Every now and then, I venture away from my favorite mud to try another, usually one that is advertised on the forum. Whoops. I can understand when color is used in moderation to differentiate some things such as channels or room names, but what is the deal with putting 5 different colors in a prompt or seeing 6 colors when I just type 'look'? Personally, I do not like it...but maybe I'm in the minority. How does it work from the view of an administrator? Do most player prefer super-colorful screens? Do more colors bring more players?

Gad, I agree. Blinding kenderish rainbowing colors drive me right out the door. My preference is color placed in control of the player. That's one reason we provide Colorset to make the game the way you want it.

A game without capability to customize the colors is like moving into a house and leaving the walls the same garish purple that the previous owner found 'delightful.'

Fern

I'm with you on that one, some color is good but I've seen games that go WAY overboard on it.

In Ilyrias we let you customize what color you want each channel to be, the brief description of a room, extended description of a room, color of items/mobs in the room, color of players in the room, color of exits in the room, etc. They we also use 3 colors on the prompt, green yellow and red. Those change based on your health/mental status. Ie if you are 75% or higher in health it's green, if you're at 50% and higher it's yellow and below that is red.

Much like anything else in life, different people have different preferences, and a wide variety of MUDs cater to them all.

Personally, I prefer low-color, with color only highlighting important things I might otherwise miss in the sea of quickly-scrolling text.

I've seen high-color done well, but most of the time high-color games just look like a Crayola factory puked all over them. Multicolored room descriptions (for no real reason other than the builder secretly wishing they were writing Hallmark cards instead of MUD rooms) are the worst -- if the description mentions a nearby sea, and the word sea is colored blue, I'm finding a different MUD.

Like most things, it's a matter of preference. Personally I try to make the colours as customisable as possible, and avoid using them purely for cosmetic purposes (i.e., if something is coloured, that colour has a specific meaning).

I use five colours in prompts - these are the default colour (usually white), and four scaled colours (defaulted to cyan, blue, magenta and red). Things like health, mana and action points use the scaled colour as a percentage indicator (with each colour also representing a pain penalty level). Boolean options use only the two extremes of the scale, but it provides the same benefit - it lets you see the important information at a glance.

For the actual descriptions I don't use colour (except highlighting for the title), but I use it extensively for the ascii maps (including the one displayed alongside the description). In my opinion it's much easier to see that "." represents plains and "~" represents rivers when the former is coloured green and the latter blue.

It's just as bad, when a game has white text on dark screen as their "no color" default, thus forcing you to read as though presented with a negative film, or tweaking your mud client to get the whole thing back to normal.

Normal, to me, is dark text on a light background, just like reading a book. You remember books? Those funky things made with wood pulp smushed to thin-ness, with writing on them, that stacked up on shelves in your grandpappy's office?

Even reading Topmudsites too long will give me a headache, because of the inverted color scheme. One of these days I'm gonna do a poll to find out how many people who've played muds for more than 5 years wear glasses. And see if it correllates with my theory that the human species was not intended to read light on dark.

Give me a nice, easy to read a nice greyish black, on a pale ivory or subdued (meaning, not stark) white background, no highlights, no bolds, no special colors. When I mud, I try to play as though I'm being immersed in a novel, where my character is one of the characters in the plot. I've never seen a novel in a bookstore written on black paper with white text. I wasn't brought up reading white text on black backgrounds. My eyes can't handle it. They refuse, reject, and outright battle against it. And yet, every freaking single solitary game I've ever visited on the internet thrusts a black background in my face.

It's torture I tell ya. Now someone please give me a hug. I'm feeling neglected.

Give me black text on a white background and a client with the ability to color stuff the way I want it. Color belongs client-side IMHO.

White-on-black is what you get on a dumb terminal, which is the minimum spec required to play a mud. It's also what a lot of old-school mudders learned to mud on, and personally I can't stand anything else.

If your client supports black-on-white, then it almost certainly also supports customised colours, so there's nothing stopping you from changing it.

What I really dislike, though, are the muds that don't let you switch off colour at all. That's almost as bad as the muds which display information wrapped at more than 80 characters...

Lucky.... I am so badly nearsighted that something the size of this text has to be around half an inch to an inch away for me to read it without glasses.

Anyway

I like color, and I like muds with minimum color. I have seen them both work well. I recommended AU to someone in another topic because of its fantastic color usage, but if you look at a desc and the word "Ocean" is blue and you dont like it, you wouldnt like AU.

I personally really dislike on muds when there is no way to customize and everything is practically identical when you walk into a room (color wise). Like the desc is green and the items are green that are on the ground (mixed in with the room desc) so are the peoples names are green and also mixed in as part of the rdesc.

When I have already read the description of Ye Old Tavern 10 times I get a good idea of what it looks like and if I just want to see whats different in it and it is all mixed up..guh.

The answer I have is twofold.

On one side, I dislike MUDs where you are shown multiple colors per line or text block. This applies to descriptions, prompts, MOB emotes/words etc. I find it irritating because I have to concentrate longer on every specific line to read them, and after a while it ends up tiring me much faster (and I consider myself almost tireless when it comes to play the MUD I like).

On the other side, when you have a big MUD with multiple events happening that are accessible to the characters, then I like to have a way to quickly recognize the type of information comming to me by the color codes, so that I do not have to read any part of the message to know what type of event is the one happening.

The way I have seen it implemented in my favorite place is by using at most 2 colors per info line. All channels and info's are customizable both in color scheme and activity (can turn them off). Two colors allows for the special information in the line to be highlighted, and the main color code to tell you the type of information being talked about.

Another thing I hate and that will make me delete is when players colored prompts or channel emotes are allowed or forced uppon everybody, makes every line a pain to read and the problem usually is that the more "freedom" given to the players to configure what will be seen over channels, the more annoying it gets. A plus in the game I like is that a) pretitles are not colored (cannot be), b) you can choose not to see pretitles at all and c) you can recognize and filter out emotes from regular channel use easilly (with a couple of simple client sided triggers).

Just my $2.4/100 (or 2 US cents)

Hmm, I'm the opsite of dark on brirght crowd, I for one can't do light backgrounds, my eyes are too light sensitive... it gives me a head ache, if I need somethign from a document or a website that is dark text on hwite or yellow i print it out... since the paper isn;t backlit, I to get anoyed at builders and even players that use too much color, unless it serves more of a purpose... like the one mob that follows one of my morts aroud that si garishly random colored... but that's to be anoying not to be artistic

I guess I don't see the big deal of server-side color. Any client worth using will allow users to color their screen however they want.

The client can only add colour based on keywords - it doesn't know about internal data. If you want your combat table to colour-code fighting techniques based on their attack and defence strength, or you want help files to highlight keywords and references to other help files, or you want your opponent's name to be coloured red when they've got their back to you, or you want critical hits to be coloured differently, or any number of other non-cosmetic uses, then it needs to be handled server-side.

I personally enjoy colorful MUDs that give you easy ways to minimize the amount of color you see, or set the colors using 'colorset' or a similar command.

Customization is almost always the way to go if you have capable programmers, I'd say.