VPA provides great flexibility in displaying various kinds of information. You can define colors to used to display various groups of objects on the map or to write text in multiple information screens.
All color values are defined in VPA.INI. VPA first looks for VPA.INI in the current directory (from where you run VPA), then in the game directory. This way you can customize some colors for one particular game or another by creating VPA.INI with some new colors in the game directory, while the rest of the colors (not specified in that custom VPA.INI) will be read from the main INI file.
Screen colors are specified in a special section of VPA.INI named [Colors]. This is how it looks (comments on the right are added for here only, they are not present in VPA.INI):
[Colors]
These are numeric values for all colors. You should specify numbers in VPA.INI.
Black = 0 |
Dark Gray = 8 |
Blue = 1 |
Light Blue = 9 |
Green = 2 |
Light Green = 10 |
Cyan = 3 |
Light Cyan = 11 |
Red = 4 |
Light Red = 12 |
Magenta = 5 |
Light Magenta = 13 |
Brown = 6 |
Yellow = 14 |
Light Gray = 7 |
White = 15 |
These are the colors for:
PlanetInfo |
= 10 |
planet info screen |
OldPlanetInfo |
= 2 |
old data in planet info screen |
BaseInfo |
= 9 |
starbase info screen |
ShipInfo |
= 3 |
ship info screen |
StormInfo |
= 2 |
ion storm info screen |
WormInfo |
= 5 |
wormhole info screen |
NeutralPlanet |
= 15 |
neutral/unknown planet on the map |
WeakStorm |
= 2 |
weak ion storm on the map |
ModerateStorm |
= 14 |
moderate ion storm on the map |
DangerousStorm |
= 4 |
dangerous ion storm on the map |
Wormhole |
= 13 |
wormhole on the map |
FlyPath |
= 5 |
ship's fly path on the map |
TowPath |
= 14 |
ship's path under tow on the map |
Trace |
= 5 |
ship's trace on the map |
DistLine |
= 6 |
distance line on the map |
Message |
= 3 |
text color in the message screen |
HighLight/ |
= 14 |
highlighted text colors in the |
HighLight_ |
= 15 |
message screen: text between pairs |
HighLight* |
= 13 |
of "/", "_" and "*" |
Also color profiles are defined in VPA.INI. Color profiles are used to define colors for planets, bases, ships and mines belonging to different races. Color profiles are defined like that:
Profile = ProfileName,PlanetColor,BaseColor,ShipColor,MineColor
Profile = Own,9,11,2,3
Profile = Enemy,14,12,12,5
Profile = Ally,13,10,3,3
After the "Profile" keyword and an equal sign, there is profile name followed by numeric values of planet, base, ship and mine colors. Three color profiles are defined here. They are the default profiles:
When you run VPA for the first time for a particular game, it auto-creates a file named VPACLRn.INI, where "n" is your race number. For example, if you are playing Robots and your teammate is Colonies, and you have both the RST files UNPACKed into the same directory, VPACLR9.INI will look like this:
RACECOLOR1 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR2 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR3 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR4 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR5 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR6 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR7 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR8 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR9 = OWN
RACECOLOR10 = ENEMY
RACECOLOR11 = ALLY
VPA automatically assigned "Own" colors to you, "Ally" colors to your teammate, and "Enemy" colors to all other races.
Of course, you may wish to change it (for instance, if you have allies, who are not your teammates, e.g., you don't have their RST files). Then you can manually edit VPACLRn.INI and assign any colors you wish to any races.
You can also create your own color profiles. To do this, just add another "Profile = ..." line to VPA.INI and assign the new profile to any races.
For example, you wish to paint Crystalline planets Green, bases - Light Green, ships - Light Magenta and mines - Light Gray. This is what you do:
VPA.INI: Profile = Crystals,2,10,13,7
VPACLRn.INI: RaceColor7 = Crystals
Just don't forget to backup your custom VPA.INI when you install a new version of VPA, because the distributive contains the standard VPA.INI file. See VPA FAQ on "Custom VPA configurations and new versions of VPA".
