As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to create random Color3 values in a clean way.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it would greatly improve my scripting flow when creating random colors.
Currently to create random colors I must type the following line: Color3.new(math.random(), math.random(), math.random())
This is repetitive and makes things much harder to read when you have lots of code.
I propose that something along the lines of Color3.random([minHue], [maxHue], [minSat], [maxSat], [minVal], [maxVal]) be implemented. This allows full control of the appearance of output colors and makes things much quicker since you now only need to type Color3.random() to create a random color.
This greatly reduces clutter in code that uses random colors and makes things much more readable especially because it’s much less repetitive and isn’t as easily confused with other similar lines.
Example uses:
-- Black and white noise
Color3.random(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1) -- 0-0 hue, 0-0 saturation (bw), 0-1 value
-- Fully saturated noise
Color3.random(0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1)
-- Random shade of green
Color3.random(0.43, 0.43, 1, 1, 0, 1)
There are so many different things you might want to do that I don’t think a built-in random method would actually be that helpful.
Take the following examples:
Generate a color between violet and orange excluding green. (Not possible because min/max doesn’t take into account the continuity of hue).
Generate the same sequence of colors multiple times. (Not possible because there’s no way to set the seed of the generator/the random object used to generate the color).
For that reason, it would make more sense to write a helper function that suits your own needs. A basic implementation might be as follows:
local rand = Random.new()
local function randomColor()
return Color3.new(rand:NextNumber(), rand:NextNumber(),
rand:NextNumber())
end
Random colors are an anti-pattern, if you’re using random colors in this sort of way then you’re probably doing something wrong, or at the very least suboptimally.
For end user facing stuff, color palette matters. You should be carefully choosing a palette of “random” colors to choose from ahead of time so that the colors actually match the aesthetic of your game
For debug info, you don’t want random colors either. You want well distributed colors so that you can differentiate whatever it is you’re tagging with the colors as easily as possible.
But I do use random colors in more complex ways. While random colors are generally not useful I do use them quite a bit in specific situations. Ones where I need to make sure contrast, brightness, etc are working as I intend them to, such as above, or when I need to make things look/feel more interesting in a subtle way.
Additionally I specifically suggested the API in my post since it allows for more control of what random colors you get. I actually use mono colored noise in most of my graphics although it’s so subtle sometimes that you wouldn’t know. If you were to compare two of my images, one without noise, the other with, you’d see the difference and you’d probably say that the one with noise looks more interesting even though the texture is so subtle.
So I do think random colors can be used well for sure. For example, if you wanted to add variation to terrain colors in a voxel based game. I can think of a lot of places I’ve used randomness like this for colors in Roblox and I think it is worth it’s own function.
For example, here’s my logo with and without noise (The hues don’t match perfectly but it’s pretty close)
These are much less subtle compared to some of my images but comparing the top vs the bottom image you can really see the difference.
Noise is still not a good use case for this because all it offers is static, which is about the worst kind of noise you can use in most scenarios.
You can already construct a color from HSV using Color3.fromHSV. Anyone with an advanced use case is probably just going to need to drop back to using that for more control, so I feel all that this API would do is encourage people using random colors where they shouldn’t.
