I think we should discuss implementation for membrane colouration, considering that we have it in the game but have no UI for it or a design for it to be customizable by the player.
What Does Changing Your Membrane’s Colouration Do?
To begin with, should the colouration of the membrane affect gameplay and survival?
If yes, I think it should be limited by MP. If no, I think it should be free to edit.
How Do You Change the Colouration?
The idea I have is that you have a colour wheel with all the available colours displayed, and in the editor you can choose which colour your cell’s membrane is from the wheel. If we limit changes by MP, we can make each incremental change cost a certain amount of MP.
It would be nice if any artists with ideas on how to fit this (or their own idea for it) into a concept image could create one.
What Colours Can You Change to?
There are two graphics we have that help with this:
(I can’t find ~scio’s big colour wheel, if anyone could find it that would be a big help).
The colour wheel should only have these specified colours.
What is the advantage of limiting the number of colours the player can choose? We could let them enter an RGB value and then have whatever colour they like.
It was something ~scio posted about earlier saying it was the only colours found in the microbial world. I’m not too knowledgeable on the subject so I can’t confirm.
But surely we can sacrifice the realism of membrane color in favor of creativity. After all, how many people are actually going to care if the colors of the membranes are scientifically possible? And of those, how many are going to find that a deal breaker? I understand that this game is supposed to be scientifically accurate, but this seems a little insignificant, and allowing more creative freedom is a great way to improve gameplay.
The colour wheel actually has a lot of options. I found it by the way, it’s one of the last posts on this thread (it’s not actually a wheel, it’s more of a hexagon). There is some explanation for the art style of the stage.
The goal is not realism as much as it is atmosphere (which I guess is realism), making sure certain colours (like bright yellows and purples and pinks) are absent so it looks more like a microbial world. Tritium’s concept video gives a good look at this style.
As I replied to someone on the fan forum, it would be really annoying from a programming perspective to limit the number of colors the player can choose from. The membrane material I created accepts an RGB value to color the membrane, and unless we want to create a large lookup table with all the possible colors, I don’t see how exactly we can say, you can use these RGB values, but not these ones. One thing that we can do is limit the player to ranges of colors. So we can force a blue tint, or prevent the membrane from being black.
Yeah that sounds good. We’d need some GUI element that allows you to pick the colour and the brightness/darkness of the colour. I’d assume transparency would be applied unequivocally to any colour you pick.
Limiting the player to a set of colours seems needlessly forceful in my opinion. AI microbes, on the other hand, could have a problematically higher chance of getting one of the colours from the colour wheel/hexagon than others, although this might be too much of an unnecessary strain on programmers.
I think the wheel is mostly useful as a guide for the non-microbe parts of the environment - backgrounds, ambient lighting, bacteria, free-floating particulates, etc.
