Competition with two savefiles?

[Timo Pietilä]

Only for experienced players. There was no logic to the previous colouring of uniques, and less experienced players had to learn each of them.

No logic other than that they were appropriate color of their corresponding type giving a small hint of what they might be able to do, and thematic to the name of the unique like Fundin = blue, Saruman = multicolored, Wormy = a thief blue, Ancalagon = black and so on.

Yes, d_m introduced 256-colour support for 3.1.2 - in practice this means we have something like 26 usable colours rather than 16. So it is possible to have a colour that's only for uniques, without too much restriction on the rest of the monster list. I remain convinced that this is the right approach.

I think you should use old method, but use a slightly different color for uniques of each type to separate that from rest of that type. Make Fang and Grip slightly different color than rest of the low-level dogs, Carcharoth a slightly brighter red than hellhounds and so on, so that colors are appropriate for that monster type, instead of just plain "this is a unknown unique of this letter".

Can you already use those extra colors? If you can, how?

EDIT: I found a UI for that, but I also noticed that "interact with visuals" is now lacking ability to change those. There is only selections to load user pref, dump monster/object/feature/flavor attr/chars and reset visuals. In older (3.0.9) version there was also possibility to edit those. Experimenting with older version and dropping that to new version restores old color scheme for that game, and also allows editing individual monsters. 28 colors total are in use (0-27), rest are undefined which means black (background color). I might edit a sample, if I can distinguish uniques without turning them all purple.

[Jungle_Boy]

Just play with tiles

[Timo Pietilä]

Just play with tiles

Looking at colored blobs is not my idea of roguelike game.

[Magnate]

I think you should use old method, but use a slightly different color for uniques of each type to separate that from rest of that type. Make Fang and Grip slightly different color than rest of the low-level dogs, Carcharoth a slightly brighter red than hellhounds and so on, so that colors are appropriate for that monster type, instead of just plain "this is a unknown unique of this letter".

Can you already use those extra colors? If you can, how?

EDIT: I found a UI for that, but I also noticed that "interact with visuals" is now lacking ability to change those. There is only selections to load user pref, dump monster/object/feature/flavor attr/chars and reset visuals. In older (3.0.9) version there was also possibility to edit those. Experimenting with older version and dropping that to new version restores old color scheme for that game, and also allows editing individual monsters. 28 colors total are in use (0-27), rest are undefined which means black (background color). I might edit a sample, if I can distinguish uniques without turning them all purple.

To be honest this issue will go away when someone has another go at trawling through monster.txt changing all the colours. It might be me, but it wasn't that much fun last time so it might not. If you feel like spending the time implementing your "standing out from kin" colour scheme for uniques, I'm sure Takkaria will welcome it if it goes down well here. Just attach your revised monster.txt to http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1092 and someone will commit it.

If you're bothering to do that, you might want to make (more) use of the new colours for non-unique monsters too. This is partly what puts me off - I did it in a hurry last time, and if I was to do it again I'd want to spend hours doing it properly.

[Timo Pietilä]

To be honest this issue will go away when someone has another go at trawling through monster.txt changing all the colours. It might be me, but it wasn't that much fun last time so it might not. If you feel like spending the time implementing your "standing out from kin" colour scheme for uniques, I'm sure Takkaria will welcome it if it goes down well here. Just attach your revised monster.txt to http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1092 and someone will commit it.

If you're bothering to do that, you might want to make (more) use of the new colours for non-unique monsters too. This is partly what puts me off - I did it in a hurry last time, and if I was to do it again I'd want to spend hours doing it properly.

I'll try to do that this weekend. It's midsummer and we have a bit longer weekend, so I have a bit more time than usual.

Like you said, this requires a bit work, it can't be done in a blink of an eye even that procedure itself is quite simple.

[Derakon]

As a first pass, it ought to be moderately straightforward to write a program to parse an old version of monsters.txt and remap the uniques' colors to slightly brighter versions of their base colors.

However, that'd doubtless require a decent bit of hand-tweaking anyway.

[Timo Pietilä]

Just attach your revised monster.txt to http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1092 and someone will commit it.

If you're bothering to do that, you might want to make (more) use of the new colours for non-unique monsters too. This is partly what puts me off - I did it in a hurry last time, and if I was to do it again I'd want to spend hours doing it properly.

I made that already. Got a bit sick so that I can't go to work, but healthy enough that I had not anything better to do.

However trac is not accepting my file. I get "The connection was reset" -error from it. Tried to login in case I get that without login, but I can't remember my password or even which name I used as username.

Anyway, I restored all changed monsters I could find (grep, diff etc. in use) and then changed so that there are no uniques that cannot be distinguished from ordinary monsters based on color. However there is still few cases where distinguishing uniques from each other needs looking which unique it is. Especially low-level human uniques: they are so similar that they are basically same char copied to different levels with tiny differences in HP and speed. I actually had difficulties telling "did I already changed that or not" even when I have monster.txt open. That one is good place to remove uniques. I intentionally left ringwraiths to same color.

[andrewdoull]

Anyway, I restored all changed monsters I could find (grep, diff etc. in use) and then changed so that there are no uniques that cannot be distinguished from ordinary monsters based on color. However there is still few cases where distinguishing uniques from each other needs looking which unique it is. Especially low-level human uniques: they are so similar that they are basically same char copied to different levels with tiny differences in HP and speed. I actually had difficulties telling "did I already changed that or not" even when I have monster.txt open. That one is good place to remove uniques. I intentionally left ringwraiths to same color.

Ah - the great recolouring.

For Unangband, I ended up outputing the available colours directly into the monster.txt file so I knew which I could still use.

Luckily I'd previously split the human classes into three different letters (p/q/t) so that it was easier to do.

Andrew