I have been joining Coders of the Caribbean and Code4Life competition and found that the animation is really hard to read.
Personally i have some sort of color weakness that affect my ability to distinguish Red and Green. As a result, distinguishing between Orange/Yellow, which are used as Player and Opponent, would be a very difficult task for me while watching any replay. The color issue also affect many other contest and practice questions as well.
According to wiki ,
There are around 10% of male facing these issue, so I believe that I not alone.
Simply changing the use of color into different set might again raise problem for different group of people. Therefore, i would suggest the following to improve the situation:
Provide several color theme of choice (at the setting page for the animation)
Allow picking different color for different team
Instead of color, use another feature to distinguish between teams. For example, add a pair of horns on the android, or having square head.
I didn’t implement the game but I know that, for this contest, the range of colors was limited by Roche. I agree though that we can make progress here. I have to admit that I’ve got difficulties to detect my robot sometimes.
If you want to distinguish it, you can append a message to your output. It will be displayed in the replay.
Even though I can distinguish between the two colors fine, there seems to be a pattern of using really similar (let’s call them pink and orange) colors for the player’s bot, so I don’t really believe this was done because Roche asked specifically.
How about trying, for the next contest, a combination of blue vs. yellow/orange?
And keep to good work going, this site is really awesome.