[Reality] Re: Color

[James Knight]

At 8:36 PM -0400 8/16/99, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
>In the future, discussions like this should be hosted on the 'reality'
>list... we should try to open up our TR devel process a bit.  My next
>message is going out tonight to that list (if you're not on it, visit
>http://www.twistedmatrix.com/mailman/listinfo/reality)
>
>On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, James Knight wrote:
>
>[some colored stuff]
>
>> This is generally how it is used in 'inferior' M*s and I have to say
>> that it really does help to keep players from having their eyes glaze
>> over at a screenfull of text.
>
>I think this is a bad idea.  I believe it would lend a campy air to
>Divunal, and I wouldn't want anything to be colored.
Looked at a webpage recently? Color is a good way to keep everything from
looking like a big blob of text.

>1) Allowing people to assign actual colors to text is a STUPENDOUSLY bad
>idea.  Such code I *will* refuse (woohoo, a fork in TR already ^_^),
>because the author of the 'hears' statement won't necessarily know what
>'theme' the text will be displayed on.  There is no way that the final
>design of such haphazard coloration will result in anything remotely
>tasteful.  The colors must signify something.  Each theme needs to be
>expanded to provide a color for each possible significance that someone
>might want to use.  Examples of significance might be "Server Message",
>"Global Message", "Speech", "Local message", "Important Event",
>"Environmental Change", "Unimportant Event"  etc.

Yes that is a good point. I don't know if we could actually ever make
enough categories for that to work, so I thought maybe it would be okay to
just make arbitrary colors 1-20 or something...define them in one theme,
and then redefine them in other ones, making sure that colors that look
nice together in the reference theme look nice in the other themes.

>2) Separation of color should be done atomically by "hears" statement, not
>as HTML-esque tags in the text being sent.  hears() should take an
>optional 'color' argument which specifies the color that a certain string
>should be.  If we don't do this, we'll end up with ransom-note syndrome
>(SOMEBODY will make an area where every letter is a different color).

I disagree. If someone makes an area like that, then it should just be
deleted. Its not the code's buisness to enforce aesthetic rules. Besides
which, this is a general mechanism encompassing color, styles, sizes, and
embedded picture icons.

-James

--
You are in a maze of testy little Java VMs, all subtly different.