Official forums for BZFlag.org

Hey all, small (?) request, can you please allow people to choose the color displayed for various teams in the options menu? I'm more than a bit red/green color blind so teammates tend to get shot (or I get shot while I try to figure out if that's a red tank or a green tank.)

one of the reasons I tend to suck in online multiplayer games, apparently there are no color blind testers/designers out there

Thanks muchly, seems like a cool game if you can easily tell who is on which team

There are several BZDB variables which may help you:

roguecolor
redcolor
greencolor
bluecolor
purplecolor
rogueradar
redradar
greenradar
blueradar
purpleradar

These can be set in your config.cfg file, ex:
set redcolor "1 0 0"

The 3 numbers are RGB value (red, green, blue)

You can also edit the some textures in your data folder to change
their colors to better suit you.

edit: added missing quotation marks

sweet thanks! that would definitely work for my needs. One question though, if I edit the config.cfg file in ~/.bzf/2.0/ then launch bzflag -config config.cfg (and connect to a 2 team server that's using red and green) it seems to be ignoring the line:

set redcolor 0 0 1

as the red tanks are still mostly red and not in fact blue. I've also tried

set redcolor 255 255 255 but the tanks aren't black (or white)


is there something else I need to do for the simple fix (before mucking with the textures) or is the config.cfg only used if I host a game?

Edit:
Quotation marks are needed.
So
set redcolor "0 0 1"
would be blue.

And
set redcolor "1 1 1"
would be white.

re config not being read:
Ah ha, forgot to mention, when I run bzflag without the -config config.cfg variable on my system it also replaces any changes I've made in config.cfg. But if I run via the command bzflag -config config.cfg it doesn't change the config file, so I assumed it was using the file...

re: "'s great, I'll play with it in the am :0

newbie191 wrote:Ah ha, forgot to mention, when I run bzflag without the -config config.cfg variable on my system it also replaces any changes I've made in config.cfg.

It IS correct to not use "-config config.cfg". But in your case it deleted your changes as they were syntactical incorrect. You need to add quotation marks, like that (to get blue color):

set redcolor "0 0 1"

Ok, ran without the -config .... line, and it replaced my config.cfg with the default one, removing all of the below lines:

#The 3 numbers are RGB value (red, green, blue)
set redcolor "0 0 1"


the "#the 3... : should be remmed and as such not read by the program therefor not removed right?

anyways not only did it remove the line `set redcolor "0 0 1"`but during the game, the red tanks were not in fact blue. (this is with the ubuntu package fwiw)

The value stays in the configuration file for me. It might move it around though (I think it sorts alphabetically). However, it only seemed to make the team flag color change, not the radar icons for the tanks.

newbie191 wrote:the "#the 3... : should be remmed and as such not read by the program therefor not removed right?

First, my english translators doesn't know the term "remmed" or "remm" . But true, I didn't expect, too, that Bz removes comment-lines.

newbie191 wrote:anyways not only did it remove the line `set redcolor "0 0 1"`but during the game, the red tanks were not in fact blue. (this is with the ubuntu package fwiw)

When you add this line somewhere in the config.cfg and start Bz, then after closing Bz, it automatically sorts and put away 'set redcolor "0 0 1" alphabetical, like "Blast" mentioned!
In my config.cfg the 'set redcolor"-line is about in the middle of the file. It should be listed in your config.cfg, too, right?

Edit:

However, it only seemed to make the team flag color change, not the radar icons for the tanks.

Didn't check the color of the flag and radar icons. However it changed the color of the red tanks into blue, like expected.

I found another setting you can change in addition to redcolor.

set redradar "0 0 1"

Then the only other thing you would have to change is the tank textures.

Now I know why it seemed to just work on my system, and not on yours systems, as I had textures deactivated.

@newbie191:
Alternatively to blast's proposal you could deactivate textures, if you don't care about visualisation quality:
Options => Display settings => Texturing => Off
Then the "set color" command should work on your system, too.

Hmm, sorry if I am missing something obvious..

I have trouble differentiating rogue from green team tank dots on the radar. So how could I get a darker green? Or do I just need to make rogue black (is that possible)...
set greenradar "?"

Firstly the values for each color (red, green, blue) goes from 0 to 1.

Setting green radar icon: set greenradar "0 x 0" (x is the value for green color, like trepan mentioned)
So set greenradar "0 1 0" would be the original green radar-tank-icon.
The more close the second number is to 0, all the more dark the green color gets, so for example set greenradar "0 0.7 0" would be a little bit darker green than the original color.

Yep, you can change the rogue-radar color to whatever color you want.
set rogueradar "0 0 0" would transform rogue into black.

z[h]ero wrote: Firstly the values for each color (red, green, blue) goes from 0 to 1.

Ohh, thanks that's what I didn't understand. I was trying things like "0 127 0", guess I got confused from "set redcolor 255 255 255".

Thanks z[h]ero

If I don't post again it's working fine...

I imagine you can also use names of colors. There is a list of colors on the wiki that you could try.

http://my.bzflag.org/w/Color(BZW)

also ya'll can edit the textures themselves. go to "c:\program files\bzflag2.0.10\data\..." (default location in WinXP)
instead of 2.0.10, it might be 2.0.12 BZFlag version (depending on what you got)
open a texture in MSPaint (simplest) or any other immage aditor, and start editing!
as you might have guessed, that would only change color of tanks on HUD, and not on the radar

blast wrote:I imagine you can also use names of colors. There is a list of colors on the wiki that you could try.

Out of curiosity: Is BZFlag colour managed?

Red is not equal to red in different colour spaces (e.g. SRGB versus AdobeRGB) and as consequence the colours may not look like their name would imply. For example a sRGB picture of a human with normal white skin looks like the human had a sunburn in an unmanaged application in displays featuring wide gamut.

ts wrote:Out of curiosity: Is BZFlag colour managed?

It's a game, not a publishing app...

joevano wrote:It's a game, not a publishing app...

A browser is also no publishing app and good browsers have colour management. Picture viewers are also no publishing applications. Most non TN panel displays I heard of offer wide gamut.

BZFlag partly needs managed colours (e.g. sky, textures) and I'm considering to buy a wide gamut display - that's why I asked.

that is left up to the OS in our case.

Bumping an old thread because i've had a few people with this issue lately.

Personally, I think editing the tank camouflage textures is an excellent option. Adding some white or another color to the tank textures will do a lot to make tanks more visible, but will not help with seeing team flags on radar.

It's important to note that the location of the config.cfg file may have changed since 2009. I can tell you that on an apple computer, in the finder you hold the option key while clicking the "GO" menu, which shows the "Library" folder. I'm no help on other OS's.