Monster colors

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello. kinda manual x-post here because forums do not have such feature.

Magnate suggested that I make a improved version of monster.txt where colors are revised to original scheme with new colors in use to distinguish uniques from original monsters of their kind.

I have that now ready, but trac isn't accepting my attachment. Any info why? Is the server down or something? I get "The connection was reset" -message from server.

Also: How do I reset my password or find out my account name?

[takkaria]

Hello. kinda manual x-post here because forums do not have such feature.

Magnate suggested that I make a improved version of monster.txt where colors are revised to original scheme with new colors in use to distinguish uniques from original monsters of their kind.

I have that now ready, but trac isn't accepting my attachment. Any info why? Is the server down or something? I get "The connection was reset" -message from server.

I imagine it was just too big for the server. Can you attach it to a post on oook instead and link to it from the bug?

Also: How do I reset my password or find out my account name?

We don't have accounts for non-committers on Trac yet.

[Timo Pietilä]

I imagine it was just too big for the server. Can you attach it to a post on oook instead and link to it from the bug?

Seem to be that ook has even smaller limit, ook has 19kB limit, this is over 200kB unzipped and 52kB zipped. I try again in Trac, this time zipped file...

OK now it got attached.

Track says that limit is 256kB, but this file was less than that (215540B = 210kB).

For anybody interested ticket is #1092 http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1092

Base file is 3.1.2 monster.txt so it won't be compatible with older versions.

EDIT: This is what I wrote in competition page about what I did:

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

[Pete Mack]

Timo--
did you try zipping it? You can attach a ~100K zip file on the forum. Since the original is 200K, you should come in a bit below 100K.

[Timo Pietilä]

Timo--
did you try zipping it? You can attach a ~100K zip file on the forum. Since the original is 200K, you should come in a bit below 100K.

Attached here too as requested.

[Timo Pietilä]

Attached here too as requested.

Just for information: that violet (v) in 3.0.9 colors is purple (P) in 3.1.2 colors, and v in 3.1.2 is color that doesn't exist in 3.0.9. That means that by making all uniques violet and all ordinary monsters that had violet as color changed to purple would be identical to old color scheme with all uniques using their own color.

That's not what I did however. I prefer using different colors to uniques too, but I just couldn't figure out what to do to low-level human uniques. They are too similar and there are a lot of human uniques and human ordinary monsters, so trying to use different color to each one would still leave some of them using same color. I counted that about 30 different colors would be required to do that, and there are not that many even in new color set.

Some things I would like to change still:

Black Wraith is, by definition black (Dark grey), but black is also color for Nightcrawler and Nightwalker. I just couldn't figure out how to make difference between those. Getting either of those when you expect Black Wraith would be rather nasty surprise.

Multi-hued zephyr hound is obviously multi-hued (ATTR_MULTI), but that is same as Aether hounds and Chaos hounds, and while I don't usually fight those two because they are just too tough I don't run from multi-hued hounds. That means that there is one low-level monster that isn't immediately distinguishable form two much more dangerous monsters. I just hate that. Getting to new level with basic4 and poison and seeing multi-hued hounds all around you could lead to death if they were either of the two more dangerous monsters, but thought to be the less dangerous group. OTOH Ancient Multi-Hued dragon and Great Wyrm of Chaos are similar case and no-one is complaining about that. Maybe it is just matter of getting used to.

[d_m]

I just tried playing your color patch and it seemed ok. Thanks! Once I give it some more testing I plan to commit it unless I hear other objections. It would be great to hear feedback from other people on this patch.

I think the solution to the ATTR_MULTI might be to have several kinds of ATTR_MULTI that flicker between a few colors (e.g. a reddish multi, greenish multi, etc). I've seen variants do this and I think it's pretty nice. I'm not sure if anyone else with commit access agrees with me though.

Also, in principle we can make even more colors, so if Nightwalker and Nightcrawler (and Nightwing?) need a slightly different color from the Black Wraith that seems possible. Obviously you don't want too many colors because they become indistinguishable, but I don't think we're near that yet!

