Distinctive HUDs - custom colors with clear friend or foe designation

edgepixel

edgepixel
presentation-001.jpg



GREEN
presentation-011.jpg

Code: 
<MatrixRed> 0.25, 0, -2 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> -2, 2, 2 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 2, 0, 0 </MatrixBlue>


BLUE
presentation-021.jpg

Code: 
<MatrixRed>0.35, -0.1, 0</MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen>-2, 2, 2</MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue>2, 0.25, 0</MatrixBlue>


RED
presentation-031.jpg

Code: 
<MatrixRed> 1, -0.5, 0.15 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0, 1, -1 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 0, 1, 2 </MatrixBlue>


WHITE
presentation-041.jpg

It is recommended that you set your HUD brightness to maximum for best results.
Hopefully this is the right white code out of all the variants I tried
Code: 
<MatrixRed> 0.35, 0, 0 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0, 2, 2 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 1, 0, 0.13 </MatrixBlue>


ORANGE
presentation-051.jpg

Code: 
<MatrixRed>0.64, -0.1, 0</MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen>0.23, 1, 0</MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue>0, 0, -0.1</MatrixBlue>


BLUE
presentation-061.jpg

Code: 
<MatrixRed> 1, -0.5, 0.15 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0, 1, -1 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 0, 1, 2 </MatrixBlue>
 
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Arkku

A
Here are a couple of mine:

• Blue (friendlies green, neutral cyan, enemies purple)
• White-yellow (friendlies green-ish, neutral white-ish, enemies red-ish)
• Cyan (friendlies green, neutral cyan, enemies cyan-purple-ish)

The first one has pretty decent portraits and has been my HUD theme for as long as it has been customizable. The others I made for VR use in an attempt to brighten up the HUD overall and to take advantage of the higher green resolution. They are a work in progress.
 

edgepixel

edgepixel
Lightspeed said:
The white is cool ... who needs portraits? lol

I wouldn't be surprised if these end up in the store one day.
Click to expand...

The white can probably be improved :)
Regarding the store, I hope they will do much better, without the technical limitation we players try to push these through
 

Achilles7

Banned
Achilles7
Arkku said:
Here are a couple of mine:

• Blue (friendlies green, neutral cyan, enemies purple)
• White-yellow (friendlies green-ish, neutral white-ish, enemies red-ish)
• Cyan (friendlies green, neutral cyan, enemies cyan-purple-ish)

The first one has pretty decent portraits and has been my HUD theme for as long as it has been customizable. The others I made for VR use in an attempt to brighten up the HUD overall and to take advantage of the higher green resolution. They are a work in progress.
Click to expand...

+1 for Arkku

Please rep this awesome individual - he/she is responsible for this:

​http://arkku.com/elite/hud_editor/

I have more rep :O & that's basically from taking the pee out of....well *cough* many of you!

Now, that is simply a travesty; sort it out, please!
 

edgepixel

edgepixel
Arkku said:
Here are a couple of mine:
Click to expand...
You know, you can push red-to-red up to 35 before it starts to overpower the main color.
To keep enemies red then you have to never push red-to-green and red-to-blue over zero. They can be only negative or zero.

I have a HUD with purple enemies; didn’t publish it though, thinking HUDs with purple foes were already made.
They have the advantage of being more bright overall, as you don’t have to cut so drastically the red input from the blue output.
Also there’s more red than green into orange; cut the red-to-green output to keep enemies red and you’re left with less “juice” to change the main color; you can do it now only through the green inputs, resulting in less brightness overall.

But you can never have it all. Depending on what you want, something else has to be compromised. With purple foes I saw poor visibility in station menus, so I prefer red.

With darker HUDs (dark blue/purple especially) there is also the problem of contrast over light ambiance; you can’t read your HUD. So for practicality, wanting a blue HUD, you’re kinda stuck with light blues.
 

Arkku

A
edgepixel said:
But you can never have it all. Depending on what you want, something else has to be compromised. With purple foes I saw poor visibility in station menus, so I prefer red.

With darker HUDs (dark blue/purple especially) there is also the problem of contrast over light ambiance; you can’t read your HUD. So for practicality, wanting a blue HUD, you’re kinda stuck with light blues.
Click to expand...

