Factorio Forums

Could you make the Colorselection for trains in hsv / hsl instead of rgb? It is much more intuitive when i want to select my favourite pink hue for my coletrain, because at the moment I have to look up the rbg values all the time. Just a small change, that would make life so much easier

Unfortunately I disagree. To me RGB is far more intuitive than HSV/HSL as I know the values of the colours I want to have.

That's not intuitive; That's time you've spent memorizing RGB values. HSV maps pretty much directly (the names could be better, IMO) to how people speak about color in their day-to-day lives, or an art class:
- Hue: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple
- Saturation: is it more grey/black-and-white, or is it more pure / colorful?
- Value: How light or dark is it?

Alternative suggestion: Offer HSV alongside, not instead of, RGB.

HSV/HSL is more intuitive. Select the colour, select the saturation, select the brightness.

Though, I'm used to working with whatever it is red alert 2 used.
Select the Hue (0-255) Select the Blackness (0 would be colour, 255 would be black), then select the Whiteness (0 would be colour with blackness applied, 255 would be white). This differs from HSV/HSL because the Saturation slides between colour and grey, not colour and black. And I actually find this more intuitive than either of them.

HSL is also not universal, I've seen Hue scales of 240, 256 and 360 before, with similarly deferring scales for Lightness.

I mean, yeah, RGB is workable, and intuitive if you're basically just saying you want Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, but then becomes slightly less intuitive when you want say, purple (Hue 200 on the dot on the 256 scale, what is that in RBG?) And orange is probably full red and half green (or about 20-25 on the hue scale)

Actually I don´t care about saturation, black- and white values. The only thing I would like is a slider on an hue scale of a hsv colorgradient like this:

AileTheAlien wrote:That's not intuitive; That's time you've spent memorizing RGB values. HSV maps pretty much directly (the names could be better, IMO) to how people speak about color in their day-to-day lives, or an art class:
- Hue: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple
- Saturation: is it more grey/black-and-white, or is it more pure / colorful?
- Value: How light or dark is it?

Neither is "intuitive" based on your art-class methodology, we don't talk about saturations or hue or value as there is no "intuitive" way to get colour into a spoken language. Colours are physics & biology. I'm not sure about how people look at a colour and think "it should have a higher value" or "it should have a higher luminosity", instead I look at a colour and think I want it to be "more red", or "more blue" and RGB is perfect for that. There is nothing extra that you have to memorise because you have been taught the rainbow since preschool and you are taught that black is the absence of colour while white is all the colours. Is the issue more that you need to know your x^2 tables? How about just normalising the RGB values into percentages? I would agree that that is more intuitive.

tl;dr
People have been mixing colours since they were kids. They know what you get when you mix two colours together (namely red, green or blue).

BenSeidel wrote:People have been mixing colours since they were kids. They know what you get when you mix two colours together

The problem here, is that RGB is an additive color system, whereas paint, crayons, etc are a subtractive color system. So the type of color-mixing RGB is doing is by definition not what children do with their paint, and requires extra learning (or playing around), with some colored light-bulbs, or a color-picker on a computer.

It should be a slider for the wavelenght of the photons.

We'd need some kind of slider to affect the amount of photons too. And extra sliders for every wavelength of photons...no wait, that would be fifty sliders... Let's use a bell-curve to describe the photons. So, three sliders, for average wavelength of the curve, spread-of-bell-curve (I forget what this one's called), and number of photons (area under bell-curve). Yes, that will work!

Arch666Angel wrote:It should be a slider for the wavelenght of the photons.

Ignoring the logarithmic and totally wonky curves... that's effectively just the Hue slider, as displayed earlier, except it would be cut off at about 270 ish, before Magenta, because the 300+ area is basically completing the cycle back to red, 2 wavelengths mixed together (blue and red). Although the whole chart is made of 2 wavelengths mixed together on our screens, everything from 0 to about 270 can actually be made with a single wavelength. (We do actually see low UV as purple, but the screen doesn't make that frequency of light, because we acknowledge the same colour if we mix a bit of red in instead)

TL;DR

Let the player use the HSV colour space to pick colours for locomotives, train stops, etc. rather than (or in addition to) the current RGB colour picker.

What ?

Currently you can specify a colour for locomotives, train stops, etc. using an RGB colour picker. My suggestion is to change this to HSV to make colours easier to find.

Wikipedia on the RGB colour space
Wikipedia on the HSV colour space (also the related HSL)

Whether it's HSV or HSL doesn't make much difference; both are IMO a better choice for a UI.

Why ?

RGB is the usual way that computer monitors, TVs etc. represent colour. For this reason it's trivial to implement an RGB colour picker. It also matches the way human vision works physically.

