Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Changing Player Colours?
| Changing Player Colours? |
Fri, 13 March 2009 18:11  |
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| PaulCr |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
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Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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Does anyone know whether it's possible to change the player colours that stars uses. I'm playing a game where everyone is set to enemy and I've turned on the player colors option so that everybody's ships show with the ship count in their player colour to make it easier to tell who is who without having to click on every ship.
I've just searched autohost and nothing popped up, looked at the ini and can't see anything there, I've even loaded the exe into notepad to see whether the various settings would show up as plain text in there which would have shown all possible setting for the ini but unfortunately they don't.
It would definitely be nice to be able to change the colours to make the easier to see with the scanners and stop similar colours being used on neighbouring races to make it easier to tell which is which instantly without having to keep taking a closer look.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Fri, 13 March 2009 18:32  |
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I don't think you can no. I always have the player colours & ship counts on for the same reason, and sometimes resort to switching my diplomacy setting around so I can more easily focus of a few races.
Most annoyingly, one of the player colours in identical to the non-pen scanner too, so those numbers don't show up at all.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Fri, 13 March 2009 18:44 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
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Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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I have been temporarily changing a couple of people to friend to check quickly where their ships are, it is an hassle though which is why I turned player colours on, even though it's very unlikely I don't want to risk forgetting to reset then, there's even the possibility that the return to enemy setting might get ignored by the server when it processes the x file since I have seen orders I knew I gave not get carried out a few times in some of my previous games.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Fri, 13 March 2009 18:58 |
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heh...I just assumed it was my own fault, and apologised profusely to my allies.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 13:42 |
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| PaulCr wrote on Fri, 13 March 2009 23:11 |
It would definitely be nice to be able to change the colours to make the easier to see with the scanners and stop similar colours being used on neighbouring races to make it easier to tell which is which instantly without having to keep taking a closer look.
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Sometimes I toggle scanners (7) on and off because the red or yellow background makes it easier to see some other players' ships.
Dark Blue is easier seen with scanners on while for example red is really tricky to see with the red scanner background.
Additionally to this poor workarounds it would be great if one could change the colors. But I've never heard of such an option.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 14:17 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
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Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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| [email |
m.a@stars[/email] wrote on Fri, 13 March 2009 23:47]| PaulCr wrote on Fri, 13 March 2009 23:11 |
Does anyone know whether it's possible to change the player colours that stars uses.
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Most players would like to see it, but no one has succeeded.  If anyone manages to mod the client to do it, I'll be among the 1st to test it. 
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That kinda sounds like a challenge so I've just took a screen dump of the game I'm in, looked up a few colour values, figured 237FFF would be a fairly low occurrence in the executable, loaded the stars exe into an hex editor, searched for those bytes, found whats looks like colour values and so changed it to FFFFFF, saved it, loaded the game again and hey presto, the colour has changed to white. That's about the limit to what I would have done, anything more difficult would have probably required one of the disassembler guys such as kotk.
Should take less than 30 minutes to write something to allow them to be changed so I should get it done over the weekend, not sure if it will affect anything else though such as the scanners, hopefully not but even if it does it would still be useful to be able to set them to whatever you like.
If someone wants to experiment with it in the meantime the offset for player 14 which is the one I searched for is located at BCAA2h in the 2.6JRC4 exe and each colour takes up four bytes in the order RGB0 as they are included in the file, ie 8 bit bytes rather than a 32 bit word.
Edit: just done a quick look to see if the pen scan colour 606000 was included in the 16 colours there and it wasn't so they do look to be unique to the player colours.
[Updated on: Sat, 14 March 2009 14:25] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 16:41 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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I have a first version of the Player Colours editor that edits the English (or what Americans call English anyway) version of stars 2.6jrc4 that is 3,344,384 bytes long.
The utility can be downloaded from http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/StarsPlayerColoursChange r.exe
Given how easy it was I'm surprised something hasn't been produced already, especially after searching rec.games.computer.stars yesterday which showed a lot of people asking for it absolutely ages ago when new patches were still being released.
Edit: We just need somebody to spend the time to come up with a set of suitable colours that don't clash with the Black/Red/Yellow backgrounds and that are still different enough to still be able to tell the various races apart easily. I won't be doing it since I have virtually no artistic ability so it would pretty much be trial and error for me, I sure a more artistic person could probably put a set together without even trying.
[Updated on: Sat, 14 March 2009 16:50] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 17:02 |
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*mutters curses about people who create utils that don't fit into the normal categories* link
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 17:28 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
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Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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It just checks that the file length is 3,344,384 bytes in length, if not then it won't load and the save button remains disabled, I would assume that the likelihood of any other stars version happening to be the same size is pretty remote although I haven't checked.
To cause problems with another version, the user would first have to ignore the version message and try to load another version into it, that would have to be the same size as the 2.6jrc4 version, the colour values would have to be in a completely different place which if the file size is identical is less likely, the user would have to completely ignore the fact that the existing colours it displays are obviously incorrect, the user would have to change at least one of the colours and then they would have to save it.
I could check for specific bytes in the file but given that checking the file size is almost certain to be enough I'll only bother doing it if an existing version happens to be the same size and it's colour table is in a differenet place.
[Updated on: Sat, 14 March 2009 17:29] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 17:31 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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It just checks that the file length is 3,344,384 bytes in length, if not then it won't load and the save button remains disabled, I would assume that the likelihood of any other stars version happening to be the same size is pretty remote although I haven't checked.
