Player Colors? But What, When and Why?
Roblox has had colored usernames for the chat and player list since 2006. These colors are seemingly given at random, however any game which a player joins, will keep the same color for their name.
What colors? (Part 2)
It seems when Roblox was looking for their playlist colors, they had to solve three problems.
- What colors do we use for the players?
- How many colors should we use?
- How do we implement it?
"So, what colors did Roblox decide on, and why those in particular?"
Well, I noticed that the colors used on this page, match the colors inside roblox:
https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~wad/color/palette.html
But they didn't use all of them, and the colors they ended up choosing were:
1. Red: 173, 35, 35
2. Blue: 42, 75, 215
3. Green: 29, 105, 20
4. Purple: 129, 38, 192
5. Orange: 255, 146, 51
6. Yellow: 255, 238, 51
7. Pink: 255, 205, 243
8. Tan: 233, 222, 187
There are also other colors that Roblox doesn't use from the palette, they only ever used 8 of the 16 listed here.
They may have used this palette, because a Roblox employee googled something similar to "Colors that don't look the same" and it came up.
"How did they implement them?"
Well, they used the old ScoreHud code from back in 2005, and repurposed it for displaying names. As evidenced by the name of the player list in game.
When Colors? (Part 2)
The player colors seems to have been implemented between July 22nd and August 14th of 2006, as seen by these two archives:
Why colors? (Part 2)
It is unknown exactly why Roblox chose random colors for their player list, but one good assumption, is that Roblox wanted to differentiate between each player. Without player list colors, most likely all players would have a single color for their name, which would make it more difficult to distinguish between one player and another on first glance.