[REL] Improved strategic icons (updated: v50742, ALL icons)

UPDATED: This now takes into account the new strategic icons system from version 49900. It contains unique icons for every unit and structure currently in the game (including icons that originally don't yet have icons, e.g. all sea structures except naval factories, nuke launcher, etc). It also uses secondary team colours, made possible by v50000.
First off, here are the files (with instructions to install):



If you prefer to use the mod manager, you can use the following file:




Now some images.



Some older images:





What's missing so far:

• Some tweaking to make sure icons are readable for all primary/secondary team colour combinations. At the moment the border is changed from black to white if the primary team colour is too dark, but nothing else.
• (Optional) Ability to see if icon is selected or not, to make unit selection clearer.

Any suggestions or comments welcome! Please report any bugs here, e.g. a unit appears with the wrong weapon type, etc.

Old previews: 1, 2, and 3.

Further images (even more outdated) here and here.


Old version:
There's a few glitches I haven't ironed out. Some units are missing icons or sharing icons they shouldn't (for instance there are no separate fabricator icons for air/sea), and for some reason the torpedo launcher is using the icon for the sonar.

For the moment I'm waiting on:

• Removal of the hard coded limit on strategic icons, to be able to have different icons for every unit/structure,
• Figuring out how to use the secondary team colour (not sure if that's possible at this stage),
• Figuring out how to change the icons (in the code, not necessarily accessing a different texture file) depending on whether they are selected or not (again, not sure if this is currently feasible)

Very old version: image

The factories are missing icons to say which type of factories they are. I'm also missing some T1/T2 information, and there aren't separate icons for bot fabricators yet (and more...).

For the preview, I hard-coded the icons to look red, and picked white as a main team colour, so that the white pixels in the source files remained white.

I've made up a scheme that tries to convey quickly what each unit does. The shape of the icon indicates the unit type (tank/bot/flying etc, with variations between e.g. light and heavy tanks). The black part inside the icon indicates possible targets (e.g. can attack ground, or can attack air, etc), whereas the white part indicates the weapon type (laser, missiles, artillery...).


If anyone has a solution to be able to have different icons for all different units, and a consistent way to have more than just black as a colour (aside from team colour), I'd be happy to try to make a first version of the icons and see if people think they're readable enough, or even useful at all over say the SupCom icons. In the end, it'll probably be a matter of preference, with everyone free to pick various different sets of icons.

Re: Improved strategic icons

I'd recommend you use SupCom's system for differentiating between unit types. Triangles for air, diamonds for tanks, long hexagons for bots, semicircles for navals.

Re: Improved strategic icons

Yeah, I know. I didn't want to just use SupCom's system blindly though.
I find that the air icons make a lot of sense intuitively, but I wasn't so convinced with the diamonds vs hexagons. Of course, after many games of SupCom it's kind of ingrained in my mind, but I don't think it's necessarily too intuitive. I'm still experimenting, if this ends up not being particularly readable I might switch some stuff back to look like it does in SupCom.

Re: Improved strategic icons

How did you make white pixels there? Everything i made is multiply by team color

Re: Improved strategic icons

Yeah. I don't know how to use multiple colours right now, so I just cheated, as I explained in the first post:

Re: Improved strategic icons

I like those icons but i think they (Uber) will add that later on but for now this is a useful mod

Re: Improved strategic icons

OK, I've updated the icons, now you can download and try them. It's still pretty rough, especially with the limited number of icons we have to play with at the moment.

For those interested in how it works, the colours are basically coded in RGB in the icons, making them look like this:



Then I modified the textured_unlit_bgra_colorized.fs file that Ben mentioned.
For most team colours, what this does is that black stays black, red becomes team colour, green becomes white, and blue becomes black too. Things are a bit different for dark team colours, giving a white border.

Here's a preview:

Re: Improved strategic icons

For the doubly curious, here's an image showing the principles from which I made these icons.

Initially a lot of the icons for the weapon types were more schematic (so that the "bomb" weapon looked more like a bomb, etc), but I didn't think it ended up reading too well.

Re: Improved strategic icons

I updated the icons again, making them a bit smaller, and changing the code for later improvements.

For the moment I'm waiting on:

• Removal of the hard coded limit on strategic icons, to be able to have different icons for every unit/structure,
• Figuring out how to use the secondary team colour (not sure if that's possible at this stage),
• Figuring out how to change the icons (in the code, not necessarily accessing a different texture file) depending on whether they are selected or not (again, not sure if this is currently feasible)

If anyone has some pointers for any of those problems, please say so.

