im 15 i dont get headaches i like lots O color!

I dunno, but to me color isn't that big of a deal. I played a really cool CircleMUD for like a year without color, and had no problem. Then I went and played an SWR and said "Wow, look at that color!"

Obviously some people abused it, but it was well regulated, and most of the time the color was applicable to the theme or coding.

Once I went back to the no-color CircleMUD I was at first shocked (Cause all the text and stuff looked so alike and dull), but then quickly got used to it and forgot about color. Mind tricks I tell you!

Personally, I dislike server-side color, but I find client-side coloring of names and messaging I find important very useful. The builder's idea of what is important to be eye-catching may be different than mine, and I'd hate to have so much color that the bright red person-I-should-be-running-from hue blends in with the background. But as long as you let me turn it all off, I don't care how much color you're using.

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I would... *evil grin*
No seriously, we have restricted colors mostly to what is pre-set in the code, meaning we use different standard colors on room names, exits, room descs, mobs and object long descs, plus that we allow certain words to be highlighted.

I once wanted to change the room desc colour from green to blue in all 'water' rooms, but one of my co-imps flatly refused and he might be right, too much colour soon becomes an eyesore. And if you left the decision to the builders, you'd end up with a mud looking like a christmas tree, becuase most of them would do just about anything to attract attention (you just have to look at their titles to realise that).

However, we actually do have some red rooms, and the colour there actually IS meant to torment the players. There is a number of Glowing Lava rooms, and those don't only hurt your eyes, they drain you of hp with each tick, so if you stay too long you die.

And there is another red room, the boudoir of a lovesick Nymph, who incessantly spams you with vows of her undying love. That room is a sort of quest - the quest is how to get out of the room and AWAY from the irritating female, muhaha.

Otherwise, what I like most with colours is that you can use them to create 'illusions'. You can make mobs that look exactly like objects and vice versa. And above all, you can make objects totally invisible in a room by using a single { as long desc.

That's what I mostly use colours for. Little quirks like that, not rainbow coloured objects.

While I don't allow colored objects (except for restrings or EXTREMELY special cases), our rooms actually ARE coded to all be different colors. While it's a little scary and overwhelming at first, you VERY quickly become accustomed to it - forests are green, water is blue, roads are gray, cities are white - and it definitely gives you more of a feel for where you are, and helps sometimes give a little more insight to where the player is, even when they're not taking the time to (or don't have time to) read the room descriptions.

Personally, I like to use colour to separate pieces of information. For example, I might have the available exits one colour, and the description another, the objects another and the mobs yet another. Prompts are a special case - I like making them multicoloured because they help me see the information I want at-a-glance.

What I don't like (really, I detest it) is highlighting colour words in their colour. For example, "The <span style='color:green'>green</span> hilted sword". I already know what green looks like! It gets very garish if applied consistently, too.

Kas.

On a tangent note:

Too much colour in the wrong place can actually lag the mud down, or even crash the Port. The place to be especially wary of is the mob short desc, because that is used in the fight code.

I know this from own hard experience.

We once put in a Goblin invasion as a temporary Quest, and the Builder thought it a 'cool' idea to colour the different Goblins after rank/(level). Since it was not a permanent zone, I foolishly let it slip by the control.
There were tons of goblins, and they all assisted, so the first time a player got into a serious skirmish, the Port went down. The code couldn't handle the colour spam.

I also have an example, where an excessively rainbow-coloured object kept crashing the Build Port at each zone reset, because the reset line exceeded the max number of characters allowed.

So this is not merely an aesthetic question.

Colour shouldn't cause lag or crashes unless there's something broken within your code - from a conceptual point of view, it really is a purely aesthetic question.

Personally I rarely use colour, although I find it's very nice for displaying maps. I also like to highlight "tell" messages, as it makes them stand out (unless you've got lots of other colour). The other place I like it is within prompts, with the colour representing a percentage of remaining health/mana/etc. But in general I prefer a very small amount of colour, so that what little there is really jumps out at you and draws attention to itself.

One of the main reasons we keep ourselves deliberately low-color is that it allows you to use color to say "This event is important or unusual." If you overcolor, it's hard to make things truly stand out.

Our philosophy colored comm channels to separate them, standard low key colors for info preset and the occasional rare color for something that should infer surprise or some other emotion. When situations occur, it's typically in a certain color comm channel and I've learned to ignore other colors when concentrating on an issue. I think that's a valuable feature.

Rainbow muds are personally distasteful me and I would prefer running them as ANSI off and color off. Most have the ability through clients to change any color display on their screen if they wish, so imposing our artistic talent or lack of isn't really a large concern.

Iluvatar

Currently, in my mud, people can include colors in their tell, say, and other such commands using the colorcodes of circlemud, &R for red &B for blue and such. so...

say &RRed text hurts my &Wwhite eyes

would turn up as

hmm...cant figure out how to do colored text....but you get the idea.

I wanted to ban this, and have the &X strings be literal, and not translated into color. However, my other half implementor was dead-set against this, saying that he loves color, and he finds it as a form of self expression.

I have also seen builders transform our normally yellow room descriptions into a myriad of blinding color, simply unfair to the eye, but my other half wont allow me to block that either, stating (very rightly) that it can allways be taken out when the zone is reviewed. Again, he says this is a form of self expression.

Does this strike anybody else as self expression? Can you not express yourself without annoying colors? As a counter argument, I see the colors that I program my mud to be as a form of my own self expression, which I dont want the players to be messing with. After all, anything that a player sees on my mud reflects on the aesthetic feeling of the mud, which I work hard to generate with my preset colors. Should I allow players to mess with my carfully set scheme, or is that an impedement to their self expression? (do we even need self expression on muds...? but thats a different topic.) Some answers would be cool of all you lovely people.

For most of your post you would have my support immediately. We don't allow coders to use colors. Certain types of messages are classed and players are free to choose the color those message appear in (if any).

Yikes, this part I won't support you on. I guess it depends on what the whole reason behind colors is for you. We implemented colors for one, and only one, reason: "Improve the interface". We don't use it because we think that blinking red on a high intensity green looks cool and is part of how we feel a player should see it. If the player however feels that it makes his playing easier and more clear to set those colors for all his combat messages he is free to do so.

Regards and good luck with your struggle,
Eddy

I have nothing against colour in general, to be honest. It's the too-bright colours that give you headaches and make you half blind I don't like. Of course the way too dark colours aren't any fun either.

I don't want to have to squint at my screen in order to figure out what the heck this person is saying/wearing/whatever.

Channel titles are ok...asides from the aformentioned way-too-bright colours and way-too-dark colours. And using a bit of colour here and there in your description or pose is ok if you're trying to accent something that you're doing or wearing.

After all, 'Kairin sends, ~Hello~' is nice. But if you redo it so that it says, 'Kairin sends, <span style='color:green'>~Hello~</span>', the message itself gets across more clearly since your attention is drawn to the colour.

And something like that is ok. But a multi-coloured pose for no reason other then the fact that the person wants to show off their skills/has some deep-seated urge to make the entire MU** blind is /not/ ok. Personally I don't use colour all that much though--I just don't see the point in using it more then sparingly.