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KaVir · 10-01-2003, 07:38 AM

Because colour is there to improve the game for the player. If you force your own configuration down their throat, regardless of their client or personal preferences, then you've just failed in that objective.

But why come "pretty close" for the "majority" when you can instead give all of your players exactly what they want?

It's not redundant. Not only do some clients not support it, but there are also many examples which cannot feasibly be handled at the client end. In fact the only scenario I can think of in which colour should be handled entirely by the client is a mud which can only be accessed via its own custom client.

Imagine you want percentage scaled health in your prompt - white is 100% health, blue is 75-100%, green is 50-75%, yellow is 25-50% and red is 0-25%. How can you simulate that at the client level without hardcoding it according to your max hp?

Or what if you want to enable highlighting of certain keywords (eg in a help file, or player/mob keywords, etc) - the client has no way to know which are keywords and which are not.

Or how about changing the colouring on an ascii map (for example, if your client doesn't handle certain colours, as mentioned previously)? I've used clients before which didn't display the "bright" colours properly, forcing me to switch off colour completely so that I could see the map.

But the biggest problem with handling colour at the client end is that at that point the only thing you know is the colour code itself - you've no way to know what it represents, and if you change it for one thing you'll be changing it for all things. Want to adjust colour in the client so that critical hit messages are displayed in white instead of red? No problem - but it'll change your "warning" messages to white as well...

The better way to handle that is to provide colour configurations based on themes (eg "chat", "say", "warning", "health", "mana", "help keywords", etc) - but that has to be handled server-side (unless, as I mentioned before, you have a custom client which is the only way to play the mud).

I have considered the points, but have yet to find any reason for not having reconfigurable colours other than lack of time or technical ability. Almost all mud features represent a compromise - they add something at the expense of something else. Reconfigurable colours, however, add something while taking away nothing. They only apply to those who want them, and give no disadvantages to those who don't.

10-01-2003, 07:38 AM	#41
KaVir Legend Join Date: Apr 2002 Name: Richard Home MUD: God Wars II Posts: 2,052	Because colour is there to improve the game for the player. If you force your own configuration down their throat, regardless of their client or personal preferences, then you've just failed in that objective. But why come "pretty close" for the "majority" when you can instead give all of your players exactly what they want? It's not redundant. Not only do some clients not support it, but there are also many examples which cannot feasibly be handled at the client end. In fact the only scenario I can think of in which colour should be handled entirely by the client is a mud which can only be accessed via its own custom client. Imagine you want percentage scaled health in your prompt - white is 100% health, blue is 75-100%, green is 50-75%, yellow is 25-50% and red is 0-25%. How can you simulate that at the client level without hardcoding it according to your max hp? Or what if you want to enable highlighting of certain keywords (eg in a help file, or player/mob keywords, etc) - the client has no way to know which are keywords and which are not. Or how about changing the colouring on an ascii map (for example, if your client doesn't handle certain colours, as mentioned previously)? I've used clients before which didn't display the "bright" colours properly, forcing me to switch off colour completely so that I could see the map. But the biggest problem with handling colour at the client end is that at that point the only thing you know is the colour code itself - you've no way to know what it represents, and if you change it for one thing you'll be changing it for all things. Want to adjust colour in the client so that critical hit messages are displayed in white instead of red? No problem - but it'll change your "warning" messages to white as well... The better way to handle that is to provide colour configurations based on themes (eg "chat", "say", "warning", "health", "mana", "help keywords", etc) - but that has to be handled server-side (unless, as I mentioned before, you have a custom client which is the only way to play the mud). I have considered the points, but have yet to find any reason for not having reconfigurable colours other than lack of time or technical ability. Almost all mud features represent a compromise - they add something at the expense of something else. Reconfigurable colours, however, add something while taking away nothing. They only apply to those who want them, and give no disadvantages to those who don't.