Switching to 256 colours
Starting the game again after a long time, I’ve noticed that modern terminals no longer interpret the Curses attribute A_BOLD as bright colour. This sounds obscure, but as the traditional Curses interfaces only supported 8 colours, this was the way to go to get 16 (!) colours. Hence the display of this game was broken in some terminals in their default configuration! I’ve noticed this in the new Terminal included in Fedora 41, but also the sweet COSMIC Terminal behaves like this.
With 256 colours, we do not need to use A_BOLD to modify colours anymore and the first-time experience is okay again. Unfortunately PDCurses, which is essential for the Windows and macOS builds of the game, only supports 256 colour pairs, so we cannot use all possible combinations of foreground and background colours in the game.
Gladly, only a few colours require a background, so we can use the whole lot of colours in the game on the black background of the game. And fortune smiled upon us, as 8 colours of the 256 of the enhanced palette are duplicates! These redundant colours are now used for the UI colours.
To make the colours accessible in the game, each had to have an unique name. There are some lists of names to be found on the web, but unfortunately these all contain duplicates, leaving a lot of the colours without a name. Hence I had to find an distinct name for every colour.
XTerm 256 colours palette
The colour names were carefully assembled from various sources, mainly by using Thomas Dickey’s helper script closest-rgb.pl, which was designed to find the closest colour names for the XTerm colour palette. This script was run against the original X11 list of colours (which it was designed for), Wikipedia’s list of RAL colours, Crayola crayon colors and generic colour names (A-F) (G-M) (N-Z), and the list of traditional Japanese colour names (actually I found a JavaScript representation of the data, which was much easier to work with).
The script not only shows the closest match for a value, but also the distance of the colour to the named colour. Usually I’ve picked the colour name with the best match, but there were still quite a few duplicates and bad matches. Those I’ve fed into the ArtyClick Color Name Finder, which knew a nice name for most of the remaining colours.
I’m quite happy with the resulting names.
I have assigned new colours to most items and monsters. For the latter I’ve tried to assign a colour that matches the well-known D&D style of the monsters. Stay tuned for the next release, which will include these changes - soon (TM).