vague echo
There is already a suggestion for custom colors, but I think 3 more is all the game needs. Currently we have 11, which allows for a byte and 3 more.
I often find myself only needing two or three more colors, for miscellaneous stuff, especially in the CPU levels. I also noticed that the color discrepancy is very high between some of the colors in the "rainbow", whilst in others, it is very small. This leaves room for 3 more, whilst keeping some, if not all, the same.
muted kelp
4 more for a perfect 16 (counting the size-dependent color) would make sense
vague echo
4 more for a perfect 16 (counting the size-dependent color) would make sense
I said three since the grid for the colors would remain essentially the same with three more colours
muted kelp
with 4 more it'd be a square
bleak tangle
The current colors are already not color blind (or color weak) friendly. I don't think there is a good way to add more colors that are also distinct from the background, green (for ON on bitwires), red (for errors) and all others colors in a way that doesn't make some of the colors very hard to recognize.
I would instead say there should be some other way to mark wires, maybe with patterns or clearly mixed colors? That would also allow way more combinations without too many issues
muted kelp
for patterns it'd be hard to tell them on short wires, possibly the same with mixed colors
I don't see what's wrong with just continuing to use color, other than red for error it's not absolutely required that you can tell the color of wires
bleak tangle
Ok, let me phrase it like this: Stuffe is concerned about color blindness support, this is why the current selection of colors is the way it is
muted kelp
I'm not sure it's feasible to have a color-blind friendly way of marking wires that doesn't break for short wires
bleak tangle
I don't see a reason to make it worse by maybe modifying some of the colors to be less recognizable and adding more colors.
Also consider that screenshots are consumed by others; even if you can reocnize the colors, doesn't mean that everyone seeing screenshots of your circuits can.
If the game can have a set of colors that is easy to read for people with varying kinds of color blindness, that will improve the openness of the entire community.
muted kelp
and what if it can't?
bleak tangle
Well, it's currently quite good at that.
If it means we can't add more colors, I don't consider that too much of a loss
muted kelp
the current ones can be kept, and maybe future ones could be marked as colorblind unfriendly
it can't be worse than right now since all the current colors would stay
vague echo
The current colors are already not color blind (or color weak) friendly. I don't...
I also thought of putting patterns in my wires manually, but the wire "cores" being a solid block makes that hard
so if it were already in the game that would most definetly be useful, it would give us atleast double the wires
shut trench
The current colors are already not color blind (or color weak) friendly. I don't...
I've thrown this together as a mockup of example templates of wire patterns, with the 2 worst colors to mix. I wouldn't be suprised if one of these colors would have to go, but we could get pure black in it's place right?
muted kelp
the problem with those is that when you're zoomed out or the wire is super short (connecting adjacent pins for example) you can't really see the detail of the patterns
maybe if we could come up with 4 patterns + 4 differentiable colors there could be a toggle between 16 colors and 4 colors + patterns
vague echo
I've thrown this together as a mockup of example templates of wire patterns, wit...
This is definetly a great idea, and while I think it could have its improvements, this should be put into the game ASAP
topaz sequoia
the current ones can be kept, and maybe future ones could be marked as colorblin...
the problem with that is that (to my understanding) the most important part of making colours distinguishable for colourblind people is contrast
so if you add more colours that are in between the current colours, you lose contrast between them
topaz sequoia
I've thrown this together as a mockup of example templates of wire patterns, wit...
and these are hard to distinguish even for me, a not colour blind person
tho i agree that patterns probably are a good way to go
shut trench
and these are hard to distinguish even for me, a not colour blind person
Yeah, these 2 & Yellow are particurarly bad.
I think that the Lime color should be removed & perhaps replaced with pure black.
topaz sequoia
(also fully in support of the idea of pure black)
shut trench
Ok, after spending some time in VSCode I put together,
this colorblindness perception "visualisation" in HTML/CSS &
populated it with the colors optained from pixels of wires placed in a schematic.
You're supposed to compare colors within a row to eachother & not between rows.
You get a row for the normal / no-colorblindness look,
as well as if someone couldn't percieve one of the 3 RGB color channels at all.
And yeah, it looks pretty bad for the currently implemented colors:
This visualisation just removes a given color component from the color outright,
without doing anything else, but maybe it could be better if I instead populate it
with the color's average value; if someone has any input on how I can change
how it displays the colors to make it more accurate, I just don't know what & how to change.
shut trench
Update: I forgot to add the 2 special wire colors, the one for size wires & the one for errors:
bleak tangle
I mean "not percieve one of the 3 channels" is fundamentally not really the correct model.
There are various simulators out there, especially for color weakness this can be very relevant.
Also, don't forget about the background color
muted nexus
2 ways of increasing, with a bit towards "texture" - dash and stripe.
i think a basic dash would be the easiest way to moderately increase the options. either simply doubling the colour count for normal and dashed, or allowing both halves of the dash to be selected independently (over 100 combinations). The rendering wouldn't be 2 complicated, as you could keep the dash length at something fixed like 20 pixels, so it doesn't just blur away when zoomed out.
the stripe option runs into the zoom-out problem where the width of the central strip wouldn't be visible after a certain amount - but that isn't much of a problem, as long as it is the center that disapears on zoom-out it allows you to pick major and minor colours, where you only see the major on zoom-out, an auto de-cluttering
solar rain
the problem with those is that when you're zoomed out or the wire is super short...
This seems like an over-engineered solution, but what about making the patterns a fixed size relative to the camera and then having them scroll?
Like if that wire was a color mask for a scrolling background texture.
No idea how it would look, and it probably wouldn't be great for screenshots, but it'd sidestep the issue of patterns being indistinguishable on small wires or when zoomed out too far.