I have been visiting some muds the last few days, and most all muds have an insane amount of color. I visited Materia Magica, and it plain and simple made my eyes hurt. It is ugly, and unnecesery. It makes the reading hard as ####.

just my 2£.

I too have found this on a few games. The colours just hit you in the face like fist with a chain wrapped around the knuckles - It really does hurt! Not only does it strain your eyes with all the scrolling but it actually hurts the playability of the game. I like having colour in the games, it adds variety and helps you to imagine the areas so much more. But is there really a need for a whole room written in magenta if you're in the middle of a desert? Perhaps this is a dig at the builders who do such things, but it has to be said, bad colouring just isn't aesthetically pleasing and will lower the game play dramatically, for me anyway.

It's not so much that channels are colored and things are highlighted, it's that there's so MUCH color in things.

In creating my current mud, color was one of the first things I played with, especially from a room and eq standpoint. We generally do not allow color to be used in room descriptions or equipment, with a few exceptions. Rooms are automatically colored depending on what type of room sector it is (i.e. forests are green, mountains dark white, water blue, etc). Yes, we do have a "standard" text of bright white everywhere that takes people some getting used to, but past that, it doesn't look like a crayon factory exploded, if it's in color, it's there for a reason, not just to be there, and yes, the very FIRST thing you see upon logging in is "Do you want color?" so people can turn it off if they choose to...

Players are allowed to use color when restringing a piece of eq, and most do so, but even then people even tend not to go too overboard with changing it all...

Terloch

Well, I am not saying that there should be no color. Some color is needed. Like on tells, says, group tells, damage verbs and maybe some echoes.

What I am talking about is the exessive use seen on some. When I type 'who' i get a list of non important OOC information coded in blue, red, green, and any other color imaginable. (Not to mention names like Darkslayer, tha masta' of all things nice and shiny. In red. That turns me away from the mud AT ONCE just because of the stupid non roleplay name.)

Also, the hp/mana/move promt in two or three different colors.

Room descriptions in color, and of course the rainbow colored ****.

All this is entirely unnecesery. I say...only code important things in color. Like what i mentioned above, things you need to see of vital importance.

ATK
"A long time player of Carrionfields."

I like good use of colour, for things like distinguishing objects from mobs, and mobs from players, as well as clarifying channels.

In fact, if it doesn't have this sort of colour, I don't bother playing. I couldn't stand how hard carrionfields was to distinguish between channels, players and such.

However, I do agree that rampant use of colours in room descriptions, whois info is even worse than no colour at all.

My personal preference of colour is that of Realms of Despair's: Simple, and useful, without blinding everyone.

We've always gone with a low-color approach for the same reasons books are (usually) sold with white paper and black text. We're working in a text medium in part because it allows the freedom of imagination a book does. If you're writing your descriptions correctly, you simply don't need color. If I picked up a copy of a new fantasy book, and the author felt it necessary to color the word "Tree" green every time he or she used it, I would wonder if I had accidentally wandered into the children's section.

Thus, we use color sparingly, and primarily to highlight communication. (And even that is optional.) We're a roleplaying-mandatory MUD, so we don't want people to not notice speech during a heated battle or quick sprint, and we felt that was a necessary concession.

That said, I agree with the sentiment that most MUDs I have visited strongly overuse color as a visual tool.

I am going to have to side with those who like colour. I will however, agree that 'rainbow' text or too much colour might make one have seizures.

Our colour code allows a player to change or select a different colour for almost everything...channels, room descriptions,mobiles,room objects,exits,eq slots etc. So with a few minutes, and I am sure this applies to most muds, you can adjust your colours in a pleasing way.

In regards to the who list subject. I dont play a RP mud, so as long as the name is not entirely stupid, it does not offend me. I do however dislike the 'sloppy' who lists I have seen around. Those that display the last logged player on the top, no matter the level, with some odd self chosen title beside his or here name. I would be guessing here, but are those who lists simply a lack of better code on the mud?

[ 83428][33/165 THI ][1722][ 3 -+LaW+-] Rubicon [Overseas]

a sample of the information displayed on our who list, w/o the colours

Character points-lvl-total lvl-class-pks-House #-clan nick-player name-location

I assume you're talking about the player titles in Materia Magica or the clan titles. There are some things (such as the clan titles that show up on the WHO list) that are player-set, and they're going to have more color than normal. There are limits on the number of color codes people can put in specific locations, but there are a few people who do reach the maximums.

The color coding of the hp/st/sp prompt is to inform people when they are hurt or are running out of some particular stat, if you know what the colors mean it's hardly intrusive.

Materia Magica is also not a strict RP mud - RP is encouraged but not enforced. It does make an attempt to keep OOC subjects out of public channels like SHOUT and YELL, however.

Room descriptions are not colored, they are done in offwhite with the room title in yellow. Materia Magica does have a compass that has directions that change color depending on if the room is lit or not, and if it is a PK room or not, but other than that I think that Materia Magica makes very judicious use of color in the actual game and rooms itself, in that color is not allowed for use in descriptions by the builders. I will agree there are some instances where players go too far in their use of color codes, however, but if it really bothers you that much you can always SET COLOR OFF.

If you mean each of them is a different colour, then I agree that that's pretty awful. However what I do find useful is when the values are coloured according to what percentage they're at - so if your health is cyan you know you're at full health, if it's yellow you know you're in trouble, if it's red you know you're about to die, etc.

Personally I prefer to use very little colour as well. I display tell and chat (both of which are OOC and use your account name rather than character name) in green, IC communication (eg "say") in yellow, and highlight peoples names in white. The only reason I did the latter was to help draw your attention to who is performing an action, because "<distance> feet <direction> of you, " is prefixed to most output.