Guild color chat testing

From my testing, the following colors work best on light and dark backgrounds, have minimal interruption on the screen, and do not significantly conflict with existing used colors. I have ordered them by my preference.

• Blue1: bold but not too intrusive (same as "-----Welcome to the Awnage Rivan Warriors Client-----" and the blue guild text of the console picture)
• Green2: a tad bit too strong of a contrast (same color as the OpenGL "GL_ARB... using it" when first starting EL)
• Purple1: slightly wimpy looking (same as "This is your X minute warning for the coming hour")
• Red1: pink. enough said. (same as "Connecting to Server...")
  

The dark colors (like yellow4) are almost too dark on a dark background, and they display too much black gunk around their text on a light background (as can be seen in the first to panels of the image block). We will have to face the fact that until we have better scaling fonts like truetype, it will be very difficult to have an ideal font on both backgrounds.

Mana bar

Working on the mana bar. Here is a first screenshot. I am having trouble getting things to line up properly right now.

Coloring guild chat better

Smurf had a comment in a rivan thread I decided to have a look at. Sometimes it is hard to separate guild chatter from the din of local or other channels you are on. So I made a patch to put guild chat headers in light blue.

Edit 20071231 (12:23am): I added a picture showing all the available colors on a light and dark background. I have also managed to get the whole line to be in the same color finally. All four blocks are the same text on different backgrounds. If there is a color that you think is better than the rest, go ahead and post a comment of which one. They are in groups of four: Red 1-4, Orange 1-4, Yellow 1-4, Green 1-4, Blue 1-4, Purple 1-4, and Grey 1-4. Of note, Grey1 is the normal white text color. Grey 4 is Black (shown improperly on the third block)

A New Client for Windows: Passed the Stick

First off, thank you Awn for all your hard work. Your additions to the client make EL even more fun!

Ryddler was kind enough to send me all the source code for the new client with Awn's patches applied. I compiled it for Windows using Dev-Cpp, with one minor adjustment: The "Load" information in the Inventory window was overlapping the "Store All" button, so I moved it down a little.

Here is a link to the latest custom client for Windows: http://www.apmagnan.net/bin/elriva20071203.exe

This is an uncompressed copy of the exe file, so you won't need any fancy skillz to get it. :-) Simply download it into your EL folder (default install location is "c:\Program Files\Eternal Lands") and run it from there.

edit: the related patch file is here

New contributors

I would like to welcome and thank Ryddler and Hex for picking up where I left off on the client. My sabbatical was a good rest and I hope to start adding more fun stuff soon, with their help.