40 player FFA games...colors?

One of the things I want to do is have a 40 player FFA (free for all) allnighter!

I was wondering, will PA have 40 different colors schemes for the armies?

If not, how will we be able to tell my yellow army apart from your yellow army?

Team color has been talked about, but no idea what would work best yet.

Mike

FOURTY DIFFERENT COLORS.

That's going to be a lot of similar shades though.

I maintain the same answer as in the last thread. A two tone system. In FFA and 1v1 you would simply be free to choose any two. But in team games the primary tone would be overriden by the team colour. So you could have red team with a player blue, yellow and black. That is, player red/blue, red/yellow and red/black. And theoretically green team could have the exact same: green/blue, green/yellow and green/black.

Just an idea.

THE COLOURS! MY GOD THE COLOURS! THERE AREN'T 40 COLOURS? ARE THERE?




Yes there are.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

You need to be able to readily tell them apart though. Look at all those shades that are basically the same.

I can :/

Our units will be in forty shades of gra... uh, orange!

While it may have been non-obvious in the live stream, units have two colors, a primary and secondary team color which will hopefully help alleviate issues of games with 8 teams of off blue. It just randomly happened we showed the game with white and orange units (with the units in the UI mostly blue and orange).

Wanna join my robot commander in the red room with me?

Lol!

Also... (very unofficial links)

http://color.method.ac/
http://www.colormunki.com/game/huetest_kiosk

Enjoy.

8.8 and 7 respectively.

To be honest this is probably more of a test of your monitor than your eyes.

I'm not sure if people will be getting into the 'make decal for my units' stuff. I'd be happy with the colours (especially of the strategic icons) representing their relationship to me.

eg
My units -> greenish
Allied units -> blueish
Enemies -> red

And I in turn appear red to my enemies. In replays etc, you would be able to look from any given player's POV, so you can see their fog of war etc if desired. An observer might see them as whatever colours.

And if they'll each end up being different colours, perhaps the owner could be shown above units heads when you interact with them, like happens in FPS's.

A few thoughts on this. Probably all been said before, but I feel like getting them out of my brain.

First, colors are only used for distinguishing the borders between players. They don't need to be globally recognizable, and they probably won't be used for communication between teams (that is, people will say "Attack vebyast" or "attack Sol III south" instead of "attack blue"). This means that you can get away with colors that are so close together that they are only distinguishable when placed right next to each other, as this will be exactly the situation that matters.

Second, it may be possible to get away with recoloring players, particularly if you do so slowly and gradually enough for there to be no discontinuity. This opens up an interesting possibility - instead of globally unique player colors, you only need unique player colors per world. We don't care if there are two red players as long as they never share a front. Work up some elementary graph coloring algorithms, do recolorings in the time it takes units to move between planets to ensure that things are all set by the time fronts form, and you're done.

Third, consider allowing players to actively interact with coloring in the UI. For example, in addition to the "draw on the ground", "ping", and "place marker" signals, give players a "highlight selected player" signal that makes that player flash colors. Another option might be to have a "highlight this player" switch somewhere, so that a player can mark out a particular other player for future reference.

Most RTS games have a friend/foe colour toggle like that. It'd be hard to imagine if PA wouldn't also.

i like the primary secondary color solution, but i'm curious how that would be indicated in chat or diplomacy

in supcom for example your chat name appears in your player color

My Units: My Color (e.g. Blue)

Enemy Units: Any other color. (e.g. Red)

Allied Units: Yet another color. (e.g. Green)


I would like the strat icon color I assign to a player to also be their unit color.

Oh wow! lol

Thanks for all the (entertaining) replies!

Reposting this from a previous thread just because

"IMO colours need variants, depending on the commander allegiance.

I point to transformers, and the variations of colours used for Autobots and Decepticons.

For example while Sunstreaker and Swindle were both yellow transformers, they had subtly different tones and the same was mostly true for both the factions.

One thing this would help, is that upon seeing an army and recognising the colour, you'd have an idea of what kind of commander you might encounter and the faction they belong to."