It is certainly true that because of the colour matrix approach you can never have it all. However, I disagree about contrast antd readability (in themes with purple enemies and/or dark blue/purple main colour) - I've used the blue theme linked above (or variant thereof) for way too many hours in the game (i.e., almost all of my playtime since gamma) and I don't even need to set the HUD brightness very high (in fact it is near the minimum). Menus in particular are very bright with white text.

As for red enemies, I understand the desire to have them, but personally I think the trade-off is quite bad. And overall the choice to keep the original red as red is quite arbitrary, e.g., my blue theme keeps the original green as green, which I even prefer visually. But this is just a personal preference, your themes are very nice, just optimized for different things than mine. =)

(Edit: Actually, I do have one experimental blue theme with red enemies, and I agree that it gets very dark - needs max HUD brightness. So, yeah, blue themes may not be very well suited to that design.)
 
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S3B4ST13N

S
Lightspeed said:
The white is cool ... who needs portraits? lol

I wouldn't be surprised if these end up in the store one day.
Click to expand...

Considering we can adjust the colour's right now, for free .. I'd be really surprised if they took that away and then tried to charge for it. Would leave a very sour taste in a lot of people's mouths.
 

Gun Star

Gun Star
So I tried out the first blue one. I like everything about that setup except the ship icon is fuschia. Which number in the ini would change that?

great job by the way.
 

Arkku

A
Gun_Star said:
So I tried out the first blue one. I like everything about that setup except the ship icon is fuschia. Which number in the ini would change that?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately you cannot change one specific thing, all of the numbers affect many colours to varying degree. That's why all the custom HUD themes end up being some kind of a compromise…

You can try tweaking that theme here, but I doubt you'll be able to keep all the other things (such as red enemies) while substantially altering the ship icon colour.
 

edgepixel

edgepixel
Gun_Star said:
I like everything about that setup except the ship icon is fuschia. Which number in the ini would change that?
Click to expand...

Short answer is, you can surely get either one the way you want (main color, warning colors, friendlies colors, shields color, ship color), often two, very rarely three, but definitely never all of them at once.

The best you can hope is getting a desired main color + distinct enough other colors (but it's a gamble as of what you can get), as you're not affecting individual elements, but the whole lot, through manipulating the RGB color components.
 
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edgepixel

edgepixel
Arkku said:
your themes are very nice, just optimized for different things than mine
Click to expand...
Thank you. Wouldn't have even started without your groundbreaking work.

That was the idea, giving the community some other options. The desire for better friend or foe color separation in custom HUDs, that I personally had, and other people seemed to share, didn't look very well served by the HUD schemes available to the community. So I thought that was an area where I could make a contribution.
 
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edgepixel

edgepixel
MalcYorks said:
Is there any difference apart from this one having nowhere near the number of schemes as that one?
Click to expand...
The difference is in the title itself. Do you care about friends and foes being as distinct as possible in your HUD? Then you can get that here.
If you just want some new colors, you can get them anywhere else.

Regarding NO2O, I checked that whole thread beginning to end, and the enemies are usually blue, or at best some very pale reddish/purplish. So there.
 
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Para Handy

Para Handy
edgepixel said:
The difference is in the title itself. Do you care about friends and foes being as distinct as possible in your HUD? Then you can get that here.
If you just want some new colors, you can get them anywhere else.

Regarding NO2O, I checked that whole thread beginning to end, and the enemies are usually blue, or at best some very pale reddish/purplish. So there.
Click to expand...

Well I have used the Deus Ex Mint-Mocha for ages (it is also in that thread) and I find extremely clear and free of the orange neon glare. Have a peek yourself:


<MatrixRed> 0.7, 0.08, -0.08 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0, 1, 1 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 0.15, -0.15, 1 </MatrixBlue>


BTW I didn't originate it, I got it from a "Cmdr Uncertain" post https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...lour-*tweak*?p=1226693&viewfull=1#post1226693 a long time ago.



Also by the way you forgot the :p after your "So there." ;)
 
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Bottom Hat

Bottom Hat
Great and useful thread OP! Especially since I haven't seen many recent updates to the other thread that was here and started off by Arkkuu [iirc??] a long time ago, so thanks for this o7
 
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