I was thinking about this myself. If we look at the radar elements, they indeed can change color. They are not bound to orange - ship and station icons on the radar can be green, orange or red depending on their states. So they must not be bound to the rest of the HUD. The station icons at the left of the radar can also change color according to their states while neutral icons there are grey. So I do think these elements are not tied to the rest of the HUD color-wise. And I can't imagine that they are bound by hue (which would mean if they change the default orange then the hue of these elements would change accordingly). I think red is red, green is green and not orange + x and orange + y. Of course, only the developers know exactly how this works. It would be great to hear from them about this topic.
Respectfully, I disagree. The elements are indeed "bound by hue"; when the console color "hack" is applied, the radar blips and shield rings
do change color. What I'm imagining is that the UI elements are in various bitmaps which are combined via overlays to produce what we see in game:
Because the colors are part of the artwork, the orange stuff can't be changed without changing the hue of the other elements. The station and ship "icons" can be a separate color because the are actually drawn in 3D. This is obvious in the new beta, where the stations change orientation, relative to your ship.
If this happens to be true, one more reason to wonder if Frontier really planned their game to evolve as years go by.
Not necessarily, it just means that they didn't anticipate that players would want to change the UI colors. I've worked on projects where we didn't anticipate a much-requested feature that was really hard to implement, because of architectural reasons.
They probably were going to allow it..... As micro transactions for different colours....But then we figured out how to do it without them implementing it and now they're stuffed.
Can't monetize something that we can already do for free...
Unless your on Xbox.
There's no "we figured out". FD provided that quick and dirty "hack" which allows for limited customization (at the expense of UI colors changing which shouldn't change). If you look at Obsidian Ant's video on Holo-Me, you'll see that the hair colors are
completely wrong because he's using the UI color hack.