Custom Pin/Wire Colour system

[Dom-c-d]

I know being able to add/change pin colours is one of the many things everyone echos wanting. Is this something likely to be on your radar? I also wanted this feature so went away and have implemented it into a useable state.

Currently only 2 bugs exist, one crashes the game if the player decides they don't want any colours anymore and deletes them all, but this does give them colours back on next load. easily preventable but as its only been me using it so far not bothered.

The other is that if you wire a pin to a subchip and then view the chip all while paused in the same step, the subchip input pin colour shows as disconnected rather than the colour on pin and wire disconnected. This has no impact as will update along with the wire on the next step anyway. I just for the life of me couldn't figure out exactly what allows the subchip input pins to load colours during pause.

Currently this works with existing saves. Instead of saving the colour as an int for each input pin in, it instead saves the name, in case they copy across chips from other projects. If it cannot find the colour by name it checks if it is instead a valid index(to support existing saves) in the colour system and if not returns the default colour of the first colour available. It stores the values and names of the custom colours in the project description.

Would be happy to try and fix those 2 bugs if its something you'd be interested in. was also thinking about instead using hex values in the menu and using your colour picker from the chip customization to improve the UI but as its only been for me so far i've been happy with using RGB vals instead.


user can also right click on an existing entry to edit or delete

[RobMayer]

Clever way to get around the backwards compat, and good thinking to have an eye on interop.

[SebLague]

Hey, that's cool -- yeah it's definitely on my radar as I've seen the request a bunch of times as well! In your own usage, roughly how many extra colours have you found useful to add, before they're not really distinct enough to stand out from others at a glance? Just trying to gauge whether it's something that can be solved with a few extra presets, or if a whole customization is really required!

Also, just out of curiosity, what is the 'debugging' option you've added there? :)

[Dom-c-d]

Personally at the moment I've used an extra 3 normal colours (although this is before you added orange so i guess i'm only 2 ahead now) but I also have used it to be able to have a wire one colour on low and another one high (these colours match the high values of 2 already existing colours) so if i have red & blue data going into a chip, and the chip is using the red input to determine the output when a toggle pin receives low, and then it uses blue on high. i can have the custom wire connected to the toggle, to be red on low and blue on high to quickly visualise what is being used where.

I know this could be something visualised in other ways such as coloured LEDs built in but i had also built this before that was a thing too, so this is slowly drifting towards more unnecessary lol
As for the "debugging" option, thats just the name of a custom colour I used during testing and doesnt actually do anything cool. The screenshot was taken from the development project as i had that open at the time.

[RobMayer]

I'm mildly curious what your other two colors are - I anticipate Brown and Cyan?
(kinda cool to see you use different hues for different states :3)

[Dom-c-d]

I went with Cyan and with a light brown tan like colour

[RobMayer]

Nice. The hue-space does kinda get crowded after that, doesn't it? The only other one I could think to add would be a distinction between a Lime or Kelly Green and a Hunter Green. (I'll take off my UI designer hat now :P)

[RobMayer]

One last additional thought.

If the custom colors ends up being the route you take, it might be a good idea to show disconnected state in a different way like a dotted or dashed line to make it distinct from a black wire.

Alternatively, if you end up simply adding more color enums, a black wire (or near black really) might be one more to throw in there, provided the same idea that disconnected state would probably be best rendered in an different style.

[BraveCaperCat2]

Actually, there are some features that I'd expect to have in this implementation:

• A flip colours option to swap the Low and High colours.
• A "Save As" option to allow editing an existing colour, renaming it (or otherwise just working like the save function) and then saving it as a new colour (instead of renaming and replacing the existing colour, unless that's how the save feature works already)

[Dom-c-d]

for the second point, it currently kinda works as you described, if you click to edit a colour it will only overwrite the colour if the name matches, if you give it a new name it creates a new custom entry. to rename you'd need to note down the colours and delete and recreate as i didnt see much of a use case for needing to rename colours.
However i haven't really touched the code for this project as it works enough for my casual use and as mentioned previously, theres really not a huge range of unique colours to need a whole system so i've started a new feature instead