Re: [Rails-devel] Roadmap for improving User Experience

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:51 PM, John A. Tamplin <ja...@ja...> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:45 PM, Erik Vos <eri...@xs...> wrote:
>>
>> IMO, what is really important is that the SVG and the company name fields
>> use the same colours.
>
>
> That isn't necessarily the case even with physical games -- for example, I
> try and make sure the company colors are distinguishable from each other,
> but sometimes the logos don't have that color or are distinguished by shapes
> or whether the color is the foreground or background, for example.  Also,
> multicolor logos don't map well to a color to use for the company.
>
> --
> John A. Tamplin
>

I'll complicate this a bit further:  Color blindness.

Red-Green color blindness is relatively common in men. Other forms of
color blindness also exist, and make these sorts of decisions sort of
dicey.

There are a few people in my old gaming group that were color blind
and some games were more difficult for them to play because of this.

I think all markers should have the initials of the company along with
an associated color. If we can also make each token it's own shape or
use distinct combinations of foreground and background colors, so much
the better. However, 18xx games have a *ton* of information
(comparatively) and so there's a balance to be struck lest we
needlessly complicate things.

At a minimum, players should be able to match up the B&O token on the
stock market with the B&O tokens on the map and the B&O entry in the
game status window... very much like in a physical game. The easiest
way to do this is just to have the characters "B&O" everywhere the
company is referenced. If there's space in the UI to include the full
name *and* the abbreviation in some places, that's great. But, at a
minimum, we should maintain some amount of consistency by always
displaying the abbreviation and not rely on just coloring to convey
this information.

---Brett.