@BitVenom @thisquietreverie
The tech bug is pretty explanatory from the image below. It instantly complete and doesn’t add a single thing to the construction tree.
The other image, however, shows how HW1 ships don’t get an engine trail change based upon the secondary colour of the player. Could we have this rectified? It’s really confusing to know who’s ships are who’s otherwise.
Lemme look at #1 - There are some changes that hide 1 (or less) cost items in any tree. So how that is getting onto the screen is a concern, yes.
As for #2 - The trail color logic hasn’t changed. I know there’s a bug there in certain edge cases, but in general it is what it always was. I’m very, very disinclined to mess with any of that… And in reality I believe it isn’t a code setting - there are files (texture masks) that define how team/stripe are translated to engine trail color - it’s an art thing.
For #2, can you pass that along to the art team then, Bit? Being able to recognize which ships are the enemies is pretty important when considering your odds!
No, what I am saying is that the art used is the default HW2 systems for that logic. We haven’t changed any of that. Frankly, I dislike the whole section of code… but still, it was that way in HW2, we kept the same ‘filter’ TGAs, and the same code still runs on them. That sort of change isn’t considered a bug fix… so we’re very unlikely to touch it.
The engine trails are actually working correctly.
When you use a very dark color like that the game engine slides the saturation and brightness over to get a more recognizable color. If you try making your fleet all black you’ll see it takes on the color as if it had max saturation with enough brightness to recognize it.
In this case the original color you used was white before it was darkened to that dark grey (and this is also one of the premade color swatches that I’ve used before so I know it does this :P)
Here’s a simple gif to illustrate the concept in GIMP
When brightness is that dark it’s very hard to tell what the original color is, but HW saves the brightness as a 4th value so it can compensate for it later like this 
So if I make sure that my “black” colour is definitely a regular colour before making it dark, it’ll be a fully-bright version of the dark colour?
Yup, something like that.
Using this I’ve been able to do silly things like have a black fleet with a pink trail, or a black fleet with a green trail.
I’ll give it a shot later! Thanks!
Well that’s pretty cool to know. Thanks, Xercodo
A useful feature, in a dreamland where it wouldn’t take devtime from other features, might be a trail preview in the color picker.
That’s be nice, actually…