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rob
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 8,232

Old October 9th, 2014, 10:37 PM
Please realize that having all this stuff be fully configurable and adaptable increases the amount of work many-fold, sometimes by an entire order of magnitude. So the more customizable this stuff becomes, the longer it will take to implement, which means the more competition this feature will have from everything else on the todo list. Tasks that can be done in a couple days are vastly more likely to get tackled during small windows of opportunity compared to tasks that will be measured in weeks. That's something critical to keep in mind here, so it's most likely that features like some of you are requesting will be implemented in small increments.

There's another important thing to keep in mind for all of you folks who want a wide range of colors to "color-code" an array of purposes on a single map. That sounds great in concept, but it's going to run into some nasty problems on a practical level. And those problems have NOTHING to do with technical hurdles. When we picked the map pin colors, we tried dozens of different colors. There were THREE that we found were generically good against virtually all the diverse assortment of maps that users will be employing. All the other colors we tried ran into serious problems with one type of map or another, as the pin color was nearly the same as the underlying map. For example, we wanted to use green to indicate something is revealed (for consistency), but green gets washed out against many overland maps. Blue sounded like it would work well, but it virtually disappears against water areas. The list goes on.

So even if we do make it possible to have an entire rainbow of colors for pins, the basic nature of most maps will preclude the use of many of those colors as pins. Most maps will only reasonably allow for a handful of pin colors to be used (unless all your maps are black-and-white), since the rest won't yield enough contrast to be good choices. And there will be some maps that will reduce that number down to only two or three good options.

All that being said, I'll make sure this request gets on the survey. Just don't be surprised if this feature is not quite as useful in practice as it may seem in concept. That consideration is something we're also going to have to factor into how much development time we invest, since there are numerous other features that don't have the potential baggage of this one that are vying for the same resources. It's an ugly task trying to juggle all these competing priorities against one another.
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