[0.18] Need suggestions/feedback for a WIP reskin mod...

[kirazy]

I am making yet another Bob's mod reskin:

Preview


Going to have particles/remnants that are also colored and match.

Now, the issue:
1. There seem to be two schools of thought on what the tiers should mean.
2. Not everything fits nicely into the tier system

My PLAN is to support both schools of thought, which I understand to be:
1. The tiers should correspond to technology level/ingredients.
2. The tiers should correlate to the name of the item (e.g. Mk 1 = Yellow, even if the Mk 1 has items that match a great many Mk 3 items).

Route 2 is easy and straightforward. Route 1 is messy as shit:

• The three Reactors are "tiered" but my plan for those is to just color them related to their fuel icons.
• Metal Mixing and Chemical furnaces merge into a multi-mode furnace, do we color these (red/yellow/blue) in accordance with Furnace/Chemical/Metal-Mixing, or tiers, or a mixture so primarily the role color and then tier highlights?
• Medium/Big electric poles have 4 variants, do we start with Tier 2?
• Pumps have 4 variants, do we start with Tier 2?
• Steam turbines have 3 variants, and ingredients seem to suggest we start at Tier 3
• Oil burning generators have 3 variants, tiers 2-4, but are ingredients to Oil burning boilers (tiers 2-5) that have 4 variants, 3 of which use them as ingredients? Treat this the same as other entities that use previous-tier items as ingredients?
• Oil burning heat sources have no ingredient overlap with the belts, but seem to want to be Tiers 2-5?
• Storage tanks seem to start at tier 2
• Artillery seem to be tier 2 (steel/iron) but have electronic circuit boards, and the other two match to tier 4-5. Where should the first artillery fall?
• Roboports lend themselves to tiers 2-5

I am using the belts as a basis for ingredient-determined tiers, since they're the most explicit and unique:

• Tier 1: Iron plates, iron gears, Basic circuit boards
• Tier 2: Bronze/Steel plates, Steel gears, Basic electronic boards
• Tier 3: Aluminium plates, Cobalt steel gears, Electrionic circuit boards
• Tier 4: Titanium plates, Titanium gears, Electronic logic boards
• Tier 5: Nitinol plates, Nitinol gears, Electronic processing boards

Unrelated to the tiering issue, there is an additional unresolved problem surrounding accumulators. There are four types, 3 tiers, and they all look the same within tiers. My plan for High capacity/Fast/Slow accumulators was to put decals on the batteries to differentiate them visually, and on the icons. Any other thoughts?

[bobingabout]

Boilers are a fairly easy example, Oil boiler 1 requires boiler 2 to be made, so starts at tier 2, likewise the heat exchanger 1 requires tier 3 to be made, so starts at 3.

here is my full list of what materials should be considered at what tier:
T1 is anything that doesn't require research to be made.
Iron, Copper, Stone blocks, Tin, Lead and Glass.
T2 is anything that requires only red science, or a T1 material to make (or doesn't apear in start area)
Steel, Nickel, Silver and Bronze.
T3 is anything that requires Green science
Plastic, Zinc, Brass and Gunmetal, Aluminium, Gold, Silicon, Invar, and Cobalt/Cobalt steel
T4 is anything that requires Blue science
Titanium, Tungsten, and Ceramic(Silicon Nitride)
T5 is anything that requires Alien science or science pack 4, or just T4 materials as a component.
Nitinol, Tungsten Carbide and Copper Tungsten Alloy.

Note, this is old, instead of science pack 4, we now have logistic/production science to be considered, then there's also utility science that can be a science pack 5.
also note that this is the material tier, science tier can be different for unlocking machines, for some examples Tier 1 requires automation science to unlock, where tier 5 requires automation, transport, chemical, logistic/production and utility.

assembling machines break the mould a little by having 6 tiers outside of burner/steam phase, the first one being grey. Grey/black/white is often considered to be burner/steam phase, a decent example of this is inserters.


Looking down your list...
Reactors: technically start at tier 3, as they're designed to power the Heat Exchanger and Steam Turbine which both start at tier 3.
I would suggest you read the "Nuclear overhaul" ("bobmods-revamp-nuclear") from revamp, make them tier 3, 4 and 5 colours if it is turned off, make them green, yellowish orange and blue/pink if the overhaul is turned on, to match the fuel. You'll have to read the "Deuterium is blue!" ("bobmods-plates-bluedeuterium") option from bobplates to get the deuterium colour too.
Medium poles in theory start at T2, as the small wooden pole is the T1 version of a medium pole.
Furnaces They do start as Yellow for standard, Red for chemical, and Blue for mixing... I think the electric versions of this did follow the pattern, except I swapped blue and yellow because the original looked kinda blue. then multipurpose was purple and green for tiers 4 and 5, suggesting that electric is T3, however, steel and electric are basically the same tier, so... just do what feels right to you. Personally, have a mix of yellow/red/blue for normal/chemical/mixing, then when you turn electric add the tier colour to it too, and maybe have red and blue on multipurpose?
Pumps probably should start at T2
Steam power related stuff I already covered. Oil burning boilers start at 2, Steam turbines and heat exchangers start at 3.
Oil burning generators... I think start at T2, with Hydrazine burning generator being T5. Hydrazine generator probably wants some blue colouring in it because it specifically burns Hydrazine.
Heat sources in theory should line up with reactors, as they use the heat pipes as ingredients, and we've already put them in a slot with the reactors and heat exchangers.
Storage tanks start at 2. there is actually a small storage tank now too, which would be tier 1.
Artillery I'm not too sure, but if it has 3 tiers, I'm inclined to say tiers 3 to 5... but then trains are weird too, The base game one would suggest T2, but then the MK2 clearly uses T4 materials.

