widelands-dev team mailing list archive

[Teppo Maenpaa <teppo.maenpaa@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 07:44:40AM +0200, Holger Rapp wrote:

> No, I do not think you are correct here. There is so much difference in the 
> way people can or cannot perceive color. Brightness doesn't seem to be 
> easily order-able for a human and the differences are harder to perceive.

Hi,

You are right in what you say, except that I still think I am right. If the 
brightness, or "lightness" in HSL terms, is *sufficiently* different, all 
will see a difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV

> I used to think the same till I regularly gave slides for my presentations 
> to a red-green deficient colleague of mine. And it was really hard to 
> predict what he could or could not distinguish.

I know. Also, not all color impaired are red-green type.

> We do not do flame wars here - people voice their opinion and then we make a 
> decision and move forward. Flame wars haven't been a big problem for 
> Widelands in a long time :).

There are new people joining WL team now and them, and most people have never 
met in person I would guess. Flame wars happen very easily in those 
conditions.

> I wanted to add some more constructive discussion to the suggestion. For me 
> this idea gives us the chance to consolidate the information we currently 
> have in the game. For example for workers we show "vacant" and "missing" 
> next to them to is the building window - this suggestion can allow us to do 
> the same for wares.

I would not write these minor notes in full text: as the various on-screen 
text already overlap with each other now and then, at least in some 
localizations. More text makes the problem worse. A possible work-around 
would be to add special characters to the percent-string. Here the challenge 
would be to find an easy-to-get language independent symbol. Like putting the 
percentage to parentheses when wares are missing, and appending an 
exclamation mark when all needed wares are present. This would fix the 
color-impair issue for sure, and still adding colors could make it more 
intuitive for the majority.

> Instead, I suggest adding "status panes" to the building statistics - small 
> pictures (maybe 10x10 pixel) that show the status of the building. Wares 
> missing, Workers missing, Building stopped and so on could all be such panes 
> and they are displayed hovering over the building or in the tooltip.
[many details clipped]

Really good long-term goal. I think that this is the way to go, in terms of 
future year releases. Regarding the coming release, I still see the colors 
worth adding.

> Isn't this a cleaner approach that could scale better to other information 
> than using colors?

Yes, it is a mighty longer term goal worth remembering -> bug report?

Regards,


	Teppo