To cause problems with another version, the user would first have to ignore the version message and try to load another version into it, that would have to be the same size as the 2.6jrc4 version, the colour values would have to be in a completely different place which if the file size is identical is less likely, the user would have to completely ignore the fact that the existing colours it displays are obviously incorrect, the user would have to change at least one of the colours and then they would have to save it. And even in the unlikely event all of that takes place and they hadn't kept a backup they'd still be able to re download the original file from autohost.
I could check for specific bytes in the file but given that checking the file size is almost certain to be enough I'll only bother doing it if an existing version happens to be the same size and it's colour table is in a different place.
[Updated on: Sat, 14 March 2009 17:31] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 20:09 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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You need .net installed to use it, you can get that from the microsoft website. VB.Net defaults to version 3.5 so you'll probably need to download that, I normally change them to use V2 which my other utilities use but I just threw this together and I forgot to change it so I'll probably do that at some point tomorrow and upload it again.
When run you should get a form and that includes instructions but it's pretty simple, enter the filename to the stars executable, click load, the player labels change to the existing colours in the file, click on the player you want to change and a color dialog box comes up to let you select a new color, once you've finished updating the colours you want to change then you just need to click save.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 21:20 |
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 m.a@stars |
 | Commander |
Messages: 2765
Registered: October 2004
Location: Third star to the left | |
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| PaulCr wrote on Sat, 14 March 2009 21:41 |
Edit: We just need somebody to spend the time to come up with a set of suitable colours that don't clash with the Black/Red/Yellow backgrounds and that are still different enough to still be able to tell the various races apart easily.
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Well, I would at least change Player8 from 7F0000 to something like aF0000, so it didn't blend with the red scanner color. 
Then, Player5's pure Yellow (FFFF00) looks too similar to Player1's yellowish F0F03F and to the "Friend" Yellow.  I'd try a "whiter" yellow for 1, like F8F88F.
Finally, Player16's grayish 606060 is not only too similar to Player11's gray 7F7F7F, but it's also hard to see over the penscan's 606000.  It could be beneficially changed to something like FFCCCC.
[Updated on: Sun, 15 March 2009 09:04]
So many Stars, so few Missiles!
In space no one can hear you scheme! Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sat, 14 March 2009 23:36 |
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hmm I wonder if there's a greedy algorithm for this out there somewhere... ie so that you have optimum distinguishability for any given number of players.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Sun, 15 March 2009 17:14 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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I've created a Colour Map page on the website at http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/colourmap.aspx which shows a set of colours on the Space, Scanner & Pen Scanner Coloured backgrounds, the default set creates the page using value of 0,64,128,192 & 255 for each of the components which produces 125 colour combinations but it can also be set to use a different list in the parameters such as http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/colourmap.aspx?Colours=0 ,51,102,153,204,255 which create 216 based on 0,51,102,153,204 & 255
Hopefully it should be useful in helping to find suitable colour values to use.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Mon, 16 March 2009 14:07 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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I've done an update to the colour changer that makes it .net 2 rather than .net 3.5 now, I've also fixed changing player 5 since it was requiring a double click rather than a click like all the rest and I've made it so that the colour only changes if you click OK in the colour dialog rather than always being changed.
I've also made an update to the colour map page that allows a colour to be removed by clicking on it which makes coming up with a selection easier.
I've used it to create a set of colours that seem OK to me which I've started using, I've put the exe on the website if anyone wants to try them at http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/starsjrc4.exe, the colours it uses are FF0000, FF5500, 00AA00, FFAA00, 00FF00, FFFF00, 0000AA, AA00AA, FF0055, 55FF55, 0000FF, 5500FF, 0055FF, 5555FF, FF55FF & 00FFFF
If you want to set up the colours I mentioned yourself then the colours break up into 2 hex digits with the first 2 being Red, the Next being Green and the last 2 Blue, in the colour dialog use 0 for 00, 85 for 55, 170 for AA and 255 for FF.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Mon, 16 March 2009 17:06 |
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| PaulCr wrote on Mon, 16 March 2009 19:07 |
I've used it to create a set of colours that seem OK to me which I've started using, I've put the exe on the website if anyone wants to try them at http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/starsjrc4.exe, the colours it uses are FF0000, FF5500, 00AA00, FFAA00, 00FF00, FFFF00, 0000AA, AA00AA, FF0055, 55FF55, 0000FF, 5500FF, 0055FF, 5555FF, FF55FF & 00FFFF
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Those are the 16 new colours as chosen by PaulCr... I've sorted them a bit:
http://stars.arglos.net/misc/new-colours.html
Looks fine. 0000AA and 0000FF may be a bit close to each other.
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| Re: Changing Player Colours? |
Mon, 16 March 2009 18:16 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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| Altruist wrote on Mon, 16 March 2009 21:06 |
| PaulCr wrote on Mon, 16 March 2009 19:07 |
I've used it to create a set of colours that seem OK to me which I've started using, I've put the exe on the website if anyone wants to try them at http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/starsjrc4.exe, the colours it uses are FF0000, FF5500, 00AA00, FFAA00, 00FF00, FFFF00, 0000AA, AA00AA, FF0055, 55FF55, 0000FF, 5500FF, 0055FF, 5555FF, FF55FF & 00FFFF
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Those are the 16 new colours as chosen by PaulCr... I've sorted them a bit:
http://stars.arglos.net/misc/new-colours.html
Looks fine. 0000AA and 0000FF may be a bit close to each other.
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Looks like I made a mistake in my app and displayed them as BGR instead, the colours you put up are different from the ones I put in the exe on the website, the colours I have are at http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/colours.png
Tried including it has an image put it doesn't seem to be working, ie [img]http://stars.atlantissoftware.co.uk/colours.png[/img]
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