Unfortunately it doesn't really match how we perceive colour. We don't think of brown as having blue in it, or orange having green in it (unless perhaps you're a painter), but they do. If you have a particular colour in mind, finding it with RGB can be pretty hard. If you don't have a strong undestanding of how RGB intensities relate to perceived colours (most people don't, certainly i don't), it's a lot of guesswork.

With HSV, you think of a colour, pick a hue that looks similar, and tweak the saturation (whether it is strongly coloured or washed out, approaching white) and value (whether it is strongly coloured or muddy, approaching black).

Yes, HSL or HSV (I've personally written a RGB-HSV-RGB converter in the past for Red alert 2 colour code specification... for some reason you had to define what your side's colour was in HSV) is definitely more intuitive for a slider system than RGB.

I would suggest a color wheel instead of (just) sliders.

the colour wheel often only effects hue, so you'd still have a slider or 2 under it rather than 3 sliders.

+1 for hue-focused color picker

If making things simpler is the goal, I'd vote for some provided colors in addition to user-configured colors, whether the system changes or not. If that's adding a color wheel or a color palette, great! Getting into the semantics of HSV shows that it's obviously not the intuitive solution.

Changing from one system of color precision which isn't readily easy to grasp (can you tell me the RGB color codes for the forum background and navigation bar?) to another system which also isn't readily easy to grasp (same example, but tell me the HSV values) won't improve simplicity in a meaningful manner. It seems more like an "I most often use this system in my own graphic design" suggestion, heh.

Having some provided basic colors that are popularly used, such as colors generally matching ores, some colors that are commonly used throughout the game, and/or just a simple point-and-click color selector (like a box with 50 colors) would be great. Having the ability to save colors you commonly use would make things faster for both vanilla and mod players, whether you memorize color codes or not.

Although I'm personally comfortable with RGB in hex or decimal format, I too would prefer something simpler for quick color selection because nothing about color selection in graphic design feels intuitive to me, and HSV doesn't seem like the appropriate solution for needing simplicity. Something always seemed different about Factorio's coloring system as well, and I gave up with RGB color codes long, long ago. But, changing from one precision color system to another doesn't seem like the route to take for end-user ease of use.

bobingabout wrote:the colour wheel often only effects hue, so you'd still have a slider or 2 under it rather than 3 sliders.

The examples I know have the hue around the circle and saturation going radial. So the wheel is white in the middle and rainbow on the outside. That takes care of 2 values of HSV. Then you have a extra slider for brightness. Having black (brightness radially) in the middle is an option too.

Jon8RFC wrote:If making things simpler is the goal, I'd vote for some provided colors in addition to user-configured colors, whether the system changes or not. If that's adding a color wheel or a color palette, great! Getting into the semantics of HSV shows that it's obviously not the intuitive solution.

Changing from one system of color precision which isn't readily easy to grasp (can you tell me the RGB color codes for the forum background and navigation bar?) to another system which also isn't readily easy to grasp (same example, but tell me the HSV values) won't improve simplicity in a meaningful manner. It seems more like an "I most often use this system in my own graphic design" suggestion, heh.

Having some provided basic colors that are popularly used, such as colors generally matching ores, some colors that are commonly used throughout the game, and/or just a simple point-and-click color selector (like a box with 50 colors) would be great. Having the ability to save colors you commonly use would make things faster for both vanilla and mod players, whether you memorize color codes or not.

Personally, as a colour picker, HSV is the most intuitive to use over RGB and HSL.
It's been a while since I've played Terraria(I don't think I've done much since a month after the 1.3 launch), but I believe they changed their colour sliders from RGB to HSL/HSV, and while it did make it harder to pick a colour from a sprite sheet, does make it more intuitive for picking a colour from just playing around.

mrvn wrote:

bobingabout wrote:the colour wheel often only effects hue, so you'd still have a slider or 2 under it rather than 3 sliders.

The examples I know have the hue around the circle and saturation going radial. So the wheel is white in the middle and rainbow on the outside. That takes care of 2 values of HSV. Then you have a extra slider for brightness. Having black (brightness radially) in the middle is an option too.

I did say a slider or two, not specifically 2 extra sliders, to acknowledge that the wheel CAN have a second value.
And the one I was thinking actually has Saturation as the second value (HSL rather than HSV) so the middle is grey, then the other slider goes from black at the far left, to white at the far right, with pure colour dead centre.

However, I am more a fan of HSV, where the two additional sliders change from pure white to pure colour, and pure black to pure colour.
The whole HSL thing where the 3rd slider goes white -> colour -> black, having 3 steps rather than 2, is less intuitive for me.

HSV sounds good to me.
Another option would be the system that is used in GIMP, where hue is on the slider and brightness and saturation are in a square.