Well, I wasted a fair bit of time compiling this, so I thought I'd post it just in case someone out there finds it useful.

First there was this, which is a modified version of something I first posted here:

The "Color" field of përs resources works as described in the Bible: it's RRGGBB, just like HTML colors. Clearly, however, there is something wacky with the gövt "ShipColor" field, which is supposed to work the same way.

In response to this, Matt Burch has written (in here) that this is a "fixed" issue, which hopefully means that when EVN 1.0.8 comes out, we'll see that ship color modifiers work the same way for both pers and govt resources.

Unfortunately for me, by the time mcb announced his plans I was already hooked by the puzzle of the gövt "ShipColor" field. I had already tried out several theories in an effort to find a way to match a colored pers ship to its own (govt-colored) fighters. Stupidly, I kept going, even after learning that this would all be irrelevant once 1.0.8 came out....

Here, we see that converting "6666FF" to base 10 didn't give me a govt ship color matching the appearance of 6666FF on a pers or in the color picker as accessed from NovaTools:

Here, we can see that there is a relationship between govt ship color and the RRGGBB code, at least in an extreme corner of the color space -- but we still don't have a match to the look of a pers ship with the same color code:

I also tried both inverting the color and using the "Nova Paint" utility program to convert colors to the system used for paint outfits. Neither of these produced matches to pers colors, either. Some of the govt-color ships below are the results of those experiments. Others resulted from other lines of thought.... I can explain more fully if anyone wants to hear it.

Quite a collection of overly-pigmented space vessels! Well, maybe there is something here that some plug developer can stand to look at while waiting to see what govt colors look like under EVN 1.0.8.

Or you can temporarily "tag" a govt so its ships stand out while you are doing play-testing. Brother, will they ever stand out....

That's it! It's out of my system!

(Edit: modified URLs to see if it would help with intermittedly broken links.)
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(This message has been edited by Dr. Trowel (edited 01-21-2004).)

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 06 July 2006 - 11:56 AM

it might just be me, but I'm getting broken images.

Matrix

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Quote

Originally posted by what_is_the_matrix:
**it might just be me, but I'm getting broken images.

Matrix

**

Hmm. I've just reloaded the page several times, and the images came up every time save once. I just made a change to the URLs that shouldn't matter, so far as I know....

Since I can't test from outside my home network, could someone else out there please chime in to say whether or not they see the images. It's rows of Fed Carriers that look like a lunatic has dipped them in various day-glo paints.... Which is about right....

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Yep I see a bunch of very ugly carriers...

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Hmmm, the only pattern I see is that dimmer intensities of the same colors produce brighter ship colors, such as 0x0000FF vs. 0x000031 and 0xEEEEEE vs. 0x111111. Other than that, the colors seem really bizarre.

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Hrm.. Kind of a stupid question, but did you ever try putting the hex color values directly into the Templates? Perhaps the Novatools editor has an overflow error, and is reading/writing the wrong color... Doubtful.

~ SpacePirate

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Quote

Originally posted by SpacePirate:
**Hrm.. Kind of a stupid question, but did you ever try putting the hex color values directly into the Templates? Perhaps the Novatools editor has an overflow error, and is reading/writing the wrong color... Doubtful.

~ SpacePirate

**

I gave it a shot, but no. I can switch back and forth between plain templates and NovaTools without anything squirrelly happening to the codes.

However, NovaTools does hide the first two digits in the code. As you can see in the 2nd of the graphics above, what the templates show as $00000000 is shown as #000000 in NovaTools. If I remember right, I've already checked to make sure that those first two 00s have no effect on the color that is shown.

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Interesting point: Does the system work with additive colouring or subtractive? I mean does it, to make a ship more blue, remove the red and green channels to a degree, OR does it add more blue to make blue?

Anyone field this one? I'd say additive.

~A~

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"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

Whatever happens, it is not the painting behavior we would expect, even coming from another color (someone naively suggested ships were painted with another color than the one indicated). It seems some wierd modifications that are not what we can legitimately expect. Could you try to do $000001, $000100, $010000 and $010101, just to check?

Reminds me that I once played EV on a computer whose blue (I don't know if it was the fault of the computer, the screen or the link between the two) was broken, therefore making white appear as yellow usually... and in EV making proton shots invisible!

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Quote

Originally posted by Azdara:
**Interesting point: Does the system work with additive colouring or subtractive? I mean does it, to make a ship more blue, remove the red and green channels to a degree, OR does it add more blue to make blue?

Anyone field this one? I'd say additive.

~A~

**

Well, I think the system is supposed to be subtractive, because I once made a white paint and it didn't change the ship at all. However, these images seem like additive. Funky additive. Reminds me of my brother's first EV ships. He'd tint them blue and then give them to another government...

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Quote

Originally posted by Azdara:
**Interesting point: Does the system work with additive colouring or subtractive? I mean does it, to make a ship more blue, remove the red and green channels to a degree, OR does it add more blue to make blue?

Anyone field this one? I'd say additive.

~A~

**

Dark (shadowed) areas are lighter in govt-colored ships than in the unmodified sprites in every variant I've tried. I'd say that probably means the color isn't subtractive.

