I have seen muds with all of these. Builders will often make multicolored objects and mobs if they have this power. Players will make their names colorful and blinky to attract attention. Should the coder let the players set the color, or restrict it to only the builders, or perhaps preprogram colors into the game and let nobody edit them?

As long as the colors don't hamper my playing I'm all for color of any kind.

as long as there are rules controling the use of color, im all for it, i just dont like to see peeps running around with a rainbow sword of death and then does the care bear stare....*shiver*

Tastefully done colors are great. If there is no color i might as well bust out an old monochrome monitor. Too much color might make me dizzy. The trick is to have a nice balance. If that can be done, color can really add a nice dimension to the game.

i like color, however the majority of the text (room descriptions, actions and whatnot) i prefer to be colorless.

Muds with all white text really hurts my eyes.

Well, on Seasons of Almadyn we use a term object with variable messages. We allow players to customize colors hp message types of commands, channels, and guild stuff. We have messages types like hp_bar, gossip_channels, mage_channels, say, tell, whisper, shout, help, short_desc, long_desc etc. We don't allow builders to hardcode any ansi into the mud because we feel that it becomes tacky. Colouring words in code like 'red' or 'green' becomes blinding and may vary directly with the client's own colour terminal so we let mortals and builders configure the term object to their liking. There are preset colors, but the term object allows you to overwrite them. Thanks to Leto for that term object and Mojo@SoA for rewriting it to fit our code base. We run on LPC.
~ Grey@SoA

We have the preset colors which seem to be adequate for the mud that I code for allowing a range of colors which can be bolded which provides more colors.  

I have to agree with some of the previous posts though, too much color gives me a headache.  A long while back I visited a mud that looked promising in description, but unfortunately everything was in bright blue, with some bright green and bright red thrown in, and I had a migraine and refused to read the screen within 5 minutes.

I do like color, but every single thing does not need to be a color.  I think color should be used to make things stand out, like titles, and that players should be allowed to use color on certain things, like decoration of their eq, titles, and their maincolor preferences.

I'd probably agree with Mason's post above : you need a balance.

I've played on worlds that had no color : no problem.
I've played on worlds that had too much color : eye strain!

But if you have a balance - having words that are accented in the room descriptions, certain "flaming" objects that are bright red, it all helps with the entire "experience" of playing on that mud. When you see something in bright colors, it draws your attention to it - it makes it more important, dangerous, or what have you.

I like the idea of having the builders be able to code the colors they want, but the players be able to choose their color level.

On our mud, we have a few different levels : no color, partial color, complete color. That way, the players can decide what they want.

Some mud clients don't support full ANSI color either, so you dont' want to have color viewing a requirement either!

Hoop

So we seem to mostly agree that color is good in moderation. Of course, the line of that moderation is still up for debate.

When builders make zones, nine times out of ten they will include colors for the objects, make room descriptions painfully colorful and such, make rainbow swords as somebody mentioned, and make multicolored mobs. Not only that, but the array of color used by telnet can be rather horrifying (thank IBM). Walking through a zone like this can cause severe headaches, cramps, and internal hemmoraging.

Players, if they recieve color, go out on a tangent. They love to make their open chats flashy and colorful. They like to post on boards where they will get attention. They can find many ways to abuse color.

Is it good to let builders and players mess with the color set of the mud? Colors take a large part in the presentation of the mud. Some may view letting builders and players mess with colors as letting builders mess with the presentation. Others may say that color is something of an expression issue, where colors help convey a message, even if it is casually abused.

The bottom line here, is that color is used more often then not as a way to outline what the color-er thinks is important. Its a grab for attention at the least. My opinion is that whatever the person has to say remains of the same level of importance whether or not there are blinding colors to accomodate for it. The great dont make cheap grabs for attention.

I use colors to relay alot of information quickly, and to help differentiate between different areas on the map.

For example, a map will have color-coded terrain and temperature.  Any players or objects appear as a red background on the map, so that the player can still see what type of terrain that player or object resides on.  Whatever object you currently control appears as a blue background on the map.

So this creates maps that are quite color intensive, if the terrain is non-homogenous and there is alot going on.  But it's almost necessary to convey all of the information without writing my own graphical client.

I tend to think of text as the same way.  If there is an important piece of information (such as a keyword), I like to have it highlighted so that it stands out to players.  Consequently, I dislike "hunt the keyword" puzzles that some muds employ.  But all of this depends on what kind of game you're trying to run.

As for giving players the ability to choose colors, that's both a good and a bad idea.  Within reason, colors can augment a conversation by highlighting and giving a certain tone to certain words.  But 99% of the world will just use it to make flashy annoying messages where the content is lost in the noise.  Perhaps it would be useful to limit player input to one or two color-codes per command, as more is rarely needed.

It's best to have several preset color schemes that players can choose.

Failing that, one really good color scheme should do.

Try not to have more than one color per line unless you're highlighting a word, and that I'd only recommend in motd's, announcements, help pages, and extremely emphasized text.

Keep the scheme consistent and pleasing to the eye.

Don't overdo it. Less is more.

I have no problem with muds having color, and don't really care what sort of scheme they use. However, there must be an option to turn off colors (even better is if you can select what you want to see in terms of color) for me to even bother playing.

i dont see how people woulnd not want colors..... colors are fun.. and make it easy to read after spending like 8+ hours in a mud

I'd personally rather have preset color. As a builder, I don't believe I've ever made things differently-colored, simply out of my preferences. The area should speak for itself.

As a player, I only use color in one place if possible, and that's in setting my prompt. That's more out of a habit, though, as the first MUD I played had a nice-looking prompt, very easy to read.

I personally like the smaug default colors...and dont intend to change these. But in something like ROM...more color is GOOD! COde bases like rom lack in color..which is a downfall for me.. I want to see some color in a mud I play...staring at a black and white screen is annoing ya know?

I like the idea of colors, but they have to be somewhat uniform and make sense in regards to the area/object/mob they are being used with. And DEFINITELY, as it seems everyone agrees, too much color is a headache and a bad thing. We, being a relatively newer MUD, have alot of younger, newer builders. Everyone does a pretty good job, but when first learning to build, tends to make rooms/objects/mobs with huge alternating colors of every rainbow! Fortuneately our head builder has to approve everything that goes in, and an editting team helps out as well to guide people in what is expected. I don't mind a description in a room (ie forest) being all green with one or two words highlighted, but when everything in the room is colored specially, that can get annoying.

Players can also, in some respects, choose their colors for their titles, descriptions etc. but I find that most will tend to go with what they see around them, if not crazy then they won'ts be crazy, and the few that are, well they are quickly discouraged by those of us playing who complain of headaches. hehe.

im 15 i dont get headaches i like lots O color!

I dunno, but to me color isn't that big of a deal. I played a really cool CircleMUD for like a year without color, and had no problem. Then I went and played an SWR and said "Wow, look at that color!"

Obviously some people abused it, but it was well regulated, and most of the time the color was applicable to the theme or coding.

Once I went back to the no-color CircleMUD I was at first shocked (Cause all the text and stuff looked so alike and dull), but then quickly got used to it and forgot about color. Mind tricks I tell you!

Personally, I dislike server-side color, but I find client-side coloring of names and messaging I find important very useful. The builder's idea of what is important to be eye-catching may be different than mine, and I'd hate to have so much color that the bright red person-I-should-be-running-from hue blends in with the background. But as long as you let me turn it all off, I don't care how much color you're using.

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I would... *evil grin*
No seriously, we have restricted colors mostly to what is pre-set in the code, meaning we use different standard colors on room names, exits, room descs, mobs and object long descs, plus that we allow certain words to be highlighted.

I once wanted to change the room desc colour from green to blue in all 'water' rooms, but one of my co-imps flatly refused and he might be right, too much colour soon becomes an eyesore. And if you left the decision to the builders, you'd end up with a mud looking like a christmas tree, becuase most of them would do just about anything to attract attention (you just have to look at their titles to realise that).

However, we actually do have some red rooms, and the colour there actually IS meant to torment the players. There is a number of Glowing Lava rooms, and those don't only hurt your eyes, they drain you of hp with each tick, so if you stay too long you die.

