TremblingBlue's Color Scales

[TremblingBlue]

I present to you a pack of the finest color scales and color assignments in all of Darkest Hour! Each meticulously put together over stupidly long hours to produce lightness and diversity, helping to provide the most pleasant of visual experiences while playing your favourite strategy game.

Older version featured in the official graphics pack. Update yours today to keep on track with version 1.3!


Take a look below at the latest version (1.7):






Download link to current version (1.7):
http://depositfiles.com/files/glo361gw6


Download for older version compatible with Kaiserreich (Thanks Ober):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2mdqgte0i8...0Mod%201.6.zip



Be sure to make backup copies of the original files, just in case you want them back.

If there are any mistakes please let me know so I can update.





Many Thanks to Omega20.

[BeardedHoplite]

The colors are very easy on the eyes, although I think I prefer the intensity of the other world color pack.

[TremblingBlue]

The colors are very easy on the eyes, although I think I prefer the intensity of the other world color pack.

That's what I was aiming for, my eyes weren't doing so well with the default maps. It was originally going to be a lot more paler but it turned out not to be possible. Are you referring to Omega20's pack? It is the polar opposite of this one so if that's what you're looking for I recommend.

[Fernando Torres]

Looks VERY nice

[Pityubaa]

Much better than the eye-burning ones, especially in Kaiserreich.

[Kannon]

Nice, but not exactly my cup of tea.

Much better than the eye-burning ones, especially in Kaiserreich.

I always thought that KR isn't juicy enough.
Bonaparte legacy/TRP are the best when it comes to visuals for me.

[TremblingBlue]

Looks VERY nice

Thanks! Means a lot!

Much better than the eye-burning ones, especially in Kaiserreich.

Yes, I know what you mean. Extremely intense! I still have a couple of changes to do with the KR colorscales, such as Nationalist France and Serbia. Trying to make regions as diverse as possible.

Nice, but not exactly my cup of tea.

I always thought that KR isn't juicy enough.
Bonaparte legacy/TRP are the best when it comes to visuals for me.

If you want stronger visuals, have a go with Neat Color Scales.

[Bizon]

What is the color of borders in closer zoom levels?

I fell in love with red borders and I'm not going back

[Burning]

Judging from the screenshots and a firing up the game once:
You might want to look at the following country color combinations, as they are very difficult to distinguish.

Really hard:
Yugoslavia vs Hungary
Hungary vs Austria
Austria vs Italy
China vs Japan

Sub optimal:
Persia vs Turkey (for me it's still a reasonable difference in color, but i guess people with less-good vision would have a problem)
Columbia vs Venezuela


Hope that helps, besides that: nice overall look; makes the game seem more "serious" without all the bright colors.

[TremblingBlue]

What is the color of borders in closer zoom levels?

I fell in love with red borders and I'm not going back

They're the current green borders. I'm not totally sure what I'm going to do with them at the moment as I don't fully understand how to edit the borders properly. I guess I could take a look at Kaiserreich and maybe take the borders out from that. I was at some point going to try and experiment with a black border too...it's a work in progress, but seeing as everyone seems to like the red borders I'll likely go with that (plus, it's easier). We'll see how it looks.

Judging from the screenshots and a firing up the game once:
You might want to look at the following country color combinations, as they are very difficult to distinguish.

Really hard:
Yugoslavia vs Hungary
Hungary vs Austria
Austria vs Italy
China vs Japan

Sub optimal:
Persia vs Turkey (for me it's still a reasonable difference in color, but i guess people with less-good vision would have a problem)
Columbia vs Venezuela


Hope that helps, besides that: nice overall look; makes the game seem more "serious" without all the bright colors.

Have you checked the contrast/brightness settings on your monitor? I'm asking this because I've viewed this on several computers already and not had a problem so far. Because I tried to roughly keep the groups of colours (bright, normal, dark) the same shade there was always going to be a problem with this and that's why I spent quite a few hours on this trying to get it "perfect". The biggest problem I had was Bulgaria vs Romania and Manchukuo/India vs Mengjiang/Persia before a few slight edits.

I'll need to see if people are having the same problem. If they are, I'll definitely make changes.

[bestmajor]

they look good, thanks for sharing i'll definately use them. (like the understatement, btw - very noble )

[Burning]

Have you checked the contrast/brightness settings on your monitor? I'm asking this because I've viewed this on several computers already and not had a problem so far. Because I tried to roughly keep the groups of colours (bright, normal, dark) the same shade there was always going to be a problem with this and that's why I spent quite a few hours on this trying to get it "perfect". The biggest problem I had was Bulgaria vs Romania and Manchukuo/India vs Mengjiang/Persia before a few slight edits.

I'll need to see if people are having the same problem. If they are, I'll definitely make changes.

Well, i wouldn't say they are calibrated using a color-meter or one of these optimizers, but setting are supposed to make sense. The screens (I'm using two on my PC, one 27" and one 19" + my 14" dell-notebook) neither serve as light-bulbs in the dark, but they offer reasonable brightness to do programming for about 4-6 hours a day without making eyes hurt due to intensive brightness. On the other hand, it would be very difficult to read code over long periods of time, if brightness was too low, as you would read dark-grey/blue on light grey background that way.