Accumulators it has been a while since I looked into them, but If I remember correctly, ingredients would suggest they're T2 to T4. I was never good with graphics, but the high capacity version was supposed to look like a "Double Decca" version, twice as tall, where fast is just more optimised and slow having a flow limit on it so guarantee (unless you're using mods that change daylength) that a full charge will last the whole night, meaning you can't burn your whole power supply in extreme conditions of a broken power setup.
Anyway, Some sort of visual difference between the 3 types, and colour for the tiers does make sense to me. For slow, you could add some sort of additional circuit or box to it that contains the flow regulator.

[kirazy]

This is very helpful feedback, much appreciated. Especially the bit surrounding reactors... I would not have thought to check for the Deuterium color setting.

As an aside, I have two different thoughts for how to color the solar panel sprites and am soliciting feedback on what I have so far:


I personally like the first one, but am leaning towards making the tint of the solar cells themselves less intense, so only a slight tint from default, e.g.:

[bobingabout]

This is very helpful feedback, much appreciated. Especially the bit surrounding reactors... I would not have thought to check for the Deuterium color setting.

As an aside, I have two different thoughts for how to color the solar panel sprites and am soliciting feedback on what I have so far:


I personally like the first one, but am leaning towards making the tint of the solar cells themselves less intense, so only a slight tint from default, e.g.:

I thought I only had 3 tiers of solar.
I actually like the middle ones, with the extra band of colour in the panel spacings. but if we're looking at the top and bottom only, the bottom ones do look better to me. Perhaps combine them both?

[kirazy]

There are only three tiers, but since the solars are either tier 1-3 or tier 2-4, needs graphics for both.

[bobingabout]

There are only three tiers, but since the solars are either tier 1-3 or tier 2-4, needs graphics for both.

makes sense, and looks good.
I'd probably say they should be T2 to 4, but I'd need to look at the tech tree and the ingredients again.

[kirazy]

makes sense, and looks good.
I'd probably say they should be T2 to 4, but I'd need to look at the tech tree and the ingredients again.

I agree they should map to T2-4, but I want to support both ingredient-mapped and the typical way reskin mods have mapped stuff to tiers.

It's also two clicks to make a different color, so, nbd.

[kirazy]

Took some doing; six unique assembling machines with unique animations.

[bobingabout]

Took some doing; six unique assembling machines with unique animations.

Impressive.

[kirazy]

First pass on electric pole entities:


I think the substation and big pole are fine, medium seems a bit much. Would like feedback from people with opinions.

[bobingabout]

Looks good to me.

[kirazy]

Feedback on nuclear reactors please: https://imgur.com/a/c4KEWLQ.

For uranium/thorium I averaged the fuel colors from the two valid fuel types.

Heat pipes

[kirazy]

Thoughts? Goal is to support the ability to have player colors while indicating tiers.

[bobingabout]

Thoughts? Goal is to support the ability to have player colors while indicating tiers.

doing both in code is possible, and I would have done this, except for not having the art skills to make 2 different masks.
so I approve.

[kirazy]

A or B?

A:


B:

[Deadlock989]

Thoughts? Goal is to support the ability to have player colors while indicating tiers.

My experience of making turrets and vehicles that have a force colour mask but are also non-grey (copper/bronze mostly) was that it looks horrific for about 75% of the colour wheel. I actually spent an hour yesterday re-rendering a turret so that it uses a dark grey "tin" colour because it was so ugly as copper most of the time.

A turret with green tier markings would be hard to distinguish for a player who has coloured themselves green, and be incredibly garish if they coloured themselves purple. How will they know if it's a purple force with green turrets or a green force with purple turrets?

[kirazy]

Hmm.



All the default colors, plus white, plus the 5 colors I use in photoshop to tint everything in the first place. Looking at that my instinct is to strip out the gun barrel tinting and just tint the planetary gear.

Edit: And done:

[bobingabout]

Hmm.

All the default colors, plus white, plus the 5 colors I use in photoshop to tint everything in the first place. Looking at that my instinct is to strip out the gun barrel tinting and just tint the planetary gear.

Edit: And done:

I actually liked the barrel tint, more so than the tint on the base. Perhaps because the tint on the base is in contact with the main tinted area, it feels to me like it's colour clashing.

[kirazy]

I actually liked the barrel tint, more so than the tint on the base. Perhaps because the tint on the base is in contact with the main tinted area, it feels to me like it's colour clashing.

You make an interesting point:

[kirazy]

I think I'm going to go with this:


It's readable when zoomed all the way out (the gun barrels were not), and sufficiently removed from the color mask to not interfere in a negative way: