Better yet, what's wrong with different colored horses being caused to spawn, including black, and people can let this whole black horse issue be put to rest? Is there reeeeeeally a good reason for the only colorful/black horses to be Nightmares and Fire Steeds (tamer only)?
Basically, there are a few body types of horses in UO (body type meaning it has a different underlying hueing scheme), and when you apply color hues to the horses, you can end up with varying degrees of depth and shades depending on which type of horse you applied it to. Some types of horses do NOT look nice with a certain color applied to them, whereas the other body/hue type can look decent with that same color applied.
I was able to come up with nice looking horse colors on my old private shard, but certain color and body type combos had to be avoided because they just didn't work well. In fact, the ones that worked well were fewer in number than the bad looking ones.
An example of this type of thing: people note that some nightmares are much blacker than others. To the best of my judgement, the super dark nightmares are the deep-hued body type (uncolored, it's the dark brown horse) with black applied, and the lighter ones are the other body types. The applying of a black color happened to work okay on all the body types (the dark brown one being the nicest as you can see yourself) but if you took say, red, and put it on all the body types, it looked bad on some of them. Yellow looked nice and natural on some of them and outright bad on others. If they did implement colored horses, they couldn't just throw out random horse colors onto random body types. There would have to be some established ranges and colors for each body type. It wouldn't have to be as precise as they did the CUs, but there would have to be some care taken with it.
They have clearly put some additional consideration into pet colors since the time that horses were all that we had to ride. For example, that snow-white color looked horrible on any and all horse bodies, yet in today's UO they got it looking quite nice on the snow-white CUs you see around. You may not LIKE some of the grey colors or brown colors that you see on CUs but, as pet huing goes, they did a good job with all of them. It's easy to apply a hue to an animal body in UO and have it come out looking nasty, is the thing, it's touchy to get it looking decent. None of these recent pets look *wrong* (CUs, ostards, I'm thinking).
Colored normal horses are about 7 years overdue in UO, in my opinion.
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I acknowledge that nowadays very few people ride UO horses, but with some nice colored horses available, maybe the trend of riding anything-but-a-regular-horse would shift a bit (because people would like them better). One of those Why Not kind of things - if there's a nice looking pet that anyone can ride, even though it's not an ethy, I think some people would want to do it. I bet the snow-white and red ones would be liked, as well as the blacks.
