[Divunal-devel] Color

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

In the future, discussions like this should be hosted on the 'reality'
list... we should try to open up our TR devel process a bit.  My next
message is going out tonight to that list (if you're not on it, visit
http://www.twistedmatrix.com/mailman/listinfo/reality)

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, James Knight wrote:

[some colored stuff]

> This is generally how it is used in 'inferior' M*s and I have to say
> that it really does help to keep players from having their eyes glaze
> over at a screenfull of text.

I think this is a bad idea.  I believe it would lend a campy air to
Divunal, and I wouldn't want anything to be colored.

> But anyhow, I'm gonna implement it, (along with basic styles) in the
> server and java client, so hopefully someone will find an approved use
> for it. :)

*sigh* OK -- I'm not going to refuse an optional feature, so... If you're
going to implement it, at least implement it correctly.

1) Allowing people to assign actual colors to text is a STUPENDOUSLY bad
idea.  Such code I *will* refuse (woohoo, a fork in TR already ^_^),
because the author of the 'hears' statement won't necessarily know what
'theme' the text will be displayed on.  There is no way that the final
design of such haphazard coloration will result in anything remotely
tasteful.  The colors must signify something.  Each theme needs to be
expanded to provide a color for each possible significance that someone
might want to use.  Examples of significance might be "Server Message",
"Global Message", "Speech", "Local message", "Important Event",
"Environmental Change", "Unimportant Event"  etc.

2) Separation of color should be done atomically by "hears" statement, not
as HTML-esque tags in the text being sent.  hears() should take an
optional 'color' argument which specifies the color that a certain string
should be.  If we don't do this, we'll end up with ransom-note syndrome
(SOMEBODY will make an area where every letter is a different color).

Hopefully you're not too far along yet into something incompatible with
this :-)

--glyph