be added and the PR should be reversed.

There is a compromise: make a ranked UI/Sim mod that does nothing but add colors and let the players choose whether to play with it or not.

I can only speak for me personally but adding these new colors is making playing the game worse due to my bad eyesight.

Femboy

I think currently people are agreeing more to not add more colors. I think instead of adding (which would have to be lighter/saturated variants to avoid being too similar) we can actually remove 2 shades of green and adjust some colors so visualization is better.

I think we could all agree that the CURRENT color scheme is bad because it offers alot of greens and it's quite confusing

Yes, that is in the CURRENT client. So, I believe we should add more colors. Otherwise, I hope we can all agree that we don't need 4 shades of green.

Caliber

For me its not so much as having more colours but how they are used so to be able to easily tell which team a player is on, so for example one team could be warm colours and the other team can be cold colours or something like this.

even more an issue when playing multiple games a day and lets say last game red was on my team and now this game red is on the other team, sometimes its easy to forget if you see red to react to it or think nah thats my team mates stuff.

maybe for a host to be able to force a theme of team colours in a custom game

SpikeyNoob

IMO we should keep all the existing colours no matter if we add more or not.

FtXCommando

@spikeynoob said in Do not add new colors - discussion:

IMO we should keep all the existing colours no matter if we add more or not.

Any reasoning for that?

SpikeyNoob

Mostly because i know people by certain colours and it will throw me off if everyone is suddenly a different colour. Also it seems unneeded since i can distinguish (ik other might be unable to, thus the imo) the current ones just fine.

thecore

Would be nice if you could preference your colours so it auto picks your preferred colour based on the colours that are still available.
E.g

Blue
Red
White etc

arma473

How hard would it be to make a lobby mod where you put your favorite colors into an ordered list and then the lobby mod automatically picks your most favorite color available whenever you join a lobby?

It wouldn't have to do anything else. Like it wouldn't have to grab up your favorite color every time a player with that color released it. It would just always try to give you your favorite color whenever you join a lobby.

Anachronism_

I suggest you guys play on FAF develop more and see how the new colors actually are in practice rather than just basing opinions on how they look in a list that specifically ordered them in a way that makes them look more blended/similar than the other ordering systems.

@arma473 said in Do not add new colors - discussion:

How hard would it be to make a lobby mod where you put your favorite colors into an ordered list and then the lobby mod automatically picks your most favorite color available whenever you join a lobby?

Btw, I already want to make an integrated (not mod-based) automatic color selector for FAF if someone else makes a UI for choosing ranked color preferences. That would be used for custom games. It could be applied to TMM as well if allowed, but that would be a topic for another thread.

Dragun101

@ftxcommando said in Do not add new colors - discussion:

No one argues that the current FAF color list is perfect, but there is no functional reason to expand beyond 20 colors. There is barely a functional reason to even have 20 colors beyond not making the last dude in an 8v8 sad.

If people want to optimize the current list of colors I think anybody would be for it, but every list I've seen has problems with making it way harder to communicate what is going on with teams because no generic person has 3 variations of green in their vernacular that can be explained to people that have English as their 2nd or 3rd language or just not a language at all.

The reason to go beyond 16 in case someone in lobby is a colourblind for a colour in theory we have additional options. Beyond that other reason I could see is have it rainbow colours alternating if as a neat reference (but that could cause isses with casting tmm as noted due to issues of colour scheming)

FtXCommando

I really doubt there is a type of color blindness that would benefit from that selection of 5 colors but wouldn’t be hampered by the other 15 colors selected for instance.

There is a color mode that makes you/ally/enemy units 3 different colors already. Adapt that to a color blind mode and there you go.

Dragun101

Fair enough, its just only reason I can see why we'd have 4 more colours than alloted players (actually that a lie if we had a for people to 'jump' in any already started match that is reason #2 I could see but I also want pie while flying).

Defiant

@femboy I like your list.

Consider modifying the final list

Third item down --> more skin tone brown #743D2B
Fourth item down --> more energetic cadmium orange #FF4700

Defiant

Another suggestion: most of the colors are neon type energy. We could have a neon set of colors and a pastel set. I do NOT mean add all these colors. Rather it is a strategy to have more contrasting colors.

Defiant

Last suggestion, we could add skin tone colors. I'm sure there would be no problems in chat.!