Suggestion: Console colors

[Denethor]

Replace dark colors such as dark blue with lighter options to make in game items more readable against the background in different lighting conditions. All of the colors used in game should re-evaluated for their readability against the background. Perhaps some color schemes could be added to the in game menu to make things more interesting and noob friendly.

[Siegurt]

Programs running in consoles don't have that much control over the actual colors used, typically they get to pick from 8 or 16 colors (however many the console makes available, more frequently it's 16 nowadays).

The host console program that crawl is running in gets to decide what the actual colors displayed are, I have yet to come across a modern console that doesn't let you set them to something (Although the default for "dark blue" is nearly always some variant of dark blue).

While you could certainly come up with color themes for the console you happen to use, it would be for that console, rather than for crawl, specifically.

FWIW I tweak my console colors for crawl to make the darker colors more visible, on my windows machine it looks like this:

[ebering]

Sigurt is correct that in console crawl only is able to specify abstract color names, and its up to your console program to set the colors.

I adapted the solarized color scheme for rogue like play, check out this thread for what it looks like: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=25431

[duvessa]

...but some abstract colours are still nearly guaranteed to be brighter than others. It is a fair assumption that blue on black is going to be less readable than white on black.

[Siegurt]

...but some abstract colours are still nearly guaranteed to be brighter than others. It is a fair assumption that blue on black is going to be less readable than white on black.

So is the proposal then "just don't use the colors that are likely to be less visible for anything at all" I mean that's a reasonable request, but it makes the already limited palette of console colors even more limited. (Also I think you can do that in your .rc)

[advil]

So, yes, this is an issue, but the recommended solution is to adjust the colors in your terminal program. In addition to the various themes for different apps mentioned here already, I put together one for mac terminal that fixes the dark blue color in particular.

[Airwolf]

allow_extended_colours = true

[advil]

allow_extended_colours = true

Oh, yeah, definitely don't forget this -- for compatibility reasons dark grey is realized as dark blue in most terminals by default, and this setting gets dark grey back. With the compatibility mode turned off, blue is much rarer on the map (though certain monsters still use it).

[Airwolf]

allow_extended_colours = true

Oh, yeah, definitely don't forget this -- for compatibility reasons dark grey is realized as dark blue in most terminals by default, and this setting gets dark grey back. With the compatibility mode turned off, blue is much rarer on the map (though certain monsters still use it).

Terminal compatibility is too complicated for my puny brain, but I wonder if allow_extended_colours = true should be the default.

[advil]

allow_extended_colours = true

Oh, yeah, definitely don't forget this -- for compatibility reasons dark grey is realized as dark blue in most terminals by default, and this setting gets dark grey back. With the compatibility mode turned off, blue is much rarer on the map (though certain monsters still use it).

Terminal compatibility is too complicated for my puny brain, but I wonder if allow_extended_colours = true should be the default.

We went a few rounds of what the best solution is around 0.19 or so, I don't remember the details, but it was something like: if that is the default, then on most terminals it works, but on some terminals that setting was hopelessly broken and rendered dark gray as block, so the map is effectively broken by default. So we ended up with a compromise position that is non-ideal for everyone, but usable for everyone. It might be worth revisiting though, IIRC the major problem terminal was the OS X one and it's gone through several versions since then.

[Airwolf]

Oh, yeah, definitely don't forget this -- for compatibility reasons dark grey is realized as dark blue in most terminals by default, and this setting gets dark grey back. With the compatibility mode turned off, blue is much rarer on the map (though certain monsters still use it).

Terminal compatibility is too complicated for my puny brain, but I wonder if allow_extended_colours = true should be the default.

We went a few rounds of what the best solution is around 0.19 or so, I don't remember the details, but it was something like: if that is the default, then on most terminals it works, but on some terminals that setting was hopelessly broken and rendered dark gray as block, so the map is effectively broken by default. So we ended up with a compromise position that is non-ideal for everyone, but usable for everyone. It might be worth revisiting though, IIRC the major problem terminal was the OS X one and it's gone through several versions since then.

I wasn't aware of that and definitely defer to you who have thought about the issue.