Modifying building colours

[wlindley]

Can we get some graphical variation between cannery types?

I have added a little script, alter_hue, to my little collection of tools.

Using this, I created a copy of the cannery graphics, selected source hue 17 and destination mapcolor 212 (for fish) and mapcolor 170 (for vegetables) and out come these possible alternate graphics:




It might be awfully nice if industrial and commercial buildings all had some graphic elements which were the same as their mapcolors?

'Tis years later, but: This little tool is what I have wanted for many years to draw a single shop, and then just change the hues to match the mapcolors for all the various goods that can be sold in various versions of that shop.  Perhaps I'll do a rework of various building graphics if folks here agree.

[Mariculous]

I think doing this for any industries that are currently graphically the same but technically produce different goods would be great.
Howeverm I don't agree in doing this for industries that are unique already.

[Matthew]

This looks like a great idea! I think it would definitely be an improvement to the canneries!

A particular advantage of this plan is that colours would be visible from all sides, which is an advantage in online games that don't allow rotation.

A pedantic footnote follows, but don't let it delay you.

Looking to the future, there are a couple of realism issues. The first is that the word "cannery" is emblazoned on the factories and I am not convinced that this is British English. The OED's entry (£) does not mark the word as American English, but all of their quotations are from North America, and Google Books' Ngram Viewer shows that the word has been much more popular in US English. Neither Wikimedia Commons' gallery of canneries, nor Wikipedia's List of canneries, seemed to contain a single British example when I skimmed through them.

A quick look at some British canning factories suggests that they generally had brand names on them emblazoned on them, which would quickly get repetitive in Simutrans. Could we use "quality" as the wordmark instead, as in the attached image?

The other realism issue is whether British canning factories were ever painted. All the photos I've seen show unpainted bricks. But IMHO playability should take priority over accuracy when they conflict, so I think wlindley's idea is great.

[jamespetts]

Unpainted bricks was certainly what was intended to be represented; I suspect that we might well be better off changing the colour of things like doors or window frames rather than the bricks themselves.

The word "cannery" on the chimney comes from a real life example, but I cannot now recall the source.

[Matthew]

Unpainted bricks was certainly what was intended to be represented; I suspect that we might well be better off changing the colour of things like doors or window frames rather than the bricks themselves.

I have no idea what kind of Perl wizardry wlindley has employed to edit PNG files in script, but my guess is that it relies on the fact that reds are currently used on the brickwork and only on the brickwork. If the door and window frames (as well as the lettering) are currently using the same colours as the snow, then you would end up with coloured snow (insert juvenile joke about yellow snow here ) in winter. I guess it comes down to the balance between accuracy and playability; I think the painted brick solution is a sensible compromise, especially considering how well it copes with (non-)rotation, but opinions will differ.

The word "cannery" on the chimney comes from a real life example, but I cannot now recall the source.

"All swans are white" until we find a black swan.... In other words, it only took a single example to prove my hypothesis was incorrect! Well, that issue was dealt with quickly. 

[jamespetts]

I have split this topic from the goods reference topic as this is a somewhat separate issue.

[Mariculous]

A different idea would be something like the "hide buildings" option, which currently shows industries in red.
The colored inudstries option would instead show industries in their minimap color.
This would preserve ralistic industry colors, but also allows to see the exact industry type, when desired.
A little disadvantage is that one has to know about this option and actively use it.