Showing Warcraft 3's true player colors (it's broken and unplayable)

[Luashine]

This is a problem so huge that all your melee balancing complaints pale in comparison.

As all of you know, Warcraft used to have 12 playable player slots and 13 player colors in total. This was the time of calm and the matter of the R,G,B or hexadecimal color values seemed settled. Then out of nowhere the working bees on the revived Classic Team decided to push the game further and expanded to 24 player slots. Twelve more colors! It wasn't easy to settle on a good color palette for the +12 new slots and the devs asked Hive to participate and provide feedback. You can follow the discussion here, although it's not always clear where the actual PTR data is and where is the feedback.

Over night 15 years, since the first appearance, the color codes needed an update. There now exist multiple lists with color values, in order of prominence:

1. https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/warcraft-iii-color-tags-and-linebreaks.31386/
2. 24+1 Player Color Codes
3. [Mapping] - WC3 Editor Player Colors reference
4. lost this one on hive, it had a hex listing
5. this forgotten image, but it shows an interim PTR and some upper colors had been changed since, e.g. Wheat.

Do you trust them? Would you trust your own eyes? What if you did follow the white rabbit, would you see it through and understand what world you live in?
Nothing and nobody is right. What if they took their color measurements from JPEG screenshots? What if their application of pipette wasn't pixel-accurate? It must be redone with scientific accuracy!

I didn't exactly gather the data from threads above, but here's a table. Values are in RGB for simplicity. Best viewed on a wide screen in 8K.

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Woah that's a lot. Allow me to explain.

Reforged Texture: Team colors are actually textures. Sourced from there "/ReplaceableTextures/TeamColor/TeamColor11.dds"
Reforged WE color: Player slots/forces in map settings
Wrda: his list is apparently from thread #4?
...diff tex: only if differs from Reforged Texture
Chat: player chat color. Screenshots taken in 4K, the chars "8" and "@" are great for this. Only tracked values different from Wrda's column
...diff tex: only if differs from Reforged Texture (yes, they do)
v1.29 lobby: sourced from screenshot in thread #5
v1.21 texture: only if different to v1.29 lobby

LONG STORY SHORT: Not a single source agrees with one another. But v1.29 and v1.21 are the closest.

Slot	Color name	Ref Texture	Ref WE color (diff to tex)	Wrda	diff tex	Chat (diff to Wrda)	diff tex	v1.29 lobby	v1.21 tex (diff lobby)
0	Red	255,4,3	255,4,2	255,3,3	not!			255,3,3
1	Blue	0,66,255		0,66,255	equals			0,66,255
2	Teal	27,231,186	27,230,186	28,230,185	not!	27,131,186	not!	28,230,185
3	Purple	85,0,129		84,0,129	not!	85,0,129	equals	84,0,129
4	Yellow	255,252,0		255,252,0	equals			255,252,0	255,252,1
5	Orange	255,138,14	255,138,13	254,138,14	not!	255,138,13	not!	254,138,14
6	Green	33,192,0	32,191,0	32,192,0	not!	33,192,0	equals	32,192,0
7	Pink	228,92,175	227,91,175	229,91,176	not!	228,92,176	not!	229,91,176
8	Gray	148,150,151		149,150,151	not!	148,150,151	equals	149,150,151
9	Light Blue	126,192,241		126,191,241	not!	126,192,242	not!	126,191,241
10	Dark Green	16,98,71		16,98,70	not!	16,98,71	equals	16,98,70
11	Brown	80,43,5	79,43,5	78,42,4	not!	79,43,5	not!	78,42,4
12	Maroon	156,0,0		155,0,0	not!	156,0,0	equals	155,0,0
13	Navy	0,0,195	0,0,194	0,0,195	equals			0,0,195
14	Turquoise	0,235,255		0,234,255	not!	0,235,255	equals	0,234,255
15	Violet	189,0,255		190,0,254	not!	189,0,255	equals	190,0,254
16	Wheat	236,205,134	236,204,134	235,205,135	not!	236,206,135	not!	different
17	Peach	247,165,140	247,164,139	248,164,139	not!	247,165,140	equals	248,164,139
18	Mint	192,255,129	191,255,128	191,255,128	not!	192,255,129	equals	191,255,128
19	Lavender	219,185,236	219,184,236	220,185,235	not!	220,185,236	not!	220,185,235
20	Coal	80,80,85	79,79,85	40,40,40	not!	79,80,85	not!	40,40,40
21	Snow	236,240,255		235,240,255	not!	236,240,255	equals	235,240,255
22	Emerald	0,120,30		0,120,30	equals			0,120,30
23	Peanut	165,112,52	164,111,52	164,111,51	not!	165,112,52	equals	164,111,51
24	Black	47,46,47				46,45,46	not!		40,40,40
25	Black	47,46,47				46,45,46	not!		40,40,40
26	Black	47,46,47				46,45,46	not!		40,40,40
27	Black	47,46,47				46,45,46	not!		40,40,40

