Activity Bar Colors

Be nice if we could choose colors... the green doesn't stand out very well...

I'm out of room in the world file. In the next version when I expand it, then I can do extra colours.

Unfortunately changing the world file stops it being backwards compatible.

I am planning to move the world file to XML to avoid that problem in the future. :)

I agree. The new green color, and the new font are well.. Horrible;) I loved them the way they were:) Making them settable would be verry cool:)

Oops. I thought the new font was nicer.

Anyway, can you clarify in what way the colour is no good? Is it too light, too dark, too something else?

If you have a preferred colour can you send the RGB code for it (the colour picker will show that) - Ctrl+Alt+P.

The main problem is in the contrast. When I glance at the activity bar, I want to be able to know which worlds I need to turn my attention to easily.

The most obvious color, of the ones used now, is red. It stands out sharply against the background, and draws the eye. It's easy for me to see a red number and realize that I've got new activity without thinking.

Unfortunately, the red is being used by disconnected worlds, which almost always don't need me to look at them. The green that's being used now is very subtle and is barely different from the transparent for an unopened world.

So even if you couldn't make the colors customizable, swapping the green to be disconnected worlds and the red to be worlds with new activity would make a huge improvement.

I'd have to agree that red would be better for new activity, although I am not sure what would work best for the disconnected ones. Maybe an X instead of or across that world's number? Or a greying out of the number?

I would also like to see these as being changable. While it would be nice to have this in the individual world file as others have suggested, it would be a possible compromise to set this setting (for no new activity/connecting/new activity -- allow us to set them all) as a global preference. I initially went looking for the setting in the Output section of the Appearance settings.

As for color, for the default color I'd like to see "deep sky blue" -- yeah, I like blue! This is RGB 0/191/255, or HTML #00BFFF. Leave the default for connecting at some shade of red.

I do like the new font; leave that alone (or let the user select the font? That would be another global preference.) Don't change the "greying out" -- no Xes or anything like that. That would look garish.

You are right, of course. The button bar is a global thing not a per-world thing.

However making the colours customisable is not particularly easy because they are pre-done bitmaps, which means I have to draw them in advance.

However, I have changed the colour scheme in 3.13, hopefully pleasing everyone.

Now we have:

World open but no new activity: black (as before)
New activity: red (nice and easy to see)
World closed: dark green
World not active: grey

It is obvious that different people have very different tastes... I assume the majority of you have used MC for a reasonable amount of time.

I came over from the darkside (Zmud) when I started to work in with Nick with the development of MXP, being a Zmud user I was used to seeing a bright green on new data, a red for disconnect and a yellow for connection in progress. I suggested using a range of colours for different situations to Nick and that is why you are all complaining now ;p

I think we all agree that customizing the colours/fonts/images is a highly desired feature and is the way things will go, just a matter of time till a clean implementation of this is achieved.

- Kal :)

Maybe this is a silly idea, but perhaps this should go into the global preferences, instead of world preferences? That, at least, would solve problems with backwards compatibility and suchlike. It'd work better as a global change anyway, since there's nothing in that bar that actually indicates which world it is... and a world can change numbers in the course of a session by other worlds being closed, so it could be very difficult to keep track if they were all different...

I agree with this, in fact I agreed three messages back, but maybe I was being a bit obscure. :)

Clearly the button colour cannot be specific to a world, because the buttons are relevant to all worlds. Thus I withdraw my earlier comments that there "isn't room in the world file".