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Regarding Colors
#1
As some of you may have noticed, I am giving a hand in the development team with minor things such as organize the color stuff. The taste of the color structural isn't good and is rather annoying/messy, therefore I decided to make this topic and discussed it with everyone instead of only Russell.

Color::Success:

Currently for certain commands we are using the yellow and green color for success. I could just continue with green seeing that the color.pwn says so, but I want to be sure first so there's no going back.
[*]Should we only use green?


Color::Information:

Currently we are using the color white as Color::Information. This color isn't suitable for every information, meaning for DIALOG_BOX it is. Perhaps it's just me having a hard time reading that white color, but I doubt it and always have to move a little bit forward to read it. To prove that this color isn't exactly suitable I changed the color to a look-a-like white one which suits better.
Screenshot and Color table(CCFFFF).

This also makes it harder and annoying for administrators. The messages of players plus the admin notices are white. Perhaps we can make an exception for administrator related stuff.
[*]Can we use this color instead of what we are currently using for information?


Minigame Announcement and more:

Dropping this in here is a good idea I guess though it's not fully related to colors. The MinigameAnnouncement and the MinigameAnnouncementHighlight colors is just fine, but the problem is the positions/ways they're being displayed.

[*]Certain announcements we display in the middle.
[*]Others where the players chat messages appears.
[*]Hint messages in the bottom right corner.
[*]Others above the hint messages.
[*]Style of dialog box.
[*]FS like bag of money.

This makes the chat messy. Whenever you can, go in-game and look at the position of certain messages that are being displayed in the middle of the screen with the type of colors we use.. If we don't need to display certain messages we could disable them. Example when players are buying properties. I personally don't see why I should see when a player bought a property. If it was mine and I receive a message that my property has been bought, it's perfectly fine.

Properties:

Since I am talking about this, let me bring this part forward also. The property information is displayed on the property icon when a player is close enough to this. You can see the Name[ID]/Price/Income/Owner but once you step into the icon you receive the same information but in form of SendClientMessage which isn't needed.

I honestly don't see why we have www.sa-mp.nl and server IP in the right top corner. Now that we don't have automated messages you may think it's fine. But I think players are smart and they help each others, though we need those automated messages back. We have to focus on keeping things organized, we have been trying to balance things for newbies but the result wasn't good. What we should do is have certain commands the same as many other servers, an example is /stunt instead of /jump. Back to the right top corner area, it can be used to display the FPS, PING and PACKETLOSS. Above the map where we currently display those, can be used for something else. Perhaps connecting/disconnecting from the server. Point is that these should be organized to prevent such a messy chat and unnecessary messages.

MinigamesTransparentRed & MinigamesTransparentBlue:

Think it will look well organized if use one of these colors and make it unique, just like grey can only be used when player uses the pause command. Perhaps use a other color instead. It doesn't mind which minigame the players are playing, just one unique color we can tell that they're participating in a minigame. This can also count for those who are having a match in the the fight club.
[*]Why are we using two colors?


I'll be waiting on y'all replies and hopefully help to make things better.


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#2
Welcome striker :)

Color::Success: keep it green. However, we could make it a little, little bit more lighther.

Color::Information: I honestly don't know if I like that baby blue color. Maye you can use that color for the /credits command, so we can check ingame in the next version what we like better?

General: I completely agree with your thoughts. We have a light grey color we use for connecting, disconnecting players, which is fine. We need more of these kind of colors which seperate certain kinds of chat messages (like PM'ing, minigame stuff, gang chat, VIP chat, regular chat etc.).

I don't like the location of the current playerinfo, maybe we could move it to the statusbar. I like the general server information in the top-right corner, we need atleast one bit of LVP advertising ingame.

About announcements and such: I am completely pro concerning having a clean and empty player screen. We should revise the current statusbar to hold more information, remove the yellow ugly hints and remove the news controller messages (about properties, and the one which shows who is joining what minigame). I like the big, centered minigame announcements, they work really well in getting newbs to join minigames and reduce the amount of chat spam. We need a new unified news controller, somewhere above the mini-map, which shows current minigames in sign-up mode and stuff like a killtime timer or player being chased. Maybe also show player-based hints.

Sorry for the sloppy english but @ school.

I think I'm going to take a look at the statusbar once I've finished gang tufs.
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#3
Thank you!

Cake are you sure that the Color::Success needs to be lighter? I think it's fine. Let's see what the others think.
The credits command color has been changed to the baby blue color w/e you want to call it, so please check it out and get back to me.
Quote:<&Kase> by the way, why are you using Color::Success?
<&Kase> It should be rather Color::Information
<&Kase> since it's not really a message confirming a successful action but rather a generic information given to the player

<&Kase> we have that system so we can dynamically change colors in case we want to
<&Kase> they're basically not hardcoded, but there's a layer of abstraction
<&Kase> If you want, we can change the color assigned to Color::Information
<&Kase> maybe light gray
<&Kase> I think it's white now, which imo should be reserved for chat messages
The best move here is to change the Color::Information to a other color, however not to light grey. I've tried many grey colors and it just doesn't look good. Reserving the white color for only chat messages is a good idea!

Kase I also understand your point above, that I should use Color::Information instead, but it won't look good. From what I understand you want me to do this:
Code:
SendClientMessage(playerid, Color::Information, "Developers: All the nicknames here");

Code:
SendClientMessage(playerid, Color::Success, "Developers: {CCFFFF} All the nicknames here");
I did this and you can see that the "Developers" has a green color follow by the nicknames with a baby blue color w/e you want to call it. Before I changed the code, the whole information under credits was in white. My point is that even if we change the Color::Information to that baby blue it won't look good for the whole information, there needs to be a other color before that for it to match/look good.

I vote for Hint.pwn to be removed.
  • It announces some of the same things that Nuwani does.
  • Same commands that are displayed on the user bar.

I vote also on removing the SendClientMessage when stepping into a property icon. Players can already see the information on the property icon.
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#4
If you want to use green and then blue, you can embed those two colors directly while formatting the string, like this: "{7FFF00}Developers{CCFFFF}: Nicknames" - and use Color::Information, which will be overwritten by the embedded colors.
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#5
Got it!
Quote:<@cake> striker, that baby blue is fugly :(
Quote:<&Kase> I'd probably go with a very light gray instead of the blue
Any suggestion then which color I should use? I've already said that gray doesn't look good, but if you think you have a gray color that I may have not try yet, change it and see how it looks yourself. With a day & night weather.
After we come to an agreement, someone who can, change the Color::Information.
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#6
What about #F2F2F2?

http://crew.sa-mp.nl/russell/sendclientm...st%20color
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#7
Nope. If we want to use white for chat messages only, then what's the point on using a similar color for information?
I checked it out with this, then for the fun of it compile and test it on my local server, it is basically a white color. I'll explain myself again in case I may have not made it clear in my previous posts.

The white color isn't suitable for every information. It is, however, for DIALOG_BOXES because it has a dark background which helps you with reading the information. If you go in-game and take a look at the information given under /irc, it gives you a hard time reading it even if the weather is night. While that does not happen with /credits.

I need a good color to use for information, not light and not too dark. The baby blue color looks like a BOLD color, suitable, and doesn't give you a hard time reading it. Still think it is the best, but as usual some people won't like it, but if it does the job well then I don't see why we shouldn't use it.
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#8
It's been a few days without any response.
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