FreeOrion

As the title says, I'd like to request something that tells you the star's color.
I know this sounds like a silly request when you can just look at a star and see the color, but your colorblind friends will thank you. Right now, I used MSPaint to write the color of the stars on them, and it looks terrible; functional though.

Also, thanks for making this game. As much as I love MoO2, it's nice to see a new take on it with a more intuitive UI.

Hailspork wrote:As the title says, I'd like to request something that tells you the star's color.
I know this sounds like a silly request when you can just look at a star and see the color, but your colorblind friends will thank you. Right now, I used MSPaint to write the color of the stars on them, and it looks terrible; functional though.

Also, thanks for making this game. As much as I love MoO2, it's nice to see a new take on it with a more intuitive UI.

Each color star has a unique size. I don't know if the difference is big enough to reliably see without the color cues, but that's something to look out for.

If that's not enough what you are doing is essentially the most practical route. Though for a cleaner look you might simply put an "R" in the center of the red stars, etc.

I'd encourage you to post your altered stars for the other colorblind players to take advantage of.

I remember in MoO2, you could right-click on a star and it would give you info about what kind of star it was. If there's a reasonable way to have star types in the pedia, and a reasonable way to link to them from the galaxy map or the system sidepanel, that might be a good solution.

If for instance you are looking for a white star, i don't think you would want to have to click on a bunch of them to find it.

For most of the game star color doesn't matter, but with some late-game techs it does.

Anyway, if we want to tell the player what type a star is, the top of the side-pannel seems like the logical place for me. Even those with regular vision don't automatically know that the little purple stars are neutron stars.

I'd post mine as a mod, but MSPaint doesn't handle the part of the graphic that makes the part of the image set to background.... um, I'm sure there's a word for it but I don't know it.

Top of the side panel seems good to me; just so long as the info is somewhere and the art is not done by me.

Hailspork wrote:I'd post mine as a mod, but MSPaint doesn't handle the part of the graphic that makes the part of the image set to background.... um, I'm sure there's a word for it but I don't know it.

"Transparency color", maybe?

Personally, I can't think of any place to put the star type on the sidepanel that would really mesh with the rest of the panel, so I think just putting it in the Pedia page would be the cleanest solution. I wonder, however, if it would be possible for a right click on the star to send you to the Pedia entry on the system?

qsswin wrote:

Hailspork wrote:I'd post mine as a mod, but MSPaint doesn't handle the part of the graphic that makes the part of the image set to background.... um, I'm sure there's a word for it but I don't know it.

"Transparency color", maybe?

Personally, I can't think of any place to put the star type on the sidepanel that would really mesh with the rest of the panel, so I think just putting it in the Pedia page would be the cleanest solution. I wonder, however, if it would be possible for a right click on the star to send you to the Pedia entry on the system?

That would be nice, and to be honest, I think it would be ideal if that were the case for pretty much everything clickable, but in the case of stars in particular, right-click is used to set the destination of a fleet, so it would be confusing/annoying if you were in the middle of giving orders to a fleet, to need to deselect the fleet before checking the pedia entry.

qsswin wrote:

Hailspork wrote:I'd post mine as a mod, but MSPaint doesn't handle the part of the graphic that makes the part of the image set to background.... um, I'm sure there's a word for it but I don't know it.

"Transparency color", maybe?

The alpha channel is ignored by MSPaint when loading images, and omitted by it when saving them. Use Paint.net for all your four-channel PNG editing needs on Windows.

I think just putting [the star type] in the Pedia page...

Which pedia page are you referring to?

I guess we could have a Star Type section in the 'Pedia, which would give all the star types existing in FO, with a line or two along the lines of what was in MoO1 ('red stars commonly have poor planets' etc.) and the on-screen color described.

And a mention of binary stars, too.

eleazar wrote:If for instance you are looking for a white star, i don't think you would want to have to click on a bunch of them to find it.

For most of the game star color doesn't matter, but with some late-game techs it does.

Anyway, if we want to tell the player what type a star is, the top of the side-pannel seems like the logical place for me. Even those with regular vision don't automatically know that the little purple stars are neutron stars.

And Phototrophic races.