Right now the only colors available for unit counts are black and white.  With more and more maps using sophisticated overlays, sometimes neither of these choices is best.  I was wondering about what people thought about a third choice ..Invert.

Sounds good, custom would be good as well.

Alpha wrote:

Sounds good, custom would be good as well.

Right, I considered that but was worried that could be a can of worms come Review time.  Invert pretty much guarantees success.

agreed.

Invert of just the player color, or invert of the pixel values below the # after the board map has been overlayed?

Probably just the player's color as the last one would be hard to do, but would also be good.

I'm not sure which would look better without seeing it first.  I was just thinking about how the transparent textures from the board image can affect how the # looks.  But - yeah, I'm sure just doing an inverse of the player character is a lot easier.

Custom would be nice.  I think we can trust the designers and review board at this point.  

I thought this one was already on the feature request list, it wasn't so I added it. I think custom colors should be supported.

tom wrote:

I thought this one was already on the feature request list, it wasn't so I added it. I think custom colors should be supported.

Thanks Tom,  I notice that you put down Custom Colors.  Could you please include Invert?

-thanks

You can do invert by hand, if there are custom colors.

Awesome... That means Pong can be choose your own color!

Ozyman wrote:

You can do invert by hand, if there are custom colors.

It's a pain -- Actually, I wouldn't know how to do it except to load the color in an editor and invert it, then grab the hexdec or whatever it is and paste it. 

Not much different than manually having to enter Black and White.  Right off the bat I don't know those either.  "Invert" would be very convenient. 

How would you calculate the invert of a color? Bitwise NOT? This doesn't actually work that well for many colors .

White is FFFFFF & Black is 000000, although if the player # color chooser is like the player color chooser, you'll also have a palette, so could pick black/white/etc. from there.

You can calculate the inverse via google search/calculator:

0xffffff - 0x123456

Just put the player color in that second position.  (I think this is equivalent to bitwise not).

I'm not arguing against having the inverse option, as it would be a convenience, although I'd rather Tom spend his time on something else.

tom wrote:

This doesn't actually work that well for many colors .

Hmm... then maybe not such a good idea?

As Tom noted, using text that is shaded the invert of the background color doesn't always make it "pop" as much as you might think. If you have a noisy background, the text will still tend to get lost in the noise. Also, if you have a medium value (i.e. midway between dark and light), even inverting the hue to the "opposite" color (e.g. blue -> orange) won't help much. Remember, the invert of neutral grey is still grey). Invert will definitely work in some cases, but don't get lulled into the false belief that it will work in all cases.

I guess as long as it's an option on a per color basis, it's probably still a good idea, especially if the coding is easy.

Open season on number color would make me smile.

Kjeld wrote:

As Tom noted, using text that is shaded the invert of the background color doesn't always make it "pop" as much as you might think.

For example, the 'best' camoflage paint for an airplane? pink. pink gets lost in blue like you wouldn't believe!