In colored pers ships, however, shadows stay dark -- see my first and third images. If I remember rightly the results of AAC's PaintStationPrime plug, outfits can make ships darker than the base sprite. I suspect the same is true for pers-es, but haven't tested that.

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Interests: The Good, The Bad, and The Loopy.

It's hard to tell what color mixing is being used. The most common type of color mixing is called modulation, and it's basically multiplying the red, green and blue values, except they have to be scaled between 0 and 1. So, to mix color 1 = RGB(r1, g1, b1) and color 2 = (r2, b2, g2) where all components are between 0 and 1, the result is RGB(r1r2, g1g2, b1b2). If the components are between 0 and 255 (as they normally are), then the result is RGB(r1r2/255, g1g2/255, b1b2/255). So, any color modulated with white is unchanged, any color modulated with black becomes black, any color modulated with red has its green and blue components go to zero and its red component is unchanged, and so on. Thus, color modulation is subtractive in a sense.

(Edit)300th post(/Edit)

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(This message has been edited by Aprosenf (edited 01-22-2004).)

Quote

Originally posted by Zacha Pedro:
**Whatever happens, it is not the painting behavior we would expect, even coming from another color (someone naively suggested ships were painted with another color than the one indicated). It seems some wierd modifications that are not what we can legitimately expect. Could you try to do $000001, $000100, $010000 and $010101, just to check?

**

OK, I tried 'em. $000001, $000100, $010000 and $010101 turn out blue, green, red, and grey/white, as expected, with each ship bright enough to almost but not quite completely obscure all details of the sprite. Not that different from 000031 and 111111 in my gallery, in other words.

Aprosenf, you are way beyond me -- thanks for the background lesson, though!

(Edit: at least from where I sit, my images continue to occasionally fail to load. I would have thought that a company as large as Comcast could handle something as simple as reliable web hosting for its cable modem subscribers. If you can't see 'em, just try reloading the page. "We apologize for the inconvenience." -- D. Adams)

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(This message has been edited by Dr. Trowel (edited 01-23-2004).)

The colouring scheme is indeed subtractive. That's why you can't (well, usually) get colours brighter than the ship itself. White paint makes no change to the ship (same thing). Trust me, it's subtractive.

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Quote

Originally posted by Aprosenf:
**It's hard to tell what color mixing is being used. The most common type of color mixing is called modulation, and it's basically multiplying the red, green and blue values, except they have to be scaled between 0 and 1. So, to mix color 1 = RGB(r1, g1, b1) and color 2 = (r2, b2, g2) where all components are between 0 and 1, the result is RGB(r1r2, g1g2, b1b2). If the components are between 0 and 255 (as they normally are), then the result is RGB(r1r2/255, g1g2/255, b1b2/255). So, any color modulated with white is unchanged, any color modulated with black becomes black, any color modulated with red has its green and blue components go to zero and its red component is unchanged, and so on. Thus, color modulation is subtractive in a sense.

(Edit)300th post(/Edit)

**

So it's called modulation... I called this for myself filtering, as it's exactly like if you see the ship through a color2 translucent plastic. It's the method that makes the most sense.

We can see from 6666FF, AAAAFF, and some other that it's definitely not linear. I think the reddity of 012703 and 019008 comes from the simple 01 of red while if you put 00 of red, like in 00FF00, no red.

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Quote

Originally posted by Dr. Trowel:
**If I remember rightly the results of AAC's PaintStationPrime plug, outfits can make ships darker than the base sprite.

**

They can indeed make ships darker. The black colored paint makes any ship nearly black (its more of a really dark brown though). When painting a Rebel Destroyer black, it became nearly invisible when compared to the background of empty space.
From appearances alone, it would seem that it is additive. I do not see how you cloud have an all pink ship by subtraction, instead all colors would tend towards the pink scale. But when adding, you could max out values and cause everything to be almost equally pink.

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Additive, subtactive, modulated... these terms may not really capture the complexity of the math as it currently exists in the EVN engine, or the lunacy of the results.

Since Zacha Pedro theorized that there was a big difference between 00 and 01 in the RR (red) portion of the code, I did some exploration of the color-space neighborhood around 019008. Here are the hair-raising results:

Q: Really?
A: 'Fraid so. I checked 009008 three times because I didn't believe it myself. It looks untinted to me, yet what should be its color neighbors seem to be all over the place tint-wise.

Everybody understood me when I wrote that Matt Burch's next update to EVN will change all this, right? If you're all puzzling through this just for the fun of the puzzle itself, that's OK -- I just don't want anyone thinking that figuring out how this field is currently calculated would actually provide any long-lasting benefits to the plug-making community.... <IMG SRC="http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/webboard/smile.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="15">

(Of course, we don't know that 1.0.8 will be released soon. )

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This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 06 July 2006 - 12:02 PM

Quote

Originally posted by Dr. Trowel:
(Of course, we don't know that 1.0.8 will be released soon. )

Well, there's always the possibility of a 1.0.7.1...

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Quote

Originally posted by orcaloverbri9:
**Well, there's always the possibility of a 1.0.7.1...:)

**

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