[Crystal]

The MUD I used to play on hardly had any colors at all, which was not necessarily a bad thing.

The MUD I'm currently creating, I believe we will have a bit of color displayed through a few colors, but very minimal. And with a certain amount of points gained through roleplay the immortals will be able to restring color into items for players.

I think too much color is too confusing and I usually don't bother playing MUDs with such.

Places to use color as a builder:
* Room names - I tend to make mountain rooms a dark yellow/brown.  Fields green.  Forests green.  I never color the full room description.  Many players, after having been through an area once, won't read the description again, so why draw attention to it each time.
* Very specific, special objects: one color, with a damn good reason
* Emotes by objects or mobs:  Sometimes when you have a series of emotes that can result from actions, it is useful to have the emotes colored light and dark gray, so that it doesn't get too repetative.  Example, I have a boulder in one area that you have to push about 20ish times (it's random) to get it out of the way of the path.  There are a variety of messages, from scraping sounds to revealing the beginnings of a path.  The messages are two different colors for the sake of keeping it from being endless screen spam.

Channel colors: I actually hate seeing bright colors in global channels, even channel names.  But that is due to my personal dislike of global channels inturrupting my in room stuff too much.

Player set stuff:  Let players set their choices through their clients, let them highlight the names of characters or words they want distinguished JUST FOR THEMSELVES.  I would say never ever let a player set the color of their name and if it can be coded, limit the who list titles to dark colors and no more than one or two colors.  In IC notes on the boards though, I am all in favor of color.  In part because as a player in the past, I have used one color to indicate the actions of how the post would be visible to a particular person and a second to distinguish the message itself.  Not necessary, but it adds a nice touch.  Maybe limit the colors to a certain number or only dark ones there too though.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<span style='colorurple'>A young girl arrives with a small parchment in hand and blushing slightly begs your attention.  Excuse me, Sir Blahblah, but this is a message for you.  After waiting a moment in hopes of a tip, she rushes off.</span>

<span style='color:gray'>"Sir Blahblah,
  Lalalalalala.  Color is useful and it makes for a charming little note to you.  Lovely to bother you again and I hope our next killing spree goes equally well! Blessings of whatever dark god we love and sacrifice innocent victims to.
Miss Sapphar"</span>

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are places for color everywhere.  Just don't overdue it, try to keep to the darker colors, and let players turn it off selectively.

Sapphar
(yes, I hate bright colors, in case I didn't state that enough times in enough ways *grin*)

[Thoric]

Generally one color per line, and in special cases (word highlighting) two colors per line.

Use colors to separate the room title from the room description, and the characters, and objects from the room description.

Also use colors to highlight important messages.

Anything beyond this becomes "too much".

[Enzo]

Colors helps make the MUD more interesting and more fun to play. Highlighting some keywords with Teal, or making the word rainbow a rainbow. Sometimes it seems appropiate to make a whole room just one or two colors. I think it should be the builder's choice. The person behind the building is the one with the ideas, who makes the describtions, and should control what their areas look like (except for what implementors want, but you get my drift).

[Jaewyn]

Color in MUDs is obviously a personal thing, each person will want something different. A system used on our MUD that seems to work quite well is to allow the players to choose the colors they see messages in themselves, this covers tells, chats, wartalk, clantalk, says etc. This way they can have things as bland or as gaudy as they like, the same goes for title descriptions, this is one of the few ways a player can visually add their own style to their character for everyone else to see.

Room descriptions are a single color unless to highlight a particular word, room titles are a different color to desc. At the moment, the default color for our room descriptions is bright yellow, after having several players asking for sunglasses so the could read they screen, we are considering changing the default color to something a little more subtle. As builders, we have also dabbled with using room description colors to fit in with the type of area, e.g. green for forest, dark cyan for ocean, dark yellow for desert. This seems to have been reasonably well recieved by the players.

One stipulation regarding color on our MUD... under no circumstances is flashing text to be used.

[OnyxFlame]

The mud I play on has a pretty good color scheme. Not abusive to the eyes and easy to tell what's going on at a glance.

For example when you look at someone, the health of all their limbs is represented in different colors depending on how damaged each part is. Concentration uses basically the same color scheme. Aura is represented in the colors it's supposed to be (except for octarine which just shows up kinda grayish. Bleah.) Room names are gray, descs are white, and exits are cyan or red, depending on whether there's a closed door or something there. Hexes (i.e. wilderness map) are colored according to what type of terrain they are, with prominent structures annotated. Valuable stones and metals in jewelry are colored, as are fireworks (which never get used unless it's a holiday or some creator got really really bored). You can buy colored who descs (1 color only) but they're expensive enough that people don't do it unless it's absolutely imperative to them that they show up as <span style='color:red'>a psychopathic killer</span>. Mobs and people and most objects aren't colored. The only really annoying color in the game is what happens when you're high on spotted mushrooms, and it was done that way to prove a point. You can't use color when you talk, although various methods of communication are colored separately to distinguish them from all the battle or spell spam.

As for color being a method of expression...if you can't express yourself through your words rather than <span style='color:blue'>a</span> <span style='color:cyan'>whole</span> <span style='color:yellow'>lot</span> <span style='color:green'>of</span> <span style='colorurple'>colors</span>, there's something wrong.

The moral of the story: make it tasteful, or the player will just turn off colors, or use his client to set them.

[shadowfyr]

[halkeye]

I'm split on color actually..
My last mud was full of it, builders could do what they wanted, as could players.. it became a mess... the newbie channel alternated colors, etc.. mess

I think the next mud i'm working on, will have less colors, and more customizeation.. Let players change them if they want.

I think color is really only good for letting people know what they are looking at without really needing to read fully..

I liked having channels different colors.. this way i could easily tell which channel was used without using adjectivies (not as effective this time around though, channels won't be setup the same)..

Or if being attacked.. a color to indicate being hit or something...

but thats about it.. limited colors that seperate information or help to quickly identify things..

[Kastagaar]

Personally, I view colour from a strictly utilitarian standpoint. I want colour not to enhance, but to separate different pieces of information. If I want to know the exits out of the room, I glance for the red bit. If I want to know the objects or mobs, I look for green or cyan respectively. Since most muds tend to lay things out well, it doesn't (to me, at least) look too garish. Prompts, however, do tend to be a little rainbowed, but that's because the same rule applies. I want hitpoints, I look for red. Mana, I look for blue.

What I absolutely cannot stand is:

a <span style='color:green'>green</span> hilted dagger

I already know what colour green is, there's no need to tell me!

Kas.

[Nemene]

On one of the MUDs I play on, players are allowed to add colour into speech, GMs are allowed to add colours to peoples titles, etc. I think it's good if you do have tasteful colour usage. It can really help get over someone's character better if they can have colour in their titles say (like red for a Fire Wizard).

I do think that people should have the option of supressing colours if they want to though.

I don't really agree with muliticoloured words though. It may just be me, but it seems abit silly when this is done.

[Santrilla]

[shadowfyr]