[Freeciv] Re: Odp: Re: question: CivII like tileset for FreeCiv

[Cameron Morland <cjmorlan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

La 2002-04-12, Christian Knoke skribis:

>
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 03:01:44PM -0500, Tony Stuckey wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 01:58:06PM -0600, Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
> > > Also -- Marco, ask your friend whether he needs special tiles for
> > > terrain, cities, etc.  If someone decides to do this, they may as well
> > > do a thorough job of it.  (And along with the accessibility options in
> > > GTK 2.0, this could make Freeciv a popular game for the visually
> > > impaired.  Maybe the only strategy game with such support?)
> >
> >     Not the only.  SMAC had edited graphics which were supposed to be
> > better for color-blind people, etc.
> >     Having a greyscale-only tile set might be interesting.

I made a black-and white (ie 1 bit per pixel) tileset, based on the
Trident tileset. I believe it's available in the downloads section. All I
really did was dither Trident to B&W, then manually tidy up a number of
images (especially the oceans; mine are very dark).  Something similar for
grey could probably be quite nice. The flags are the biggest problem. I
note that in Sid's Civ on the Mac, you could run it in 1 bit mode; it used
a small symbol to designate nations. Of course, it only needed to
differentiate 7 nations.

I don't know that status of my B&W tileset, I haven't used it much.

> Now you mention this, I feel encouraged to mention a similar problem.
> The Freeciv minimap is bad for the color-blinded, even partial
> color-blinded, i.e red-green-blind (which is a common term though it's
> not clear defined what lack of sight it describes AFAIK).

Humans can usually differentiate three colours (RGB), and combinations of
these or colours between these give the range of colours we see. Red-Green
blindness means that the human is sensitive to blue and red/green, ie they
have only 2 points with which to specify a colour. You could probably
emulate this with gamma-modifying software (I found one for Windoze, and I
have in the past used one that shipped with Photoshop on the Mac). Just
set the brightness of green (or red) to zero, and then see how clear your
icons are (you probably should test it long enough to be familiar with
them, or it won't be a fair test).

> Some experiments with a friend of mine turned out, that the special
> composition of colors in the minimap is the problem, not the use of
> colors at all.

I think the minimap worked very badly on a B&W screen, but I don't
remember. I don't have one these days.

I don't find the minimap particularly clear even with normal vision; the
difference between cities and background isn't very clear. I think this
could be improved just by making the green and blue of the land and water
much darker.

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