Sometimes, the chemical compounds all have the same color (black, dark gray or light gray), so I cannot know which is ammonia or else until I go into the cloud and check the status. Could it be fixed in 0.4.0?
This should be in bug reports
We’ve seen that problem before.
Could’ve sworn it was weeded out, though…
Starting a new game was a temporary fix. I’m not sure about the root cause of this issue so I’m not sure whether it will be fixed in the upcoming release.
The color scheme is arbitrary anyways, why not let the player customize it? Then every player could assign colors to the compounds as they see fit. This would also solve all issues with colorblindness too, as the player could avoid colors they can not distinguish.
You could even allow to set multiple color schemes and bind them to hotkeys. This way, you could highligt the compound that you are hunting for and have the others some neutral color where you see that “there is some stuff” but not pay attention to it.
Highlighting would also solve the problem of colors mixing into the color of something else. Ammonia + Oxygen is hard to distinguish from glucose for example. If you are hunting for glucose, you could make glucose green and the other compounds grey, so whenever you see green, you know that there is actually glucose there.
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Alastar, you’re a genious.
What if we made every compound cloud have a different texture?
Concerns of realism could be made - compounds are the most basic structure, but perhaps we could design something that looks natural and fluid, yet distinct.
Different texture doesn’t help, you still have the “mixing problem”. If you overlay colors or textures you will always get an indistinguishable muddle. (You might prove me wrong, but I can’t think of textures that mix well if you have 3+ of them.)
Another option would be to make the compounds a cloud of small balls, e.g. give them a minimum scale below they can’t overlay with different compounds. This would allow to keep control over your color scheme, but it requires a lot of work to make it look good. It will still be hard to figure out what is there if you mix a lot of compounds, it will look like a rainbow colored mess of dots.
I think customizable and switchable color schemes are really the most elegant way. The only drawback I can think of is that streamers might set really odd or ugly colors when they show off the game and you have no control over that. But you could have some resonable presets, you can migitate that unless they are really showing off the power of their color schemes (and then they are advertising the feature).
I don’t think we will be going back to having compounds be individual small particles.
You can find old screenshots that show how the compounds used to look like.
With the panel showing what you are hovering over I don’t really see the benefit from this. We should select the colours to be easily distinguishable.
Perhaps something like a button for toggling showing the colours per compound (your idea about easy way to find certain one) would be worthwhile. But I won’t be spending my energy on creating a customization menu for compound colours, that is actually usable and has a preview of the game for seeing the colours in action.
So, anything else on the subject? 
We removed a bunch of old compounds and added new ones, we will need to figure out a color scheme for that