Recolor all book icons systematically

[Wuzzy2]

The book colors got a bit messy lately. This PR changes the color of books systematically.

Color key:

• Light red: martial arts
• Light green: crafting recipes (primarily)
• Magenta: teaches skill up to 1
• Brown: teaches skill up to 2
• Green: teaches skill up to 3-5
• Cyan: teaches skill up to 6-7
• Blue: teaches skill up to 8 or more
• Pink: just (!) for fun, morale +1
• Light blue: just for fun, morale +2
• Light cyan: just for fun, morale +3
• White: just for fun, morale +4 or more
• Dark gray: book with special use case which doesn’t fit into any category above.
• Light gray: Waste book. No skills, martial arts, crafting recipes, morale boost or special use case. Basically trash.
• Yellow: intentionally unused (used for sounds)
• Dark red: intentionally unused (used for IR)

There is also a thread with more details about my intentions here: http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=6289.0

[BevapDin]

Might want to add the color keys to doc/JSON_INFO.md for future references and for modders.

[Wuzzy2]

@BevapDin: It is done.

[KA101]

Gonna object to "waste book" as it further calls out the recipe_anarch and _elfa books v. their decoys.

Likewise, I think we can get by with fewer colors: no need to color-code for different skill-thresholds or morale-boosts. Color-coding religious v. non-religious fun-books might be reasonable (religious books are usually visually distinctive) but seeing something across the room and knowing that it's +3 to morale seems over-mechanical.

[Wuzzy2]

Oh, I have forgot to mention that I made exceptions for those two decoys (and their companion books). I’ve thought of that. The decoy books are the “color givers” and their companions simply use that color instead.

Well, maybe at least one of the colors for morale boosters can be taken away for those religious books.

[Zireael07]

Cool!

[kevingranade]

I'm not really a big fan of the concept of color coding based on meta-game properties of the items, particularly different levels of the same thing. If we're color-coding, it'd rather it align with broad, visually-distinctive properties of the items, like large reference manuals vs novels vs magazines, etc.
As it is you're giving the player knowledge that they don't reasonably possess from looking at the book from across the room, specifically what the effects of reading the book will be.

[Wuzzy2]

So, any suggestions for a different color code?
If it is not okay to expose those meta-information via color, then, at the very least, I would like to achieve:

• Different colors for books made for enjoyment (i.e. novels), books that are made to teach you something and other books. (a few exceptions may apply, i.e. for books that are not what they seem to be).
• And get rid of the colors yellow and red

On the other hand, I think your argument about giving the player knowledge about meta-data just by looking at is flawed, since the color is really just a shortcut. The information exposed with the color is nothing secret to the player. The player can currently expose to which level a book will teach and to what degree the book will boost the morale just by examining them. With the V menu, this is even possible from a distance. This takes no game time whatsoever.
It follows that if my original coloring proposal is flawed, the V menu is then flawed, too; for the same reason, and thus needs to change as well. But if the V menu is alright, then it makes no sense to why color-coding is not allowed to expose these information the player already possesses.

[kevingranade]

Exposing all that information at a distance is a flaw in my opinion.
Even short of that, there is a definite difference between the color of an
item being set based on it's contents and having the description when
examined give that information.
Game-wise, what I don't like about it is it trivializes the variety of
items, they stop being individual items and just become 'cyan book' or
'pink book', and encourages the player to never even look at the
descriptions for categories they aren't interested in.

[KA101]

Game-wise, what I don't like about it is it trivializes the variety of items, they stop being individual items and just become 'cyan book' or 'pink book', and encourages the player to never even look at the descriptions for categories they aren't interested in.

But then you can just knock it down to "pink book" or "cyan book", Kevin! Think of the bloat!

:-P

was joking; agrees that magazines should be distinct from novels, should be distinct from textbooks, should be distinct from technical docs/binders, should be distinct from religious texts, etc.

Maaayyybe color-code by skill (cookbooks look different than comp-sci, etc) too, but that's the extent to which we should color-code, IMO.

[Wuzzy2]

I close this issue as outdated and in favor of #7587.