Oops, missed the questions on this page.
Has instant game over conditions been brought back?
Heck no. Does anyone actually miss them?
Any idea when DF will start using colors beyond the 16 its stuck with for now? I mean, you gave wood colors in the new release which will help with variety, but in RL most wood is some shade of brown and there is only one shade of brown in the game, currently available anyway.
It'll happen when "item display gets decoupled from the font tiles":
Will the next version display proper material colors for all items? In last year's raws preview, mineral raws still had a DISPLAY_COLOR tag, but that seems seriously obsolete. I did find a dev log reference (several weeks before the preview) to "color/symbol stuff for items/buildings made from materials," so I'm not sure what the deal is.
I don't get "proper" here. Do you mean RGB colors? The stuff being fed through the grid system rather than the creature tile system is still heavily constrained. I don't expect that to be handled until item display gets decoupled from the font tiles. If you mean using the 16 color approximation to the RGB material color, then it should use that for items. Minerals can still be weird because when they are a wall, you can't rely on the material's color, as background colors come up.
That might be in the nearish future, since a) Toady will be working on
the top 10 ESV items soon after the release, b) "Full graphics support" is in the top 10, and c) tile/font separation would be the obvious first step for that item. But as usual, there's no concrete timeline.
Meanwhile, in the colors article in the wiki, there are 91 various colors possible accross the rainbow which dyes are suppoused to use, but they default to the 16 available. We seem to be getting to the point where more color variety would be good.
Also, the wiki says that it has to be written in hexadecimal or something in the raws, which may hint at much more than 91 bieng possible.
If you mean the
color tokens, then yeah, they're in the raws and you can define more of them. The next version has a lot of new colors, I think.