Dye/Food Coloring

[Sundance]

also we can't dye individual pieces of clothing in ways that show up on our avatars and that sucks ass

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can?

Paintcan --> Clothing item --> Wear clothing. I often do it with the grey paint can so my clothing looks a bit more moody.

Although I will say the color seems totally saturated at times, it'd probably be nicer if certain colors was toned down a bit.

[Nnystyxx]

Ignoring the fact that I don't think this idea is a good one (it's a whole new system for what amounts to temporary colorful reagent/paint), contusine () for magenta, asomna () for cyan (close enough). Make commol () your yellow and now you have a reason to grow herbs other than weed.

I understand your point mordent regarding a whole new system isn't a good idea for something so trivial, which is why this might be better as a specialized chem extractor. Just so i'm clear: A dye vat could work exactly like the distillery. Put in herb/plant -> Get unique chem. I hate using chemistry as a backbone to many things, but in this case it kind of makes the most sense. If you don't want to make it a seperate device, using the distillery isn't so bad, but new things are nice all the same.

There is three problems with coloring stuff in its current iteration:

1) Colorful reagent is completely random. It's great if you want to rainbow stuff, but as far as being actually aesthetically functional, it's pretty useless.
2) Painting cans and hairdyes work off a totally different system. Hairdyes seem a bit legacy code-ish and I'd understand leaving that be, but paint cans would really benefit from being chem based for future use.
3) Paintcans leave a lot to be desired. You receive them randomly when ordered, one paint can covers about 5 tiles, and paint is impossible to get off if you get it on you, essentially targeting you (in a game that's kinda stealthy, this sucks and makes paint an annoyance rather than it's proper function)

I dunno, making paints/dyes work off a system suggested where you produce magenta, yellow and cyan, where 10 units magenta to 10 units yellow makes red, and then tying this up with botany, I think is a solid suggestion.

I suggested this partly as a way to unite a few disparate systems (colorful reagent, paintcans, etc) in a way that's fun, intuitive, and not absolutely fucking horrible to deal with (paintcans in 99% of situations; repairing the machine is great until everyone gets painted jet black and can't unpaint themselves). Essentially, a system that unites good traits and purges bad ones would go from "temporary version of bad feature" to "good, usable feature, made usable BECAUSE it's temporary".

I like the idea of the CMY healing herbs.

[Frank_Stein]

Ignoring the fact that I don't think this idea is a good one (it's a whole new system for what amounts to temporary colorful reagent/paint), contusine () for magenta, asomna () for cyan (close enough). Make commol () your yellow and now you have a reason to grow herbs other than weed.

I understand your point mordent regarding a whole new system isn't a good idea for something so trivial, which is why this might be better as a specialized chem extractor. Just so i'm clear: A dye vat could work exactly like the distillery. Put in herb/plant -> Get unique chem. I hate using chemistry as a backbone to many things, but in this case it kind of makes the most sense. If you don't want to make it a seperate device, using the distillery isn't so bad, but new things are nice all the same.

There is three problems with coloring stuff in its current iteration:

1) Colorful reagent is completely random. It's great if you want to rainbow stuff, but as far as being actually aesthetically functional, it's pretty useless.
2) Painting cans and hairdyes work off a totally different system. Hairdyes seem a bit legacy code-ish and I'd understand leaving that be, but paint cans would really benefit from being chem based for future use.
3) Paintcans leave a lot to be desired. You receive them randomly when ordered, one paint can covers about 5 tiles, and paint is impossible to get off if you get it on you, essentially targeting you (in a game that's kinda stealthy, this sucks and makes paint an annoyance rather than it's proper function)

I dunno, making paints/dyes work off a system suggested where you produce magenta, yellow and cyan, where 10 units magenta to 10 units yellow makes red, and then tying this up with botany, I think is a solid suggestion.

Yeah, I think this about defines exactly how the system would work in the frameworks already provided.

The farming method puts a resource limitation on paint/dye production, giving it a built in cool down

I also feel like this creates some room for further ideas, like print making, custom pens, pencils, crayons etc

It's an idea I really like and think adds value

[Mordent]

also we can't dye individual pieces of clothing in ways that show up on our avatars and that sucks ass

Good news, you can! Paint just that item (click it, not you). If you're wearing it at the time you probably need to unequip then re-equip it to see the effect.

...other stuff...

My issue with the implementation as distinct dye/pigment/whatever chems is that this could easily add a dozen or two new yet incredibly niche chems (black, dark grey, grey, light grey, white, dark red, red, light red, dark orange, orange, light orange, dark yellow, yellow, light yellow, dark green, green, light green, dark cyan, cyan, light cyan, dark blue, blue, light blue, dark purple, purple, light purple, dark indigo, indigo, light indigo). That list is 29 distinct colors. Yes, we could strip a few of them out, but hopefully you get my point.

The idea of deriving the color based on other chems in the paint/dye you're using and limiting it to the base three colors + some sort of whitener does keep the chem bloat down, but this sounds like a decent amount of complexity. It means when you splash some on someone, we'd need to check what else you're splashing them with in order to derive the resultant color. I'm not sure that's feasible in our current implementation. Is there any other chem anyone can think of that does that?

I am typically strongly against adding an alternative way to color something (in addition to paint), rather than making paint fit your need instead.

Paint in its current implementation is not suitable as a chem because, let's be honest, the amount of people who would foam/smoke it would be bananas; my understanding is having access to paint at all was the reason the paint dispenser was "broken" by default, let alone letting it be able to be applied as an area-of-effect.

My counter-proposal:

• Make "pigment" a chem.
  
• Make its paint effect only apply if at least a certain amount is used (5? 10?) in order to stop you using a single can and diluting it indefinitely.
  
• Make acetone have a touch reaction to reset someone's color var (however they got it).
  
• Make space cleaner have a touch reaction that has a chance of resetting someone's color var (means the janitor's life isn't living hell... more than it currently is, anyway).
  
• Make mixing colors of pigment able to be achieved in the expected way (so each pool of pigment reagent would have a pigment_color var associated with it that determines what color things painted with it become and what happens when you mix it with another load of pigment - weighted by amount, of course).
  
• Change paint cans to effectively be reskinned beakers with a few tweaks (different flavor text on "splashing" something, only behavior is to apply 10u rather than the whole can) that come loaded with an amount of the right-colored pigment.
  
• Have some special behavior for brewing and/or extracting the above herbs to get the CMY pigments. I'm a little unsure as to how to lighten/darken it, will come back to this after lunch.

[Nnystyxx]

My idea was never to have a shitload of individual color-chems; chem was just the most elegant way I could think of, which, since I'm not a coder, I can't think of a lot of elegant ways. Moreso I wanted to sort of stopgap the feature in a simplest form and maybe find ways to tweak it later, if at all, in order to add more colors.

My idea with dye was to make ontouch painting reactions much less easy to just shit out en masse and, in turn, just as easy to fix with acetone/space cleaner/water smoke/foam. Relative ease in either direction makes a problem createable but not unsolveable

Getting paint cans to behave somewhat like beakers would be nice, if only for mechanical consistency's sake.

[quote='Mordent']
(werds)

Yeah, I think this about defines exactly how the system would work in the frameworks already provided.

The farming method puts a resource limitation on paint/dye production, giving it a built in cool down

I also feel like this creates some room for further ideas, like print making, custom pens, pencils, crayons etc

It's an idea I really like and think adds value

I'd also definitely like a bit more spaceman agency over the colors of little random objects like mugs and crayons. Making those with pigment/dye seems like a fun way to do gimmicks or just kit yourself out in a way you like. (You could run a gift shop!)