I'm looking for some artist folks to take a crack at a new color scheme for the map analyzer.
What's the problem? A few new things are coming in the next release that require some nice color schemes.
1. Openness levels
The openness levels are probably one of the most helpful outputs of the map analyzer besides the distance measurements. It shows, graphically, how "open" a point of the map is. In the next official release of the map analyzer I'm going to add another level of gradient to this output so a human can more easily detect the differences in openness.
This image shows the current official release 1.4.3 on the left, and what the next release will show on the right. The color scheme on the right NEEDS SOME LOVE!
2. Influence Heat Map
This is a new feature for the next release. What it shows you, for any given point on the map, is which starting location exerts more influence over that point. Right now I'm doing it as a bunch of gradients to a middle color, then the same gradients reversed to the other base. There is a visual balance to that so users can tell where the influence differences are. For instance, in Scrap Station you can see that the influence over the watchtower is even, but the green band of influence of the 12 o'clock base extends past the cliff between its natural and its third base. I think this tells you 12 can (slightly) better protect its third base, but balance discussions aside, the influence heat map needs a nice color scheme!
So how can you help?
Download this unofficial release of the map analyzer. It has already been set up to analyze Blistering Sands and Scrap Station (included in the download) so just unzip it, double-click the sc2mapanalyzer.exe file and it will produce images in the output folder.
Cool, now how do you play around with the colors? Open the text file "colors.txt" and see I've written instructions on defining colors, and given some descriptions of the colors.
For this community experiment I've moved the relevant colors to the top of the file.
Colors opennessLow, Mid1, Mid2, High are the endpoints of gradients for the openness levels. Low is the color of a cell next to a boundary, and High is the color of a cell in a wide open space.
Influence colors have two parts. "influence1" and "influence2" are the color of text related to Start Location 1 and Start Location 2 that are being compared by the analyzer (right now they are set to blue and yellow). Then there are "influenceMid1, 2, ... 7" which are the endpoints of the gradients in the influence heat map. You'll notice color 1 equals color 7, 2=6, and 3=5 because the gradients are reflected, color 4 is the color that shows areas of equal influence on the map. In the initial color scheme for Scrap Station shown, the color4 for equal influence is red.
Colors terrainEvel0, 1, ... are the colors of the cliff levels. The terrain is rendered in the background of all other output images. I chose black for chasms and greys for playable elevations, so colored information will show up nicely. I think a talented graphic artist will know how to adjust these to better blend with the colored information of different output images.
Once you've fiddled with the colors, double-click sc2mapanalyzer.exe again and it will generate the images with new colors.
That's it! If you have questions or cool color schemes to show, please post back. I suppose we can do a community vote about which scheme to use for the official release, but nothing is stopping us from including a bunch of color schemes to choose from.
I'm looking for some artist folks to take a crack at a new color scheme for the map analyzer.
What's the problem? A few new things are coming in the next release that require some nice color schemes.
1. Openness levels
The openness levels are probably one of the most helpful outputs of the map analyzer besides the distance measurements. It shows, graphically, how "open" a point of the map is. In the next official release of the map analyzer I'm going to add another level of gradient to this output so a human can more easily detect the differences in openness.
This image shows the current official release 1.4.3 on the left, and what the next release will show on the right. The color scheme on the right NEEDS SOME LOVE!
2. Influence Heat Map
This is a new feature for the next release. What it shows you, for any given point on the map, is which starting location exerts more influence over that point. Right now I'm doing it as a bunch of gradients to a middle color, then the same gradients reversed to the other base. There is a visual balance to that so users can tell where the influence differences are. For instance, in Scrap Station you can see that the influence over the watchtower is even, but the green band of influence of the 12 o'clock base extends past the cliff between its natural and its third base. I think this tells you 12 can (slightly) better protect its third base, but balance discussions aside, the influence heat map needs a nice color scheme!
So how can you help?
Download this unofficial release of the map analyzer. It has already been set up to analyze Blistering Sands and Scrap Station (included in the download) so just unzip it, double-click the sc2mapanalyzer.exe file and it will produce images in the output folder.
Cool, now how do you play around with the colors? Open the text file "colors.txt" and see I've written instructions on defining colors, and given some descriptions of the colors.
For this community experiment I've moved the relevant colors to the top of the file.
Once you've fiddled with the colors, double-click sc2mapanalyzer.exe again and it will generate the images with new colors.
That's it! If you have questions or cool color schemes to show, please post back. I suppose we can do a community vote about which scheme to use for the official release, but nothing is stopping us from including a bunch of color schemes to choose from.