Thanks Freddy, your colours look good. For some reason I feel that red should be at the top of the list, maybe because it's the default colour in KaM
I think I'll move maroon to after brown.
EDIT: I've made a new palette for the map editor:
Iterating RGB does not give an intuitive palette layout, so I generated this palette by iterating hue, brightness and saturation (in that order). There are 17 hues, 4 brightness levels and 4 saturation levels. At the bottom is a 16 colour grayscale from black to white. This gives 17*4*4 + 16 = 288 colours in total. Originally I used 15 hues so there were 256 colours, but then there was no solid yellow (just orange-yellow and yellow-green) so I increased it to 17 hues which gives a nice yellow. It still fits in the UI nicely so I don't think it's a problem.
Then I thought that saturation isn't as important as brightness, so I changed it to be: 17 hues, 5 brightness levels, 3 saturation levels: (15x18 grid)
This seems better than the first palette, but it's hard to tell. Maybe you prefer the first one? (the first one has 18 more colours)
I think this palette is a fairly good compromise between:
- Covering a good range of colours
- Having a nice intuitive layout (each row is a different hue, darkest on left, brightest on right)
- Being easy to generate (I'm not going to hand pick 256 colours and manually lay them out on a grid, I want a simple algorithm like this to do it)
If someone wants to suggest a better palette (or algorithm to generate one) please let me know. Keep in mind that the colours are hard to judge within the palette, you need to see them on their own. For example the lowest saturation colours (columns of grey) look like they are almost completely grey, but when you see them on their own they are clearly not.