Thread 4/Wrda have the old color for Coal (40 vs 80 // fourty vs eighty). And Reforged must've changed the Black color. When Coal was first introduced in 1.29 PTR, they changed black to full black #000, but this broke texture coloring of neutrals... pitch dark black. I guess they brought it back, but as 45,45,45 instead of 40?

How come the colors vary? Some players complained about SD textures being awfully compressed in Reforged and this is visible to the naked eye. Alright then, but can't we at least take the high quality color textures from Classic? Like 1.21?

Sounds like the best choice. But... WHY ON EARTH IS YELLOW DIFFERENT?!

I happened to be working with BLP Lab (what kind of broken piece of shit ... by todays standards) and noticed that some team color textures had mipmaps. Mipmaps mean there are multiple resolutions of the texture in one file. Usually the tools will only convert the biggest texture by dimension. I saved this kaleidoscope of yellow textures as separate files (see attachments). And what do you know?

• 1x1: 255,252,0
• 2x2: 255,252,0 uniform
• 4x4: 255,252,2 on the left; 255,252,1 in both middle columns; 255,252,0 on the right
• 8x8: 255,252,1 uniform

Literally unplayable and my eyes need some bleach to unsee this discoloration.
But wait, there's more!

BLP Lab is a cool tool, because it doesn't hide internal information unlike vibe coded apps, that assume the user isn't bright enough to understand. BLP textures are actually repackaged JPEG images, one per mipmap level. Do you see where I'm going? JPEG is a lossy format and BLP shows the JPEG compression level. BAM! All the team colors in 1.21 were saved using 80% compression level using "Intel(R) JPEG Library, version 1,5,4,36". Only these architects of our simulation know why and how it managed to save 4x4 as a horizontal color gradient instead of a uniform color. Speaking of lossy compression, DDS is lossy too.

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In conclusion: Lacking insiders or uncompressed data, will we ever find out what the original colors were supposed to be? Up to the last bit of precision? Never? Our realities are full of delusion.

That said, I would be grateful is someone uploaded team color textures from 1.31 or 1.30 or 1.29.2. This is not settled yet. See "/ReplaceableTextures/TeamColor/*". You will need CascView.
Are there any other team color sources I've missed? Reforged lobby doesn't count, it has shaded icon variations.

PS: @Retera was not involved in the writing of this article.

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I sought enlightenment, but all I found was darkness.

 

[Retera]

Can we also talk about how the color Purple seemed to not be the same from 1.29 onwards? Or am I misremembering that?

Certainly I tried extracting the glows above and as you mentioned, the Reforged one has way different artifacting that is much more visible. I don't think I have to tell you which of the above two images is "Reforged Classic"

But I guess in the end maybe they landed on the same color.

 

[Luashine]

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@Retera you are so right. I didn't see it in your images, because you used upscaling with smoothing. I had used nearest neighbor for 256px images below.

SD Purple Team Glow texture from 1.21​

nice and smooth gradient

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SD Purple Team Glow texture from Reforged 2.0.4​

The pixelation artifacts are easily visible. Probably moreso when upscaling for use in the game world.

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Pixel differences between both textures (XOR)​

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Blizzard needs to bring back original BLP textures. The recompressed DDS is awful.