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Old 10-01-2003, 02:23 PM   #43
Samson
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: United Socialist States of America
Home MUD: SmaugMuds.org
Home MUD: Arthmoor MUD Hosting
Posts: 249
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An example from our own experience.

Take the Smaug default colors - from before the days of it's own colorize command. Room descriptions were bright white, room names bright yellow. I forget what alot of the other things were, but the point is, people hated it. It was ugly, and some people complained it hurt their eyes because it was so bright ( myself included ). Then you have those clients which break "bright" support and were either displaying nothing, or text so dark the user couldn't see it.

Enter the first attempt at us changing it. I polled people, nobody offered up a workable scheme, so I changed all the defaults to my own personal preferences. People complained again that they didn't like my choices. We were back to square one.

Several people on our mud play with non-Zmud clients, many of which lack the ability to alter their client-side color configuration.

When I found the custom color snippet for Smaug way back when, I jumped on it. Me being the lazy coder I am sometimes, I set the "default" color set to the preferences I had instituted before. The beauty here is that everyone can change how things look, so if they think my scheme sucks, they can do something about it without bothering the mud. This includes those people using clients that can't customize.

You should see the color settings my Head Builder uses. I can't stand them, but he loves them. I'd puke if I had to mud with those colors, but it's what he likes and he has the ability to use it and is happy. Some of the wild combinations my players pick would make most people hurl as well, but it's what they like, and they get consistent results from the mud whether they're at home using Uberclient, or at work using XP Telnet.

This makes them happy. They don't complain about colors anymore. On the occassion someone finds something they want changed, we can easily add a customization for it, which everyone else then gets to play with too.

Do we let them change everything? Of course not. Some messages force certain colors, the ansi wilderness map uses fixed color choices to represent terrain.

So I'm in agreement with those who see no reason not to include this functionality, and it's a standard feature in AFKMud and in Smaug 1.4a now as well.
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