I think the best would be to make a shader purely specialised to the strategic icons, as the one I'm changing now is a generic shader that just happens to currently only be used for strategic icons. And it should be fed the useful pieces of information: primary and secondary team colours, as well as icon state (selected or deselected).

Re: Improved strategic icons

Nice work. I like it that its not just the supcom icons, which to be honest, I never was a big fan of.

Re: Improved strategic icons

nice, these are much easier to read

Re: Improved strategic icons

GAH! you cheater! I was like I want my icons to do that tooo! D:



JESUS CHRIST and people said supcom's icons were complex

Check out mine:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/227 ... ticons.zip

Re: Improved strategic icons

As I said later on, I've since altered the shading code to get the icons to use multiple colours. At the moment 4 colours are possible (one for black, one for the red channel, one for the blue channel, and one for the green channel).

You should be able to cook up your own by downloading my strategic icons.

Not bad, but I was trying to go for a bit more than just the SupCom icons (and other people have already done that).

Re: [REL] Improved strategic icons

My only crit is that a lot of the symbols use team color #2 sitting on top of team color #1. There's no guarantee these won't be the same color in the future, or that the two colors will work well for this. Eg: blue and orange will look great on vehicles, but will be horrible on icons.

Re: [REL] Improved strategic icons

Yeah, that's a very good point. I spent a fair amount of time trying to think of how to use multiple colours so that there are never problems with colours being too similar.

At the moment I'm not even using the secondary team colour (I don't have access to that in the shader code). When I get the opportunity to do that, no doubt I'll end up having to write loads of special cases in the code so that the icons are always legible...

I don't see the problem with blue on orange for instance though, it might not look very pretty but it should be rather readable.

Of course I haven't put any thought into people with colour blindness, it seems like it'll be quite hard to accommodate them.

Re: [REL] Improved strategic icons

Aah, ok. I thought the yellow on red in the first image was primary = red and secondary = yellow. My bad then.

The problem with orange on blue is that it causes an afterimage effect (explained in my link above). It really only becomes a problem when we have shapes we're trying to parse - like letters, or in this case symbols. It's not nearly as much a problem as having two similar colors, but from a design perspective it's not ideal.

Re: [REL] Improved strategic icons (updated: v49900)

I've updated the icons again, after the release of the strategic icons in the alpha following version v49900. All units now have T1/T2 indicators, and should all have unique icons specifying weapon type and targets (land/air/sea). If anything isn't correct, please tell me and I'll try to correct it as soon as possible.

Any comments welcome. I'm all for simplifying the scheme even further, as I know sometimes it can be hard to distinguish, but I wanted unit type, weapon type and targets to all be clear from the icons (which I know might be a bit much to ask!).

As mentioned in the first post, some icons are still missing until Uber put them into the game. This includes the catapult, nuke and anti-nuke buildings, as well as all naval buildings (except factories) and submarines. For some reason, the T1 air scout icon doesn't work either.

Re: [REL] Improved strategic icons (updated: v49900)

Honeslty i'm a bit jealous of how gorgeous your plane icons look.


good work!

Hey maybe if we ally our forces we can find a fix to the naval structures (nuke, anti nuke, ect...) showing up as radar blips.

Re: [REL] Improved strategic icons (updated: v49900)

I updated the images in the first post to reflect recent improvements, for instance each factory has its own unique icon now.

I'm still struggling with secondary colours. I think I need to come up with an elaborate algorithm that finds the best colour to give a good contrast and readability respective to each primary team colour. At the moment the scheme is rather simplistic.

As for the blips, I think we just have to wait for Uber on that one. Once they get those icons in the game, we'll be able to change them.

Re: [REL] Improved strategic icons (updated: v49900)

To add new icons, you need to do one or both of the following:

Adding addition icons:

Create the new icon in PA\media\ui\alpha\icon_atlas\img\strategic_icons. Make sure it's named "icon_si_<name>.png"

Edit the file PA\media\ui\alpha\icon_atlas\icon_atlas.js, and add <name> to the self.strategicIcons array.

Changing what icon a unit uses:
By default, a unit will use the strategic icon named icon_si_<unit name>.png, if present & listed in the strategicIcons array. To change this, you need to add a field to the unit's blueprint called "si_name", with the value of the icon name you want to use (as listed in icon_atlas.js)