And there is another red room, the boudoir of a lovesick Nymph, who incessantly spams you with vows of her undying love. That room is a sort of quest - the quest is how to get out of the room and AWAY from the irritating female, muhaha.

Otherwise, what I like most with colours is that you can use them to create 'illusions'. You can make mobs that look exactly like objects and vice versa. And above all, you can make objects totally invisible in a room by using a single { as long desc.

That's what I mostly use colours for. Little quirks like that, not rainbow coloured objects.

While I don't allow colored objects (except for restrings or EXTREMELY special cases), our rooms actually ARE coded to all be different colors. While it's a little scary and overwhelming at first, you VERY quickly become accustomed to it - forests are green, water is blue, roads are gray, cities are white - and it definitely gives you more of a feel for where you are, and helps sometimes give a little more insight to where the player is, even when they're not taking the time to (or don't have time to) read the room descriptions.

Personally, I like to use colour to separate pieces of information. For example, I might have the available exits one colour, and the description another, the objects another and the mobs yet another. Prompts are a special case - I like making them multicoloured because they help me see the information I want at-a-glance.

What I don't like (really, I detest it) is highlighting colour words in their colour. For example, "The <span style='color:green'>green</span> hilted sword". I already know what green looks like! It gets very garish if applied consistently, too.

Kas.

On a tangent note:

Too much colour in the wrong place can actually lag the mud down, or even crash the Port. The place to be especially wary of is the mob short desc, because that is used in the fight code.

I know this from own hard experience.

We once put in a Goblin invasion as a temporary Quest, and the Builder thought it a 'cool' idea to colour the different Goblins after rank/(level). Since it was not a permanent zone, I foolishly let it slip by the control.
There were tons of goblins, and they all assisted, so the first time a player got into a serious skirmish, the Port went down. The code couldn't handle the colour spam.

I also have an example, where an excessively rainbow-coloured object kept crashing the Build Port at each zone reset, because the reset line exceeded the max number of characters allowed.

So this is not merely an aesthetic question.

Colour shouldn't cause lag or crashes unless there's something broken within your code - from a conceptual point of view, it really is a purely aesthetic question.

Personally I rarely use colour, although I find it's very nice for displaying maps. I also like to highlight "tell" messages, as it makes them stand out (unless you've got lots of other colour). The other place I like it is within prompts, with the colour representing a percentage of remaining health/mana/etc. But in general I prefer a very small amount of colour, so that what little there is really jumps out at you and draws attention to itself.

One of the main reasons we keep ourselves deliberately low-color is that it allows you to use color to say "This event is important or unusual." If you overcolor, it's hard to make things truly stand out.

Our philosophy colored comm channels to separate them, standard low key colors for info preset and the occasional rare color for something that should infer surprise or some other emotion. When situations occur, it's typically in a certain color comm channel and I've learned to ignore other colors when concentrating on an issue. I think that's a valuable feature.

Rainbow muds are personally distasteful me and I would prefer running them as ANSI off and color off. Most have the ability through clients to change any color display on their screen if they wish, so imposing our artistic talent or lack of isn't really a large concern.

Iluvatar

Currently, in my mud, people can include colors in their tell, say, and other such commands using the colorcodes of circlemud, &R for red &B for blue and such. so...

say &RRed text hurts my &Wwhite eyes

would turn up as

hmm...cant figure out how to do colored text....but you get the idea.

I wanted to ban this, and have the &X strings be literal, and not translated into color. However, my other half implementor was dead-set against this, saying that he loves color, and he finds it as a form of self expression.

I have also seen builders transform our normally yellow room descriptions into a myriad of blinding color, simply unfair to the eye, but my other half wont allow me to block that either, stating (very rightly) that it can allways be taken out when the zone is reviewed. Again, he says this is a form of self expression.

Does this strike anybody else as self expression? Can you not express yourself without annoying colors? As a counter argument, I see the colors that I program my mud to be as a form of my own self expression, which I dont want the players to be messing with. After all, anything that a player sees on my mud reflects on the aesthetic feeling of the mud, which I work hard to generate with my preset colors. Should I allow players to mess with my carfully set scheme, or is that an impedement to their self expression? (do we even need self expression on muds...? but thats a different topic.) Some answers would be cool of all you lovely people.

