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Author Topic: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?  (Read 4778 times)

theli0ndwarf

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I've been playing for a couple weeks, and the dark blue in the interface is impossible to see or read. In order to play the game I have to squint or turn up the brightness on my monitor to ridiculous levels.

Anyone have a quick fix for this? I figure there is some configuration file or something that would facilitate it, but I don't know which one it would be.

Thanks!
Dan
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Untelligent

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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2011, 03:20:06 pm »

I didn't even know "rediculous levels" of brightness existed, I've never not had my brightness on maximum.


But anyway, yeah, go to data/init/colors and you can set the color values there. BLUE_R, BLUE_G, and BLUE_B are 0-255 RGB values for everything dark blue in the game.
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Dradym

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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2011, 03:36:26 pm »

also, its a hardware issue-get a new monitor, or eyes lolz, but yeah changing the rbg values would work
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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #4 on: March 31, 2011, 05:02:01 pm »

also, its a hardware issue-get a new monitor, or eyes lolz, but yeah changing the rbg values would work
Actually, I've played DF on several machines and monitors and occasionally struggled to pick out dark blue items on all of them. Then again, I not only have no trouble looking at microcline but actually go out of my way to quarry it to build stuff with, so maybe it's just my eyesight.
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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #5 on: March 31, 2011, 05:27:23 pm »

I have to agree.  Dark blue on black does not show up well at all for me.  My monitor is new and my eyesight is ageing but not that bad.  I suspect that the biggest difference might be room lighting.  If you spend all your time in a dark room with your monitor turned all the way up, microcline might blind you and dark blue might show up just fine.  I like to be able to see the outdoors, and either the morning or the afternoon sun can interfere with my seeing the computer screen depending on the weather or the time of year.  I also like to keep my monitor set on mid-level brightness and contrast, so as to have it last for as long as possible.  Most of the monitors I have owned in the past ten years were delivered with those levels set to 70%, which says something negative about the manufacturers.

This is what I use for the dark blue.  The entries are found in colors.txt under data\init.

[BLUE_R:64]
[BLUE_G:64]
[BLUE_B:192]
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Quietust

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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #6 on: March 31, 2011, 06:04:56 pm »

I use 0/0/170 for dark blue, along with the rest of the CGA color scheme.
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noob

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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2011, 07:48:38 pm »

tilt your screen forward
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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #8 on: March 31, 2011, 07:54:23 pm »

Human eyes are less sensitive to blue, are more sensitive to red, and are even more sensitive to green (out of those three primaries, anyway)... so when you have equal amounts of each, something like dark blue will look very, very dark.

But yeah, there are alternate color schemes up at that wiki link.
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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #9 on: March 31, 2011, 09:50:25 pm »

I set dark blue to 32, 80, 208, and light blue to 64, 127, 258. 

And yes, just compare 255, 0, 0 red and 0, 255, 0 green to 0, 0, 255 blue, and green and red are obviously much easier to see over a black background.  You pretty much have to set blue twice as high an intensity as red or green to make it as apparent.
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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #10 on: April 01, 2011, 07:41:03 am »

tilt your screen forward

If you're using a low-quality LCD flatpanel (i.e. twisted nematic) then that can certainly help, but if you've got an IPS flatpanel (or even a CRT) then tilting the screen won't make any bit of difference.
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Kamamura

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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #11 on: April 01, 2011, 07:47:44 am »

The quality of the panel has little to do with that. It's a well known fact that human eye cannot focus well on contrasts that differ only in the blue component of the light - therefore, dark blue on black, or yellow on white will be always unreadable, no matter the quality of the screen.

The solution is to use a shade of blue that has other components besides blue - instead of using ( 0, 0, 255 ), use ( 40, 40, 255 ) which is still a darker blue, but much more readable on black
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theli0ndwarf

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Re: Dark blue is ridiculously hard to see, anyone have a workaround?
« Reply #12 on: April 04, 2011, 01:21:22 pm »

I set dark blue to 32, 80, 208, and light blue to 64, 127, 258. 

And yes, just compare 255, 0, 0 red and 0, 255, 0 green to 0, 0, 255 blue, and green and red are obviously much easier to see over a black background.  You pretty much have to set blue twice as high an intensity as red or green to make it as apparent.

These colors are perfect. Just changed to them and they look great (and don't interfere with anything else). One thing I changed though is light blue 258->255 (I don't think 258 is in the RGB color spectrum ;)).
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