*Different chestnut and bay (and other) shades

Interactive Horse Shade Demo

Just for fun, I've put together a little interactive demo just to show what things could look like and how they could work. You can play around with it at the above link. It'll show you all the different shades we could get with each colour, which is much more extensive than the handful of examples I have on the first page.

I'd love to hear what you guys think of it. Let me know if you find any bugs, or have suggestions for improvements. Maybe post screenshots of your favourite colours? :) You should be able to use this to produce lots of things we don't have on EV, like fading black, dark bay, liver chestnut, golden palomino, ivory cremello, etc. It's capable of producing literally thousands of new colours, using just the EV art and a bit of code.

Hope you guys like it. :)

You did a very good job on that UB :)

Thank you. ♥

I really hope this will be introduced! Just playing with interactive demo, I have friesians and I absolute love darker chestnut on them!! Right now, I don't breed for chestnut because it is too bright for my taste and it cost evc to get chestnut. IF this is introduced, I will gladly spend EVCs to get me a herd of darker chestnuts! 44%+ ARE GORGEOUS!!

EDIT: I also love that it doesn't require Abbey to order new coat colors. She can just code it in and have it done a lot faster than ordering coat colors.

Last edited on 2018-11-11 at 08:40:40 by ωιςκεδ

Awesome! I can't wait for trakehners! :D

I would change the shading for black horses tho. In real life black horses never get fawn (not sure if that's the word) on legs and their manes and tails are still black unless there are zinc and copper deficiency in their diet, so they can even look like bay sometimes. Another detail is that their heads are usually darker than their torsos when they get fawn.


I was about to suggest it separately in "Suggestion and Ideas", but it would be probably hard to do - black horses get fawn only during spring and summer. Since we got seasons in this game this would be a nice addition.

AND! There are still black horses which are not getting fawn at all. There is a gene which determines those purely black coats whole year. Dr. Philip Sponenberg wrote few articles about the ED gene - dominant black. But, as I said, it would be a lot of work to induce new gene here ^^

Last edited on 2018-11-11 at 14:56:53 by Carin Ravensdale

@Carin Ravensdale
Thanks for the tip about fading black. I didn't realise it behaved like that. I've changed the program so that black now uses bay as the shading layer instead of chestnut. This will keep the legs, mane and tail as black, while the body will be lighter. Unfortunately this also applies to the face, but I think this is going to be the closest we can get without creating entirely new art. I do like the way it looks a lot better now though.

Under this system dominant black would be equivalent to the original black, and fading black would be the lighter shades. So although it won't behave the same genetically, we'll at least have something that looks the same. :)



Also, just to clarify: now that I've coded this all up I can see that in order for this to work for all breeds we will actually need some new breed art, but this will only be 9 new images, and for that we will get literally thousands of new colours, so I would argue it's definitely worth it. The new images we will need are: white Akhal-Teke, white Andalusian, white Morgan, white Trakehner, white Welsh Pony, flaxen Akhal-Teke, flaxen Thoroughbred, flaxen Trakehner, bay Friesian. Note that these would just be used for shade layers - the breed wouldn't necessarily be getting these colours added to it.

Thanks everyone for your feedback. It's greatly appreciated. :)

Looks amazing now ♥

I've just updated the program with some better code which just calculates things in a better way. This is probably a better reflection of how it might work on EV. A side effect of this is that it now works for all breeds. ;)
Since some art files are missing there will be some colour/breed combinations where the shade doesn't change, and there's nothing that can be done about this unless those art files are added to the game, but the vast majority of things will work just fine.

Last edited on 2018-11-13 at 07:25:31 by UlyssesBlue

Unfortunately flaxen and grey are missing, but that demo is awesome anyway. :)

Also I am curious how would grullo look if edited with brown or similar colour layer. If I remember correctly, grullo on some horses looks more like what morgans have as smoky black dun and smoky blacks look more brown than they look on EV.

Last edited on 2018-11-13 at 10:52:57 by sikora

Adding in flaxen and grey is a simple addition. :) I'll include them in my next update to the code.

Grullo is a bit more complicated. To change the game's grey-type grullo to some sort of brown-type grullo is actually a fairly drastic change, and it's difficult to do it in a way that works. The problem is that they're just so different. I'd speculate that they're actually two different colours, and we're looking at an unknown modifier acting on grullo. For this reason I'd favour the current solution of just having different shades of grey-type grullo using black as a shade layer.

However if you wanted to just see what it looks like probably the best way to achieve this is to add a partially transparent classic dun or bay layer over top of the grullo. I'll leave this to you to play around with in photoshop though, rather than add it to my program. A small suggestion: keep the opacity down or the horse turns pink. :P

I would love to see this, too, because it would simulate modifiers which would be seen in real life, and add a little bit of unpredictability and surprise to what I got, making bays and chestnuts more interesting.  This is especially true of breeds such as the Arabians and the Dutch Warmbloods, which come in very few color varieties.  I would prefer if having a parent of one shade of bay or chestnut would increase the probability that the offspring would have that shade, just so it can be semi-heritable and I could more or less favor the version I prefer, but I know that could become difficult in the coding, so I wouldn't complain if this did not happen, just having the randomness of the variation would be fun, too.

The way I envision the breedability aspect working is that each horse is assigned a shade value between 0 and 100, where 0 corresponds to the lightest version of their colour, and 100 is the darkest shade. The opacity of the shade layer in the art is directly related to the shade value (similar to how my shade demo program works). When two horses are bred together their colour genetics combine in the usual way (completely independent of shade), and the foal's shade value would be equal to the average of the parents' shade values, plus/minus some random number related to the difference in values (or standard deviation). This would mean that if you breed together horses with similar shade values the foal will have only a small range of possible shade values, but if you breed together horses with very different shade values the foal will have a very wide variety of possible shade values.

The formula could perhaps be something like this:
Foal Shade = 0.5*(SireShade + DamShade) + R*(SireShade - DamShade)
where R is a random number between -1 and +1.
(You could perhaps change this slightly so there's a minimum and maximum possible variation in the foal shade.)

As an example, consider a dark chestnut breeding with a (relatively) dark cremello. (Dark cremello in this context looks like the current cremello art.) The parents' genetics could be something like this:
Sire: ee crcr      Shade: 95
Dam: ee CrCr     Shade: 88
So the above foal shade formula would give us a random value between 84.5 and 98.5, resulting in a dark palomino foal (you can use my aforementioned program to see exactly what this would look like).

If instead the shade values were wildly different, let's say 18 and 95, the foal would have equal chances of being any shade between 0 and 100.

So in general, breeding two horses with relatively dark shades of their respective colours will get you a dark foal, but with plenty of variation so it's not completely predictable. Likewise, if both parents are light, you get a light foal. And if you have a dark and a light horse you could get practically anything.

(Note: In my shade demo program it isn't currently set up so that 100 always means darkest shade, and 0 always means lightest, but it's a minor change to make this happen. I might do that in a future update.)

So much YES!!

I love this idea; my only concern however is that it'll become hard to tell, say, a darker shade of palomino apart from a flaxen chestnut if you don't look at the color mentioned on the horse's page; or if you're trying to breed for a specific shade, that it'll get hard to distinguish similar shades of the same color (since that won't be listed on the page).

I know that these aren't insurmountable obstacles, but I wanted to bring them to attention just so everyone's aware of what we might need to live with if this is introduced to the game.