Transport Tycoon Forums

Wondering if the mini-map industry view would be more legible with a grey colour for landmass? Or a more 'night vision' purple?

looks nice!
where'd you get the other industries?

It is, but you should take into account a new feature introduced a few revisions ago:
This means that it would need to replace more than a single color.

I find the default quite legible, especially with the ability to hide and show specific industries in OTTD (if you're looking for a particular industry, 'blinking' it works quite well).

I forgot to add: having color blindness, I will support anything that helps me distinguish brown industries against the omnipresent green background. I'm going to fiddle with _map_height_bits to see what I can get

First try, without thinking much about the colours. I just picked up some bluish tones and sorted them by blue tone and, if equal, sorted them by the other two colours.

It is maybe not very pretty from an esthetically point of view, but even as a non-color blind I have to say that it is easier to see the industries with your colors than the default colors. I think that you could add a button next to the height-button to toggle between the default land colors and your mode whatever you like to call it. I think your work is welcome to make the program more accessible.

I would say a full greyscale heightmap would be the most easy to read... sadly I'm not on my own computer so cant do a mockup...

My preference is the first of andy's mock-ups, the gray one, to give you my two cents

I have been testing greyscale heightmaps, as I also think they would be nicer to read (I'll post a screenshot later). Sadly, they turn the steel mill completely invisible. There are not enough greys under or over the steel mill colour to get the required 16 levels.

This is how a grayscale heightmap looks. I messed up with the highest colour (see the circled part of the heightmap).

In contour mode, you have grey rail-tracks. Wouldn't these disappear at some point?
(my example staircase heightmap may be helpful for testing, as it contains all 16 levels of height, yet is quite small.)

As for the blue variant, does the ECS industries work here? I seem to remember that the ECS coal mine is also dark blue.


In general: I think whatever you pick other than the current colours, something is going to give a conflict. Also, different people may need or want different colours for a good view of the information.
To me, that sounds like customizing the colours is the only viable direction.

A better gray heightmap:
I think I'll follow Alberth suggestion, implementing a configuration option to let the user decide between different land colours (green, gray, etc).

Another solution would be to have a black frame around the industries (just like the mouse on the screen).

cmoiromain wrote:Another solution would be to have a black frame around the industries (just like the mouse on the screen).

This option has two problems. The first one is that the smallmap draw code works with tiles and not with pixels. A border with a width of a tile looks ugly and does not work with industries smaller than 3x3 tiles as they would be only border. A border with a width of a pixel would require a complete rewrite of the smallmap code. The second problem is that it would cause problems when / if zoom out for the smallmap is implemented.

I have coded a patch that implements a few different colours for the heightmap, check it here: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=46601

andythenorth wrote:Wondering if the mini-map industry view would be more legible with a grey colour for landmass?

i think the first 2 non height map are very nice, the colors are in better contrast with the industrys which is more easier on the eye
but at the moment the height map looks way better.