Bugs: V3.1.2

[Pete Mack]

Changing all violet monsters to red is confusing.
* Nexus Q looks like Demonic Q
* Great Wyrm of Balance looks like Hell Wyrm/Ancient Red Dragon (almost died, since I have fire immunity and didn't care about red 'D'.)
* Smaug the Purple and Itangast are more like Dracolisk (bright red) than he is like Scatha (purple)
* Scatha is more like Ice Wyrm (dark white) than he is like Ancalagon the Purple.

[Magnate]

There are basically two ways we can go here:

1. We reserve a small group of shades for uniques (e.g. a range of pinky-purples), and we change non-uniques to avoid these shades. This is a more sophisticated implementation of the existing all-purple setup, which makes uniques recognisable as unique. We could for example use darker shades for more powerful uniques, or whatever.

2. We revert to the previous setup of uniques being a different colour to non-unique monsters of the same symbol, but not the same as each other. They could for example be brighter or darker versions of the base colour.

Now that we have >16 colours, either is workable. I prefer #1, as the other requires players to learn, for each monster symbol, which colour means it's a unique.

[Pete Mack]

I prefer two, because it is better eye candy (Ancalagon is Black!), and hints of monster characteristics comes from the color (Scatha is white!)

[Marble Dice]

Either approach has its strong points. If you go with #2, you've got better aesthetics, which is a big deal to a lot of people. I do enjoy seeing exotic colors for uniques of a given symbol (dark green orcs, cyan humans, etc). However, #1 makes it simple and easy to visually identify uniques in the field (since they're always pink/purple).

One other nice thing about #2 is it would be simple to automatically convert to #1... just change all non-unique pinks to purple, and all uniques to pink. This would be easy to implement as a display option.

[Colbey]

I rather prefer #2. Knowing immediately that a monster is unique is less important to the new player, I'd argue, than knowing that it's just different than they've ever seen before. (After all, there are a bunch of non-dangerous uniques, and even more dangerous non-uniques...)

More important, as was said above, are the cases where the (former) color betrayed some sort of elemental affinity. Making all the uniques purple not only removes that, but also removes the ability of purple to indicate Nexus and related elementals.

[Derakon]

I prefer #2, mostly because it's what I'm used to and I think using purple for such an artificial concept as "unique monster" is ugly (that is, aside from the creature being the only one of its kind, there's nothing inherent about it that would cause it to be colored purple; this is in contrast to most of the non-unique monsters, which often have some reasoning behind their chosen colors).

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Marble Dice

One other nice thing about #2 is it would be simple to automatically convert to #1... just change all non-unique pinks to purple, and all uniques to pink. This would be easy to implement as a display option.

Since people have quite strong preferences on this issue, I wonder if Takk would consider adding this as an option. We could then put some work into really aesthetically pleasing colours for uniques by default, but with a set of (say) four pink shades not used at all. Turning on this option would then make all uniques one of those four pink shades (e.g. by depth, or whatever) and no other monsters would be affected.

Personally I really think we need more than 26-28 colours for this. I'm thinking 64, where we have four lighter/darker variations on each of the 16 base colours. That way we can use 50-odd colours for the full monster set, and still have at least four set aside for uniques using this option.

(I realise that four variations of the 16 base colours leaves you with a lot of browns and greys. My point is that I reckon we need about twice as many colours as we have now, regardless of which extra shades we use. I'd be happy to do this once 3.1.2 is out, but I'll leave it to someone else to choose monster colours.)

[d_m]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Personally I really think we need more than 26-28 colours for this. I'm thinking 64, where we have four lighter/darker variations on each of the 16 base colours. That way we can use 50-odd colours for the full monster set, and still have at least four set aside for uniques using this option.

(I realise that four variations of the 16 base colours leaves you with a lot of browns and greys. My point is that I reckon we need about twice as many colours as we have now, regardless of which extra shades we use. I'd be happy to do this once 3.1.2 is out, but I'll leave it to someone else to choose monster colours.)

I think having an option to bold uniques, or use a distinctive background, or something, would be good. Despite being the one adding more colors, I do worry that if the game relies on fine-grained color distinctions it will create accessibility problems for those who have some form of color blindness. That said, I'd like to step back and try to make logical color decisions, rather than just relying one the weird colors we have now.

[Pete Mack]

d_m --
take a look at NPP, which uses ~45 colors, really quite well. It has the following nice properties:
- the original 15 colors still work, for 16 color screens
- the uniques (except for ringwraiths) are quite distinctly colored, but are recognizably similar in color to their original color.
- the new shades are quite distinct from the originals, perhaps more so for the colorblind, as they have different intensities from the originals. In comparison, I find some of the new V colors to be impossible to distinguish from each other, unless they are in immediate contrast as in the visual editor.

I genuinely prefer the V and NPP colors to more "rational" color systems, as they just look better.

[d_m]

Originally Posted by Pete Mack

take a look at NPP, which uses ~45 colors, really quite well.

I will definitely check NPP's colors out. Thanks for the suggestions.