For most of your post you would have my support immediately. We don't allow coders to use colors. Certain types of messages are classed and players are free to choose the color those message appear in (if any).

Yikes, this part I won't support you on. I guess it depends on what the whole reason behind colors is for you. We implemented colors for one, and only one, reason: "Improve the interface". We don't use it because we think that blinking red on a high intensity green looks cool and is part of how we feel a player should see it. If the player however feels that it makes his playing easier and more clear to set those colors for all his combat messages he is free to do so.

Regards and good luck with your struggle,
Eddy

I have nothing against colour in general, to be honest. It's the too-bright colours that give you headaches and make you half blind I don't like. Of course the way too dark colours aren't any fun either.

I don't want to have to squint at my screen in order to figure out what the heck this person is saying/wearing/whatever.

Channel titles are ok...asides from the aformentioned way-too-bright colours and way-too-dark colours. And using a bit of colour here and there in your description or pose is ok if you're trying to accent something that you're doing or wearing.

After all, 'Kairin sends, ~Hello~' is nice. But if you redo it so that it says, 'Kairin sends, <span style='color:green'>~Hello~</span>', the message itself gets across more clearly since your attention is drawn to the colour.

And something like that is ok. But a multi-coloured pose for no reason other then the fact that the person wants to show off their skills/has some deep-seated urge to make the entire MU** blind is /not/ ok. Personally I don't use colour all that much though--I just don't see the point in using it more then sparingly.

The MUD I used to play on hardly had any colors at all, which was not necessarily a bad thing.

The MUD I'm currently creating, I believe we will have a bit of color displayed through a few colors, but very minimal. And with a certain amount of points gained through roleplay the immortals will be able to restring color into items for players.

I think too much color is too confusing and I usually don't bother playing MUDs with such.

Places to use color as a builder:
* Room names - I tend to make mountain rooms a dark yellow/brown.  Fields green.  Forests green.  I never color the full room description.  Many players, after having been through an area once, won't read the description again, so why draw attention to it each time.
* Very specific, special objects: one color, with a damn good reason
* Emotes by objects or mobs:  Sometimes when you have a series of emotes that can result from actions, it is useful to have the emotes colored light and dark gray, so that it doesn't get too repetative.  Example, I have a boulder in one area that you have to push about 20ish times (it's random) to get it out of the way of the path.  There are a variety of messages, from scraping sounds to revealing the beginnings of a path.  The messages are two different colors for the sake of keeping it from being endless screen spam.

Channel colors: I actually hate seeing bright colors in global channels, even channel names.  But that is due to my personal dislike of global channels inturrupting my in room stuff too much.

Player set stuff:  Let players set their choices through their clients, let them highlight the names of characters or words they want distinguished JUST FOR THEMSELVES.  I would say never ever let a player set the color of their name and if it can be coded, limit the who list titles to dark colors and no more than one or two colors.  In IC notes on the boards though, I am all in favor of color.  In part because as a player in the past, I have used one color to indicate the actions of how the post would be visible to a particular person and a second to distinguish the message itself.  Not necessary, but it adds a nice touch.  Maybe limit the colors to a certain number or only dark ones there too though.

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<span style='color:purple'>A young girl arrives with a small parchment in hand and blushing slightly begs your attention.  Excuse me, Sir Blahblah, but this is a message for you.  After waiting a moment in hopes of a tip, she rushes off.</span>

<span style='color:gray'>"Sir Blahblah,
  Lalalalalala.  Color is useful and it makes for a charming little note to you.  Lovely to bother you again and I hope our next killing spree goes equally well! Blessings of whatever dark god we love and sacrifice innocent victims to.
Miss Sapphar"</span>

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There are places for color everywhere.  Just don't overdue it, try to keep to the darker colors, and let players turn it off selectively.

Sapphar
(yes, I hate bright colors, in case I didn't state that enough times in enough ways *grin*)

Generally one color per line, and in special cases (word highlighting) two colors per line.

Use colors to separate the room title from the room description, and the characters, and objects from the room description.

Also use colors to highlight important messages.

Anything beyond this becomes "too much".

