Colours

Four of the types in the catalogue are colours, and the only thing separating them is what they paint.

All four read the same colour grammar — shadows with one addition of their own — and all four share the fields every catalogue entry has.

The shape of an entry

Nick, chat and rank colours read exactly two keys of their own: the colour, and an animation.

nick_colors:
  nebula:
    category: premium
    name: '{primary}&lNEBULA'
    gradient: ['#8a51c4', '#ff6b9d', '#59a4ff']   # or color: '#8a51c4'
    animation: shine
    icon: ENDER_EYE
    description: 'Three colours, and none of them sit still.'
    priority: 1

color: takes one colour as a string; gradient: takes a list of them instead. Write one or the other — an entry with neither has nothing to paint with, and is reported and skipped. animation: names an entry from animations.yml and is optional; with one, the colour becomes the palette the animation moves through.

A palette token works as a stop like any other colour, so gradient: ['{primary}', '{secondary_light}', '{letters}'] is a gradient that follows your server rather than a fixed one. That is exactly what the shipped EXYLIA entries do.

Nick colours

cosmetics/nick-colors.yml, section nick_colors. 90 colours in six tabs.

The tabs are the chat colour tabs, and an id here is the id there: wearing CRIMSON on both paints the name and the message in the same red, and the line reads as one decision rather than two.

A name is four to sixteen letters, which is why nothing here is darker than a name can afford to be — the deepest shades live in the chat colours, where there is room for them. For the same reason a gradient across a name wants two stops, three at the most: two read as a gradient, three read as a flourish, and more than that reads as noise on eight characters.

Chat colours

cosmetics/chat-colors.yml, section chat_colors. 96 colours in six tabs.

A message from somebody wearing no chat colour falls back to chat.default-color in config.yml, which reads the same grammar — a hex, a name, a {token} or a gradient. Left empty, the message is not touched at all and arrives in whatever colour the format gave it.

Shadow colours

cosmetics/shadow-colors.yml, section shadow_colors. 90 colours in six tabs.

The shadow is the darker copy of the text the client draws under every line. A shadow colour replaces it for that player's messages, and only for those.

There is no gradient: here. A shadow is one colour under a whole line, or the line's own colour darkened; a shadow that changed colour halfway would be a second message rather than a shadow.

Alpha is how strong the shadow is: aa reads as depth, 55 as a glow, and no alpha at all as a hard block of colour. NATURAL is what the ADVANCED and PREMIUM gradients want, because a gradient should cast a gradient.

Rank colours

cosmetics/rank-colors.yml, section rank_colors. 77 colours in six tabs. Needs LuckPerms.

A rank colour repaints the prefix the permission plugin gives the player, and the suffix with it. It never touches the name — that is what nick colours are for. What the rank wrote keeps its shape, its bold and its spacing; only its colour is replaced. Wearing none leaves the prefix and suffix exactly as the rank wrote them.

repaint

By default only letters and digits are repainted, so a rank's own frame survives:

A gradient runs over the characters it may paint and not over the brackets it never reaches, and an animation moves over exactly the same characters — an animation that reached the brackets would undo the one thing letters is for. A prefix written with no colours of its own is painted whole either way.

Who may wear one

permission defaults to false for this type, the other way round from every other one, because a rank colour is more often something a rank owns than something a player buys. That is only the default an entry falls back to when it writes no permission of its own.

The shipped file uses all three. Its 15 SOLID entries write neither key and are free to every rank; the 54 entries of METAL, GEMS, GRADIENT and ANIMATED each write permission: true and are bought with a node or a grant; the 8 STAFF entries write groups: and are owned by being in one of them.

rank_colors:
  azure:
    category: solid
    name: '{primary}&lAZURE'
    color: '{info}'
    priority: 2
  owner:
    category: staff
    name: '{primary}&lOWNER'
    gradient: ['#ffd700', '#ff8c00']
    animation: shine
    groups: [owner]
    icon: NETHER_STAR
    priority: 1

The tabs

A prefix is short: two stops read as a gradient across it, three read as a flourish, and a prefix of four letters cannot show more than that.

Which colour wins

Players can also mix colours of their own, and those are separate types (custom cosmetics). Where two could apply, the more deliberate choice wins — the one somebody mixed themselves.

A rank colour has no say over the name: it paints what the rank owns, and the name belongs to the player. A nick colour has no say over the prefix, for the same reason read the other way.

Where a shadow colour is worn, the server's own shadow is cleared from the line first and the player's is drawn instead. Otherwise the line keeps whatever text-shadow ExyliaLib was configured with.

Related