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[Muffinator]

Its been a while since I posted and I want to make a mod for something that just keeps bothering me, namely that there are all these color tokens in descriptor_color_standard.txt but like 90% of all the creature raws don't use them. every dragon has green scales and black eyes, every elk bird has brown feathers. I realize that this is such a minuscule, unimportant facet of the game, but I'd kind of like it if i could look in the description of the dargon that wrecked my fort and have it be heliotrope with ruby eyes, or something. I've already gone through and updated my raws so some creatures (dragons, unicorns, chinchillas) have a ton of various colors, but I feel like my own interpretation of color tokens is subjective, and i don't know if there's any interest for modded raws like mine.

In addition, im wondering if there's a way to state [TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:ANY_BLUE:1]or something, instead of manually listing every color token that I subjectively think is blue as BLUE:1:DARK_BLUE:1:..... etc. etc. (is periwinkle blue or purple? and don't even get me started on anything with taupe in its name, are these colors pink, tan, or brown?). Just basically so many questions. If someones got a list that puts these color tokens in order by color that would be amazing too.

[Fleeting Frames]

In order by colour...I did this at the bottom of this post (the Xes are tileset-added colours) with three different colour sorts based on formulas I found online, but none of them are perfect. (Ex, Gray Taupe, Purple taupe, and Fucshia are all sort of purple, but one is almost gray, one is dark and one is bright).

This does affect some creatures in-game such as horse's hair colour:
 
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Even though the tileset doesn't modify creatures, as horses have possible hair colour set to RUSSET, (which has in-game name Storm Surf).

You could use the ANY_BLUE in your developer's copy, and when pushing to testing/production replacing it with list of blues. Still subjective tho.

[thefriendlyhacker]

Have you tested your creatures with varying colors in a genned world with at least a couple of hundred years having gone by?  Adding extra colors might work well enough for megabeasts genned at the start of a world, and I have no idea how animal pops work (hence why you should test), but when it comes to civ populations, color variations are tracked according to a genetic model.  Unfortunately, DF's genetics are completely broken because it has no concept of genotype vs phenotype - when two creatures have a baby, the baby gets a single gene for each color from a parent, and that gene is whichever one is the most dominant (which by default is the one that shows up first in the creature's TLCM raws).  After a time, dominant genes crowd out recessive ones, and the entire civ pop ends up looking virtually identical.  I don't know if animal pop genes are tracked the same way, but you might want to find out for yourself.

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, all the vanilla wild animal horses that wandered in have different skin and hair colours for me, so I suppose they are not tracked for wild animal populations.

[Muffinator]

Have you tested your creatures with varying colors in a genned world with at least a couple of hundred years having gone by?  Adding extra colors might work well enough for megabeasts genned at the start of a world, and I have no idea how animal pops work (hence why you should test), but when it comes to civ populations, color variations are tracked according to a genetic model.  Unfortunately, DF's genetics are completely broken because it has no concept of genotype vs phenotype - when two creatures have a baby, the baby gets a single gene for each color from a parent, and that gene is whichever one is the most dominant (which by default is the one that shows up first in the creature's TLCM raws).  After a time, dominant genes crowd out recessive ones, and the entire civ pop ends up looking virtually identical.  I don't know if animal pop genes are tracked the same way, but you might want to find out for yourself.

Thanks so much for posting this, because everything you said is stuff that never occurred to me because I never stick with a game for long enough to notice.. anything, jumping from the raws to other stuff, and then I don't check myself before i wreck myself  have way too much fun. Now I gotta test genetics or the lack of them. even if successive generations only display one color trait as dominant, it might still be worth it to have more colors just to notice that "hey this time my fort consists of yellow elk birds and charcoal chinchillas, and the attacking elves were led by a dick on a lavender unicorn FWIW...

[thefriendlyhacker]

Have you tested your creatures with varying colors in a genned world with at least a couple of hundred years having gone by?  Adding extra colors might work well enough for megabeasts genned at the start of a world, and I have no idea how animal pops work (hence why you should test), but when it comes to civ populations, color variations are tracked according to a genetic model.  Unfortunately, DF's genetics are completely broken because it has no concept of genotype vs phenotype - when two creatures have a baby, the baby gets a single gene for each color from a parent, and that gene is whichever one is the most dominant (which by default is the one that shows up first in the creature's TLCM raws).  After a time, dominant genes crowd out recessive ones, and the entire civ pop ends up looking virtually identical.  I don't know if animal pop genes are tracked the same way, but you might want to find out for yourself.

Thanks so much for posting this, because everything you said is stuff that never occurred to me because I never stick with a game for long enough to notice.. anything, jumping from the raws to other stuff, and then I don't check myself before i wreck myself  have way too much fun. Now I gotta test genetics or the lack of them. even if successive generations only display one color trait as dominant, it might still be worth it to have more colors just to notice that "hey this time my fort consists of yellow elk birds and charcoal chinchillas, and the attacking elves were led by a dick on a lavender unicorn FWIW...

I notice these things because I have a mod where colors are used to convey critical caste information (using colors and TLCMs to fake non-color descriptive text).  It becomes really obvious that something is wrong when a caste has over a dozen possible colors, but every single instance of that caste has the first color specified in the TLCM raws.  After that, it doesn't take much to also notice that every single creature in your fort has blue hair.

I actually have a dfhack script I made a week and a half ago that can randomize TLCMs, if you are interested.