[fizzix]

I just tried playing your color patch and it seemed ok. Thanks! Once I give it some more testing I plan to commit it unless I hear other objections. It would be great to hear feedback from other people on this patch.

I think the solution to the ATTR_MULTI might be to have several kinds of ATTR_MULTI that flicker between a few colors (e.g. a reddish multi, greenish multi, etc). I've seen variants do this and I think it's pretty nice. I'm not sure if anyone else with commit access agrees with me though.

Also, in principle we can make even more colors, so if Nightwalker and Nightcrawler (and Nightwing?) need a slightly different color from the Black Wraith that seems possible. Obviously you don't want too many colors because they become indistinguishable, but I don't think we're near that yet!

I think different kinds of attribute multi is a good idea. I definitely think there should be a difference between multi-hued hounds and aether/chaos hounds. Like Timo, I don't care if aether and chaos hounds are the same.

The similarities between nightwaker, nightcrawler and nightwings is actually a problem for me. I do not know the difference between them, although thankfully my monster memory does. One hits to disenchant 4 times, one has an acid attack, and yeah, that's all I know. Different colors would help a lot here. There are some free colors in the W's. I can't recall light blue or yellow being taken.

[Derakon]

I haven't downloaded the patch, but has anything been done about Crebain/Raven/Winged Horror? They're all black 'B's in the current version, and it's a bit annoying. Though you can usually recognize Crebain because they're in groups, and Ravens aren't dangerous enough to worry about.

I'd support adding "biased multicolor" monsters. ToME 2 has this for some monsters, e.g. the great wyrms all flicker between their base colors and a slightly brighter version.

As for the Night* enemies, beyond the fact that they have "night" in their name, any reason why they have to be black? We could make them gold-colored; IIRC there aren't any yellow or orange wights right now. Confusion between Wing, Walker, and Crawler isn't an issue since they're individually so rare anyway. Generally I avoid them all anyway; mostly I remember them as having really beastly melee with unpleasant side effects.

[Timo Pietilä]

I haven't downloaded the patch, but has anything been done about Crebain/Raven/Winged Horror? They're all black 'B's in the current version, and it's a bit annoying. Though you can usually recognize Crebain because they're in groups, and Ravens aren't dangerous enough to worry about.

Yes. Raven and Crebain are still same color, but Winged horror is not. As summons if you get many black birds it was pretty hard to tell which of the harmless black ones is that lone Winged Horror that isn't quite as harmless, so I changed that. Raven mixed with Crebain isn't that big a problem.

As for the Night* enemies, beyond the fact that they have "night" in their name, any reason why they have to be black? We could make them gold-colored; IIRC there aren't any yellow or orange wights right now. Confusion between Wing, Walker, and Crawler isn't an issue since they're individually so rare anyway. Generally I avoid them all anyway; mostly I remember them as having really beastly melee with unpleasant side effects.

Description. They are described as black. Same with bone golem. I actually changed that to same color as rangers (light gray) to make them distinguishable from pukelman, but after reading the description I changed pukelman instead.

[Derakon]

Well, then we could rename Black Wraith to Gold Wraith. Heck, make it drop some money, tweak the description a bit, and you have the undead form of a greedy mage. Much more thematically interesting than "yet another wraith, but it's faster now."

[Magnate]

I just tried playing your color patch and it seemed ok. Thanks! Once I give it some more testing I plan to commit it unless I hear other objections. It would be great to hear feedback from other people on this patch.

Well, I speak for the group of people who really like having uniques all the same colour and that colour not used for anything else (it's not just me). I guess the thing to do now is add a display option "use special colour for unique foes" - so I'll add that if I can get round to it. Takk can always revert it if he hates it ;-)

[Magnate]

Just for information: that violet (v) in 3.0.9 colors is purple (P) in 3.1.2 colors, and v in 3.1.2 is color that doesn't exist in 3.0.9.

Ah! Thank you. I can't quite see how yet, but I think you have just given me the solution to http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/1075

[kaypy]

I guess the thing to do now is add a display option "use special colour for unique foes" - so I'll add that if I can get round to it.

This seems to me something that would be better done by .prf files rather than by tweaking the display code. Maybe an option that just autoloads certain premade .prf files?