User:Numaris/PaintByNumbers

This is a work in progress.

Welcome to Paint By Numbers, a guide to finding your personal paint reactions. It aims to be a simple and step-by-step, providing you with just enough information to do what you need to do.

In boxes like this, I'll go more into the technical side of paint and the theory behind the method I present. None
of this information will be required to follow the guide, so if you're not interested, you can safely skip the rest
of these.

How Does Paint Work?

To make paint, you add a number of ingredients to a Pigment Laboratory, and the colors mix to give you your paint. Sounds simple, right? Well here's the catch: many of the ingredients react with each other, and the strength of these reactions depends on the person mixing the paint. That's why if you've tried a recipe you found on someone's user page, it probably didn't work. And that's why if you want to get your optimum recipes, you'll need to do some work yourself.

This information is available in several places already, so I'll just summarize... the base color of your paint
is a weighted average of the RGB values of the ingredients you added. The final color is that base RGB value summed
with all the various reactions.

Which ingredients react is the same for all avatars, as is what colors are affected. Some reactions only change
the Green value of the paint, some only the Blue, some only the Red, and some change all three. No reaction changes
only two values. For those that change all three (termed "white reactions"), all three are changed by the same
constant value. Reaction values range from -64 to +64.

The order in which ingredients are added *does* matter. Although they will affect the same color(s) either way,
the actual reaction value for Ingredient A followed by Ingredient B will be different from Ingredient B followed
by Ingredient A.

The Method

Finding your paint reactions is a matter of very simple math. Thankfully, you won't have to do any of it... the spreadsheet will take care of all that for you. To put it simply, we can compute the expected value of mixing two ingredients together, based on their "natural" colors. To find your reaction, all we have to do is mix the ingredients and compare your actual measured value to that expected value.

There are two common methods for getting the "measured" value: by length (of the color bars in the Pigment Lab) and
by color (of the splotch on the Pigment Lab). Color is often favored because it requires less squinting and exact
pixel precision, but it's not 100% accurate because of issues regarding the background of the window or some such. I
use the length method, which requires a little more attention to detail, but if done correctly is spot-on accurate.

Preparation

Here's what you'll need to get started:

In-game:

• A handful (5 should be plenty) of all the paint ingredients:
  • Cabbage Juice
  • Carrots
  • Clay
  • Dead Tongue Mushrooms
  • Toad Skin Mushrooms
  • Earth Light Mushrooms
  • Red Sand
  • Lead
  • Silver Powder
  • Iron
  • Copper
  • Sulfur
  • Potash
  • Lime
  • Saltpeter
• A healthy stack (150+, to be safe) of whichever ingredient you consider cheapest. I like Red Sand, others prefer Clay or Cabbage Juice. This will be referred to as your "bulk ingredient" and will be used to flush away paints when you're done.
• A Pigment Laboratory. If you don't have one of your own, check your local public works.

Out of Game:

• A tool that shows you the X,Y location of your mouse cursor on the screen. I like Nattyware Pixie; it's a Windows program but works via Wine on Linux. I'm not familiar with Macs, but you should be able to find a similar tool.
• The PaintByNumbers spreadsheet, which is in OpenOffice Calc format. OpenOffice is available in all platforms you can play ATITD on.
• Sigil's PracticalPaint, or a similar paint analyzer tool. PracticalPaint only runs on Windows... unfortunately, I've not been successful getting it to run under Wine.

Using Pixie

(If you're not using Pixie, you may still want to read this section so you know what to look for in the tool you've chosen.)

(PLACE IMAGE HERE)

This is Pixie. It's a handy little tool that helps you discern the locations and colors of objects on your screen. The top line of text shows you the coordinates of your mouse cursor (this one is at X=735, Y=727). The square on the left shows you the color of the pixel directly under your cursor (brown, in this case), and the rest of the text values are a variety of ways of representing the numeric value of that color. You won't have to worry about any of those here... you just need the coordinates (but the colored square is a good visual indicator of when you're in the right spot). Pixie will always stay on top of ATITD and any other windows you have up.

Setting up the Lab

In order to compute your measured color values, we're going to find the length of one of the three color bars in the Pigment Lab. In order to do that, we need to know the location of the start (left end) of the bars. So pin the Pigment Lab's menu up, and find the first pixel of the bars. Here's what you're looking for:

(PLACE IMAGE HERE)

In this case, the first pixel of the bars is at X=367 (the first number on the first line of Pixie). At this point there's a little setup we can do to make life easier for us... drag the menu around until that first pixel is on a *01 coordinate... that is, 301, or 401, or 701, etc.