Hope that helps, if not the sorry ;-)

It would be sufficient if you adjusted the following:

Make Hungary quite a bit darker, so the contrast to Austria and Yugoslavia is more severe
Make Italy a bit darker, so it does not blend against Austria (or Hungary, for possible later game reasons)
Make China or Japan a bit darker or lighter (they are the only two who have this issue in asia)

That should break the chain of color-neighboring, and result in an awesome map-coloring.

Keep up the good work,
me

[TremblingBlue]

New updated version now ready. New borders (tell me what you think), new colour for UserColor2 and a more diverse map on Kaiserreich.

Tell me what you think. And concerning the post above, tell me if you're having the same problem.

[TremblingBlue]

1.3 version now up. Added more diversity to the Kaiserreich map.

[Arcanjo Zero]

Sorry, but I need a little help.
I would do some tweaks in colors by myself, but I couldn't get the meanings of all the numbers, could you please explain me?

In:

Green;;;
red;green;blue;index
160;208;174;0
140;188;154;20
120;168;134;40
1;1;1;64

I realize the 3 first numbers of the 3 first lines are the RGB color code. But what's the "index"?
Also, what's the meaning of the last row?

Thank you.

[TremblingBlue]

Sorry, but I need a little help.
I would do some tweaks in colors by myself, but I couldn't get the meanings of all the numbers, could you please explain me?

In:

Green;;;
red;green;blue;index
160;208;174;0
140;188;154;20
120;168;134;40
1;1;1;64

I realize the 3 first numbers of the 3 first lines are the RGB color code. But what's the "index"?
Also, what's the meaning of the last row?

Thank you.

I think index is the rough "location" of the colour, I suppose. I didn't touch that, so I don't think it's very important at all. I think 0, 20, 40 means the locations from the centre to the border. Does that make sense? Imagine 0, 20, 40 as 1, 2, 3. I wouldn't mess with them too much.

The last row is the colour of the text. I made it 1,1,1 which makes it black. Easy to read and keeps it simple.


Are you thinking of making a colour scale mod yourself? Firstly, I would copy the values of the colours in game (enter in the second line of RGB code), paste them on a chart and edit them from there. It makes things so much easier, though it's still a very slow process (I still might even make changes to this one).

Remember the 3 lines of RGB codes go from light (not sure what this is used for), normal (default colour) to dark (border of the province/when the province is selected)...if you see the structure, I went in 20's - add 20 to make it light, subtract 20 to make it dark. Seems to work.

[Arcanjo Zero]

I see... thank you Trembling Blue!

[Limith]

From the images:
Dislike the UK red? It looks like an amalgamation of pink and orange. Pink would be okay, except it's very close in shade to the Soviets.
The Red Menace is a pink menace...I didn't know the Soviets were secretly taking over Latin America.
Way too many green-yellows in East Asia.

The Italian KR border is too close in color.

On another note, I'm glad DH's map colors aren't the same as the one the government uses.

[TremblingBlue]

From the images:
Dislike the UK red? It looks like an amalgamation of pink and orange. Pink would be okay, except it's very close in shade to the Soviets.
The Red Menace is a pink menace...I didn't know the Soviets were secretly taking over Latin America.
Way too many green-yellows in East Asia.

The Italian KR border is too close in color.

On another note, I'm glad DH's map colors aren't the same as the one the government uses.

I think the screenshots seem to give this impression or something...but the colours are a distinct enough to see the difference in game (I'm on my girlfriends laptop and they look the same as they ever did), especially when they're next to each other. If you look at the second screen shot you can clearly tell the difference between the UK and USSR. I chose a more orange pink (pastel shade) because South Africa is light pink also. It's a balancing act between the reds (and most other colours) because of the nature of this mod.

I didn't change the colour placement of the Italy's in KR, they are the same as before...but I've never had trouble with the two in game. I might consider changing Socialist Italy to the colour Xinjiang uses though.

The only change in Asia is the colour of the Guanxi Clique (same colour as Bulgaria, which now matches the name it is given, while the Turquoise is now a user colour), the colour placement is exactly the same as in the original except Communist China which is now Orange.


That CIA map is actually a pretty good layout. Most traditional maps only use around 4-6 colours, which seems to keep it so that no neighbouring nations share the same colour. This one doesn't seem to hold the same "politics" as the DH map though, which I've been toying with. One of the main reasons I changed the colour scales is to weaken the colours of Germany, USSR etc. to make them look a bit less "evil". In the process I weakened everything else too, to give a more traditional map feel.

[Limith]

That CIA map is actually a pretty good layout. Most traditional maps only use around 4-6 colours, which seems to keep it so that no neighbouring nations share the same colour. This one doesn't seem to hold the same "politics" as the DH map though, which I've been toying with. One of the main reasons I changed the colour scales is to weaken the colours of Germany, USSR etc. to make them look a bit less "evil". In the process I weakened everything else too, to give a more traditional map feel.

CIA map is horrendous for DH since countries expand and if there were only 4-6 colors, then well......