Colors helps make the MUD more interesting and more fun to play. Highlighting some keywords with Teal, or making the word rainbow a rainbow. Sometimes it seems appropiate to make a whole room just one or two colors. I think it should be the builder's choice. The person behind the building is the one with the ideas, who makes the describtions, and should control what their areas look like (except for what implementors want, but you get my drift).

Color in MUDs is obviously a personal thing, each person will want something different. A system used on our MUD that seems to work quite well is to allow the players to choose the colors they see messages in themselves, this covers tells, chats, wartalk, clantalk, says etc. This way they can have things as bland or as gaudy as they like, the same goes for title descriptions, this is one of the few ways a player can visually add their own style to their character for everyone else to see.

Room descriptions are a single color unless to highlight a particular word, room titles are a different color to desc. At the moment, the default color for our room descriptions is bright yellow, after having several players asking for sunglasses so the could read they screen, we are considering changing the default color to something a little more subtle. As builders, we have also dabbled with using room description colors to fit in with the type of area, e.g. green for forest, dark cyan for ocean, dark yellow for desert. This seems to have been reasonably well recieved by the players.

One stipulation regarding color on our MUD... under no circumstances is flashing text to be used.

The mud I play on has a pretty good color scheme. Not abusive to the eyes and easy to tell what's going on at a glance.

For example when you look at someone, the health of all their limbs is represented in different colors depending on how damaged each part is. Concentration uses basically the same color scheme. Aura is represented in the colors it's supposed to be (except for octarine which just shows up kinda grayish. Bleah.) Room names are gray, descs are white, and exits are cyan or red, depending on whether there's a closed door or something there. Hexes (i.e. wilderness map) are colored according to what type of terrain they are, with prominent structures annotated. Valuable stones and metals in jewelry are colored, as are fireworks (which never get used unless it's a holiday or some creator got really really bored). You can buy colored who descs (1 color only) but they're expensive enough that people don't do it unless it's absolutely imperative to them that they show up as <span style='color:red'>a psychopathic killer</span>. Mobs and people and most objects aren't colored. The only really annoying color in the game is what happens when you're high on spotted mushrooms, and it was done that way to prove a point. You can't use color when you talk, although various methods of communication are colored separately to distinguish them from all the battle or spell spam.

As for color being a method of expression...if you can't express yourself through your words rather than <span style='color:blue'>a</span> <span style='color:cyan'>whole</span> <span style='color:yellow'>lot</span> <span style='color:green'>of</span> <span style='color:purple'>colors</span>, there's something wrong.

The moral of the story: make it tasteful, or the player will just turn off colors, or use his client to set them.

I'm split on color actually..
My last mud was full of it, builders could do what they wanted, as could players.. it became a mess... the newbie channel alternated colors, etc.. mess

I think the next mud i'm working on, will have less colors, and more customizeation.. Let players change them if they want.

I think color is really only good for letting people know what they are looking at without really needing to read fully..

I liked having channels different colors.. this way i could easily tell which channel was used without using adjectivies (not as effective this time around though, channels won't be setup the same)..

Or if being attacked.. a color to indicate being hit or something...

but thats about it.. limited colors that seperate information or help to quickly identify things..

Personally, I view colour from a strictly utilitarian standpoint. I want colour not to enhance, but to separate different pieces of information. If I want to know the exits out of the room, I glance for the red bit. If I want to know the objects or mobs, I look for green or cyan respectively. Since most muds tend to lay things out well, it doesn't (to me, at least) look too garish. Prompts, however, do tend to be a little rainbowed, but that's because the same rule applies. I want hitpoints, I look for red. Mana, I look for blue.

What I absolutely cannot stand is:

a <span style='color:green'>green</span> hilted dagger

I already know what colour green is, there's no need to tell me!

Kas.

On one of the MUDs I play on, players are allowed to add colour into speech, GMs are allowed to add colours to peoples titles, etc. I think it's good if you do have tasteful colour usage. It can really help get over someone's character better if they can have colour in their titles say (like red for a Fire Wizard).

I do think that people should have the option of supressing colours if they want to though.

I don't really agree with muliticoloured words though. It may just be me, but it seems abit silly when this is done.