Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
How does it look?
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The colours look fine and readable on my 1600x1200 traditional TFT monitor. I'll try it out on my iPad or iPhone later, but changes are it'll look good there too.
On trick to use, to improve readability of coloured text, especially light or other hostile colours (including green), is to boldface the font. It helps a bit. But I'm not at all sure it's needed in this case.
I still miss a "relative" indicator on apparent sun size. And is there any kind of indication of the amount of solar energy that reaches ground level? I'd imagine that plays a large role for the "sense of place" element.
If I were doing such a system, and I might do that some years from now, I'd come up with a shorthand scale to describe all one-axis traits. Probably I'd use Sagatafl's 0-9/3-is-average scale, then map each possible integer value to a specific trait value, e.g. gravity or max day temp or min night temp, in a not-necessarily linear fashion, to improve the at-a-glance-usability even further.
That would also enable the prodcution of compact planet profiles, very much liek Traveller's Planetary Profile system, although incorporating many more stats than just the a-bit-more-than-half-a-dozen used by Classic Traveller. Which in turn would necessitate some kind of formal spacing system (e.g. a slash after the first 6-item block, then 9 items then a hyphen then 7 more items), because an ultra-comact "stat block" with more than 8 or 9 single-digit stats ceases to be Human-readable.
For that, having 3 as average isn't ideal, but if I made something meant to be useable primarily with Sagatafl it would make sense to do it that way. For something else, especially if your system of choice doesn't have a good suggested average (GURPS's suggested average is 10, which is ungood in this context - its' other suggested average is 0 which is equally ungood), you should opt for a higher average, and use something like hexidecimal, like Traveller does. If you're overly worried about copyright silliness and "cease and desist"-letters, you could go for octodecimal instead, or maybe femtodecimal. I'm not worried about that, but on general principle I see no particularly reason why it has to be hexidecimal instead of a slightly roomier scale. The reason I do see is that it's nice if the resulting figures don't often go above 9, because numbers will remain
relatively more Human-readable than alphabet letters. But that's not necessarily inconsitent with something like octodecimal.