Add back original color palette planets like old Universe

[Xaldafax]

While all of us absolutely love the new colors that are available and how many of the planets do fit together decently with the color schemes, I have talked to many people and there seems to be something lacking. That lacking component is some of the general base colors we had on the old planets - the ones that were there after the recent color adjustments. I’m not saying anything is wrong with the existing planets or the way they look. They look great…

But, I think many of us are missing the original woods, rocks, blue gleam, etc. There was something special about being able to mix colors across the planets and still get a feel that worked. Sometimes things have been a bit hard with only having these new colors that not all work together.

It makes complete sense that the old planets needed to go away but it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and is actually taking things away from us by removing the old colors. We have over 20 planets now and I don’t understand why there isn’t at least one that has like the color palette of Solum or Berlyn. I could be mistaken, but I haven’t seen a screen shot showing that those colors exist.

@Steggs101 / @James, since we have more new planets coming can we please get a few that have some of the original color schemes (based on the new color design). I think that would really be helpful to the community because we know those colors worked. Those pallets shouldn’t be retired and show show back up as soon as possible.

[james]

Per world block colour selection (often referred to as the World Palette) is a stage of the world builder, and not selected manually. The process of generating the world palette is pretty complicated and requires access to the World Builders. The configs are open source and available publicly here. The main challenge is creating a configuration that attempts to make the world unique, interesting and visually cohesive. With more time and iterating I think we’ll gradually make the configs much better.

I’m happy to dive into the details of the configs and discuss areas for improvement. But it would need to be at a level that I can translate into the configurations. This basically means discussing relationships between materials and colours at the hue, saturation and luminance level.

We do not manually create colour palettes and are sticking with this algorithmic approach. I don’t doubt that an artist could easily out perform our current algorithms, but they would also be totally unscalable. We need a solution that allow us to build and deploy 10s and 100s of worlds instantly.

(However, anyone with the Master perk of creating a world is welcome to select whatever colours they want.)

IMO - the previous generation worlds were nothing special and not a template or target for any worlds in the future.

We aim to create “earth-like” palettes for the spawn worlds. Please share feedback about how these could be improved.

We aim to create “otherworldly” palettes as the Level increases.

Note: We have a world lighting update coming that will make some of the high level worlds feel different. Ultimately we aim to present their unique atmospheres without destroying (or blowing out) the block’s base colour.

[Trizer]

Imo (because color is a very subjective topic)

The new color palettes are more dense with strong hue.
Wich mean it’s more difficult to mix & match if you want to obtain a natural look. Old ones where just perfect for this. The trade is: we gained a happy and fun mood in towns and large settlement. That’s great!

But…
More pastels tones with less gloss on refined stones/wood could help to build something less flashy.

[Kal-El]

First , I do appreciate your providing answers. I also appreciate how busy you are with the ps4 release and the upcoming pc release. In general, I do think the colors on the planets taken as individual planets are fine. In my opinion we do not have some of the really shocking combinations we had on a few of the hunting worlds in the pre1.0 universe. So from this standpoint i think the algorithm is working. I also understand the need to have the system automatically select a pallete as it auto generates a planet.

But where it seems to have issues is the repetitive nature of the colors across planets. Having the same color for the same type of rock should be avoided. If the colors on starters are supposed to be earth like, the we really should be seeing more colors. We have wide varieties of blue and grey. No browns. Very few in the red and yellow side of the spectrum. As someone that wants to build, I have been disappointed with the repetitiveness of the colors. When we were shown the 255 colors possible, that was very exciting. The result in live. Not loving it.

I know this might be too complicated and I also understand that your time is not limitless but could someone not have the algorithm spit out options have them reviewed by a person for uniqueness and then load 100 options into a table for use to generate planets?

In any case I was happy to hear that when people are asked to create a planet they can select colors. Will this also apply ( current thinking only) to rented planets. Do you believe at this time that if I rent a planet I can create a tier 1 planet with colors that I want and not be subject to rules on colors based on tiers?

[Xaldafax]

Thanks for the response and additional details.

For me I guess I just miss the cream stone and more brown colors and wish those would be showing up somewhere instead of the same colors we see now over and over on planets.

I think some of the other responses here helped sum up the problem with the current algorithmic approach. We need better variability in the actual colors that are being applied. When the percentage of planets colors that are picked across a large range of colors still seem to match, then we definitely need something to happen to adjust that.

Maybe you can have the system pick out a range of colors and have a person select ones that free right. Then that list goes into the planet generator and it is required to go through ALL the color sequences before it starts over. This would still be compute generated but at least curated a bit by a human to help.

Or, if we are trying to bring “color” to the universe then we need to make sure there is something in the design sequence that makes those colors are used. So if we had the system have to sequence through the colors (that make sense together) before it could use the same sequence on another planet, then at least we would have different colored planets. That would be a small step to help one of the current issues.

On a side note, I’m not sure I understand why “otherworldly” needs to be as level increases. Beyond at most the starter planet (since we don’t just have starter areas like old version WOW) we really need to find ways to show the beauty of the planet designs beyond having to get to T5+ planets. Not everyone will be able to get to a harder planet (if ever) and it really gets boring that you can’t experience other parts of the game if you decide to live on a lower tier planet. If it takes 200+ hours before you see a cool floating island or some special part of the planet design, then you are risking people leaving because things just look the same.

[Karko]

No worries man I got you covered, my world uses the most classical color sets you would be used to seeing. grey stone, yellow sand, green tree, brown wood, and so on…

[the-moebius]

please use this one pretty please

[Kal-El]

I am with you. . it may have to wait until they let us design the public planets, but my t1 with white (as close as I can get) sedimentary, tan metamorphic and brown igneous might be very popular.

[Karko]

::puts on tin foil hat::

I think the reason they don’t use that color scheme is it is popular. The problem with that is if you have a world that looks very pretty like real life, ie Solum, players gravitate to it. Then any time to do something different they dont want to go there, and they pile up in one spot, and like James said they need enough variety so they exclude the favored one to balance it out.

[Kal-El]

I will not disagree it would be popular. . as much as we are not these strange creatures called Humans from planet Earth, our architecture tends to mimic what we have heard happens on that planet. People would like the opportunity to replicate some of the structures they have heard about like pyramids from ancient Egypt, Roman and Greek temples and even medieval villages. While I do appreciate and would not want the entire universe to be populated only with replicas. I still think there is a place for the more Earth like colors even on the starter worlds.

[Karko]

Oh yeah, I want it too. The world I have built looks like a beach paradise mixed with green. Good feels all the time. Somewhere you want to come home to.

[Kal-El]

I have a spot plotted in a glen of huge trees with beautiful grey/blue bark that are probably 6-8 plots tall. It will be very restful once I decide what to build there.

[Okkelinor]

As Ben has said many times before

Art: First look at some of the new textures in 102

Onwards and upwards.

[Oggieogham]

I went mining on different starter worlds just to try to get a variety of colors of rock, and was very disappointed to see they are so similar.

[Tobelawe]

@james will correct me here (he created the palletes) but I will attempt to explain and give a little more information on how we choose world colours. We have 255 colours to choose from. We then have different algorithms to create different palleted from these 255 colours. Each algorithm is designed with some goal in mind. For example we have algorithm that try to encapsulate: earth like pallettes, monochromatic palletes, low saturation palletes etc. Worlds are given palletes based on their level and world type. This is why level 1-2 worlds looks similar. The idea here is that when you travel to a new world, they look very different from a chromatic perspective. We wanted to achieve the feeling of discovering something new. This means that for each given world type and for each given block there is a limited set of colours which it can take. Now, we are continually trying to improve palletes (as with all areas of the game). The worlds we added most recently have 'improved" pallettes. The colour space for each planet and block should have been increased quite a lot, reducing the chance of duplication substantially. That is not to say you will suddenly see neon pink starter worlds.

There is more we want to do with the pallete system and I’m sure we will continue to iterate. As far as white rocks go, I’m not sure this is something our current palletes can achieve. Maybe they can I have no idea. I’m pretty sure at some point there will be white rock however it is very possible that they will only be found on planets of certain tiers and types.

Additionally, we plan to add some form of dying system by which you can extract the colour of a block and apply it to another. This doesn’t help you now but will improve the colour situation in future.

[ctrl-64]

Thank you for the explanation, and so fast! <3
thing is, this is creating a problem where the only place to find a certain colour is to go to the hardest world possible, where that particular colour would fit perfectly normally in an earth-like starter world.
warm yellow sedimentary is just one example.
that as well as “white” i know exists in the 255 and are perfectly normal to see on earth. there is quite a large range of colours that could work on a starter planet, I don’t even mind if they look almost the same. what hurts my soul is when i see the exact same colour with the exact same block type on another planet. or several planets. I thought this issue was going to be mitigated in the new worlds but it is happening again…
I am totally okay with seeing different block types of the same colour, that’s a good thing, people like to build with all the same colour but different blocks, it looks great.
it’s just… how many worlds will drop before we see a very light near-white (I know pure white isn’t possible, but i’m pretty sure “white” exists in the selection of 255 colours) rock? I’m helping build a city and a LOT of people are asking for a white or the whitest block (a lot more people than I expected actually) and I have to tell them it’s warm yellow and they have to have a lot of atmospheric protection because it’s going to take them a long time to break those blocks…

[Tobelawe]

Duplicating the exact some colours in the exact same block is something we want to minimise. If the new worlds have duplicated colours then we need to look into the pallets some more. Thanks for bringing this up.

[ctrl-64]

phew!! Thank you so much. I (we all) were starting to go crazy!

[bubbathegoat]

a LOT of people are asking for a white or the whitest block (a lot more people than I expected actually)

I feel like the standard metamorphic rock from the beta worlds would do a lot to satisfy this demand. It’s mostly grey, but it’s a very natural, neutral color that would fill many gaps in our existing pallet.

[schasm]

Sedimentary on Refgar is a nice light grey, might do for now.