How many times have you....

News & General Discussion
1

…coded a colour picker?

OK. Bit of a random question. But it seems like every second project I’ve done I end up having to code a colour picker. Because inevitably the client or your boss will say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the user was able to change the colour of this car/horse/frog/house/word/banana?” Also, just as inevitably, none of the plugin colour-pickers quite do the right job or can’t be used because the game must be “unique”. Sometimes it felt like my entire career has just been coding a succession of colour pickers.

So depending on the language you might code one in Flash, in Unity, in HTML, in C++, in whatever.

So anyway, how many colour pickers have you coded in your lifetime? The person whose done the most wins a smiley face: :slight_smile:

2

Not once. But I may be doing so in the near future.

1 Like
3

Exactly once.

Surely you only have to do it once per GUI system you work with, though, and just re-skin it afterwards?

4

Yeah I tend to them them pretty frequently! Or make a editor extension to change colours instead of using unity’s built in colour picker so I can get complimentary colours etc, and I use HEX instead of RGB so artists understand it

5

I programmed my own color texture so I could use a color picker but then I decided not to. Lol. I will post the results when I get on my pc.

With my color generator, you can choose your file size and how many colors you want. It also saves it as a Targa file. I think I might post the source for people to study if they like

EDIT: here are the pics:

1709043--107584--ColorTexture_01.png
1709043--107584--ColorTexture_01.png512×512 3.99 KB

And with a few adjustments I can make it go to a lighter color
1709043--107583--ColorTexture2.png
1709043--107583--ColorTexture2.png1024×1024 4.78 KB

You can use these colors if you want. :slight_smile:

6

Not once. When I made my own tools I wrote down the RGB values from paint programs and put them in manually. :wink:

7

If you build something once, why do it again? Reuse your code! Build just one color picker and reuse it in all your projects; don’t build a new one for every new project.

8

That’s not always possible. For example if one project your using Windows API, another project unity API, a third project flash API, a fifth Linux API and a sixth IOS API. Then your next project may be written in HTML5 so you have to do it all over again. The latest is Windows 8 Apps which doesn’t come with a colour picker API so someone is going to have to write one!

Also, a colour picker for a paint program may not be suitable for a car game to customise your car. Where maybe you would represent it by 3D paint cans. Or a minecraft game where your “colour picker” may just be choosing different coloured carpet cubes.

Anyway whenever I play a game and it has “customise your character” facilities I always feel a bit sorry for the guy who had to program another colour picker. :frowning: