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Low Contrast on Flat Screen Monitors
I've been pretty busy for the last 6 months and haven't had a chance to play Angband. I've been playing on a big 21" CRT for years, but that monitor was a bit of a monster, and I finally put it away in favor of a nice new flat-screen monitor earlier this year. My eyes have never been great, and they've been getting worse over the last few years. Even on the CRT Angband was getting harder for me to play, as you simply _have_ to be able to see well to play well. But I find that on the flat-screen I have a very hard time seeing the darker monsters and items unless I put my face right up to the monitor.
Since I haven't played in a while I rolled up a nice HE ranger and started leisurely going down, only to find that a lot of monsters were truly invisible to me. Even Cave Ogres are hard for me to see on this monitor if they are near walls (because of the brightness of the walls, I guess). Up to 2000' that's survivable, but I'm getting into Adunaphel territory now, and it's clear that I will inevitably be whacked by a dark colored monster if I don't do something about this. And heaven forbid that this game has decided on "Jet Ring of Speed"- I would never find one
.
I guess the obvious solution is to adjust the colors in my edit files. I'm a programmer, so I imagine I could write some sort of little regex script that would grovel through them and do what needs to be done. This would have the advantage of being portable over all versions and installations of Angband and variants that use the same edit file format. I've never really adjusted Angband's colors though, and I'm very used to them- it might take a while to regain my instinctive scan of the level.
Anyway, I'm a very lazy programmer, so before messing with scripts to change my edit files I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone else has had this problem and has come up with a better solution. I'd also like to suggest that it might be worth thinking about the color scheme of Angband, now that flat-screen monitors are so common, and some Angbanders are getting older, though I know that is fraught... as I said, it will take me a while to adjust to brighter colored monsters so I can see why people who can see things well would not be happy with changes to the color scheme.
Since I haven't played in a while I rolled up a nice HE ranger and started leisurely going down, only to find that a lot of monsters were truly invisible to me. Even Cave Ogres are hard for me to see on this monitor if they are near walls (because of the brightness of the walls, I guess). Up to 2000' that's survivable, but I'm getting into Adunaphel territory now, and it's clear that I will inevitably be whacked by a dark colored monster if I don't do something about this. And heaven forbid that this game has decided on "Jet Ring of Speed"- I would never find one
.I guess the obvious solution is to adjust the colors in my edit files. I'm a programmer, so I imagine I could write some sort of little regex script that would grovel through them and do what needs to be done. This would have the advantage of being portable over all versions and installations of Angband and variants that use the same edit file format. I've never really adjusted Angband's colors though, and I'm very used to them- it might take a while to regain my instinctive scan of the level.
Anyway, I'm a very lazy programmer, so before messing with scripts to change my edit files I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone else has had this problem and has come up with a better solution. I'd also like to suggest that it might be worth thinking about the color scheme of Angband, now that flat-screen monitors are so common, and some Angbanders are getting older, though I know that is fraught... as I said, it will take me a while to adjust to brighter colored monsters so I can see why people who can see things well would not be happy with changes to the color scheme.
. Now it's buried in the user's manual
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