The Tavern

Their colour blends with the "unexplored, but mapped territory" colour too much, which is annoying when you have passive mapping. Picture related:

Are we comparing the bright pink colour with the blue?

no joke sar, are you colourblind? pink and blue are like, opposites man.

If you are colourblind, or have a bad monitor, in a way that makes those colours hard to distinguish, you can tweak the following in your rc:



(see options_guide.txt for the list)

I can see the difference between those tiles, but it's not as easy until I pay attention. From what I read this kind of color perception deficiency is somewhat common so maybe the recolour should be made default to benefit people who have similar problem and don't know how to recolour things manually?

Anyway, thanks for the solution.

I haven't been particularly active at Crawl tile-making for the last few months, but someday (like, some time within the next 3 to 5 years) I want to work on colorblind options.

I've read a few articles and it's clear that colorblindness manifests in many different ways. I'd love to hear some input from colorblind people -- in this thread or through PMs.

edit: nevermind gray blends with the explored too much

The problem is, what color should I make it? I chose laser-magenta because, for most people, it is very easy to pick out against the other colors. I am aware that this isn't the case for everyone, but colorblindness comes in many varieties -- any set of colors you choose is going to be a compromise. For instance, I could make it really bright green... but then people with red-green colorblindness would have difficulty. I could make it cyan, but then it'll blend in against water. I think choosing colors that work well for most people, and then having an option to set the colors yourself is the right solution to this dilemma -- and that's how it currently is.

"People don't know about the options" is certainly a problem, and if the default can be improved, then great. Feel free to suggest changes.

e: For clarity, I actually did think about colorblindness when I made the new defaults. I'm not colorblind myself, so obviously I'm kind of guessing, but I tried to make "background" things like walls and floors darker and lower saturation, while important things like stairs are bright and highly-saturated. Personally I would say the problem here is the way magic mapping works rather than the color, since no matter what colors you pick a random scattering of pixels is going to be hard to resolve.

If you're looking for perceptually-good ways to choose map colors, see:

http://colorbrewer2.org/

Picking a categorical color scheme for the number of categories of thing you want to represent on the minimap and then some variations in the same family would probably work pretty well, assuming the general ass-ugliness of the schemes doesn't bother you too much

Also, if you want to test what a screenshot of this might look to a person with one of many varieties of colorblindness, try this:

http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-c ... simulator/

... you'll want to crop for the minimap, but you'll see the magenta stairs turn grey with the two most common forms.

On the subject of stairs and colorblindness, does anyone else have problems telling hatches apart from used (green) staircases in console?