Minimap Colours

[Sayyan]

In response to historic_bruno's ticket regarding the minimap colours clashing I've created the following proposal for a new colour scheme.

Changes:

• Player one has been altered to tonally match player two, which also helps player one contrast when on water.
• Player eight has been changed into a much darker grey in order to stick out as much as the other players.
• The wood colour has been lightened and made a little more neutral so it's less dominating; it may be wise to represent trees with smaller blocks of colour so as not to drown everything else out.
• Metal has been changed from off-yellow to light grey to differentiate it from player four and to provide it with more contrast.
• Animals have been lightened

Known issues:

• The gaia colour isn't featured here, and would need to change with metal being a light grey colour. Any suggestions on the best colour choice for gaia?
• Yet to be tested in other biomes, there will likely need to be some tweaks on those.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Gaia can be white. I like your new color suggestions.

[Wijitmaker]

To further distinguish player from resource entities on the minimap - would there perhaps be a way to draw different pixel shapes rather than have them all as squares?

[Mythos_Ruler]

Yeah, I think AOEIII had little pixel art gold mines on its minimap. AOM had little house pixel art icons for settlements. Etc.

[oshron]

you could probably do some easy pixel art with less than 10 square pixels each. i could even whip up some examples if you want me to. but if this is the case, you could very well use "pixel art" for alot of things, or even smaller versions for different ones. for example, units could perhaps be rendered as just four pixels in a square, whereas static resources and buildings would be twelve in a square. having settlements as actual "houses" would be best in my opinion, in part because of pre-existing recognition from AOM

[Jeru]

Trees could be green triangles.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I think trees can be single pixels, since an individual tree is not very important at all. Depends on how it looks, I guess. But I think the more muted green color works nicely, while before trees were overpowering.

[Sayyan]

Having checked in game again, the Gaia colour is currently the orange I've listed by "Animals" (I only found animals at the time, but saw that bushes and grapevines are also that colour.)

Unless food sources owned by Gaia are a different colour from other entities owned by Gaia?

[Mythos_Ruler]

Having checked in game again, the Gaia colour is currently the orange I've listed by "Animals" (I only found animals at the time, but saw that bushes and grapevines are also that colour.)

Unless food sources owned by Gaia are a different colour from other entities owned by Gaia?

Things like gaia buildings and treasures and stuff like that are white, if I remember correctly (actually, treasures may currently be yellow/gold; I will playtest and see).

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Don't think Gaia should be white, probably light gray would be better. I think white should be reserved for currently selected entities.

[historic_bruno]

Yeah, I think AOEIII had little pixel art gold mines on its minimap. AOM had little house pixel art icons for settlements. Etc.

This is an interesting idea. Pixel art would certainly convey more information than single colored points, if it's not overused.

[Mythos_Ruler]

This is an interesting idea. Pixel art would certainly convey more information than single colored points, if it's not overused.

Right, I'd maybe just use pixel art for:

Civic Centres

Metal Mines

Treasures

Not much else.

[Sayyan]

Might it not look weird if only some things have pixel art? I'd think if one resource had it (metal) the others should too, for consistency. Civic centres would make sense as the only buildings. Downscaling the resource icons may work (although trees should probably look vaguely like trees, not logs.

[Sayyan]

My reasoning for the metal being light grey was to continue the iron metaphor used elsewhere. As there's no legend (and really, should an RTS map need one) it isn't obvious what metal looks like on the map.

[Mythos_Ruler]

(and really, should an RTS map need one)

Actually, I've never played an RTS whose minimap actually had a legend. It would be very cool if 0 A.D. included one somehow, even as a tooltip or popup.

[historic_bruno]

Might it not look weird if only some things have pixel art? I'd think if one resource had it (metal) the others should too, for consistency. Civic centres would make sense as the only buildings. Downscaling the resource icons may work (although trees should probably look vaguely like trees, not logs.

IMO mines are the rarest and most useful resource on the map and also the most sparse (hardest to find if you don't know where to look). I would have stone mines appear as small greyish rock shapes, and metal mines appear as anvils (should look pretty good even with so few pixels). Trees are very easy to find by comparison. Animals are constantly moving so I would avoid using pixel art for them, it will just be clutter.

[oshron]

Don't think Gaia should be white, probably light gray would be better. I think white should be reserved for currently selected entities.

i think it would be better if a more neutral color, like beige, was used for gaia units aside from trees and mineral resources, but with pixel art similarly implemented. as i mentioned before, moving objects such as animals could be rendered on the minimap as small dots (so that they dont occupy as much space) while static objects (player units given to neutral gaia, like a temple) are larger but non-moving objects

but if anything should be rendered with a straight-up white color, it should be available settlements and, if theyre included, relics

[plumo]

Personally i'd use Brown for animals, like in the age of empires series.

[historic_bruno]

Any more progress on this?

Now that we also have territory borders on the minimap, I wonder if there's any way to make them more visible, on some maps they are very hard to see.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I also like the black lines around player entities and other important objects in Starcraft 2:

[Ykkrosh]

That also seems to make the terrain very dark, which helps distinguish it clearly from the units or other objects on it. Maybe we should view colours as HSL, and use separate bands of S+L to distinguish terrain from territory borders and from units (and from resources?), and have just the H determined by the player colour.

[historic_bruno]

What's the dark purple area?

[quantumstate]

What's the dark purple area?

I think it is zerg creep which spreads from their buildings and prevent other civs from building.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Yeah, the purple stuff is Zerg creep, which isn't applicable to our game. Age of Mythology had something similar with Gaia creep. I actually think the black outlines would help player entities stand out even more with our color scheme than with the darker Starcraft colors.

[Pedro Falcão]

The Blizzard Entertainment is known for their dark environment in all their games, Starcraft 2 included. A good point in this is that you can easily find a special unit within a crowd, the bad point is that it's harder to identify the environment at the minimap and it's easier for you to identify low res textures, what makes the game graphics 'uglier'...