Strategic icons readibilty.

First of, the new Icons are way better than the last ones imho. But...



...these guys are very difficult to tell apart, especially when they are moving.

the part that actually tell what function they have is very small and the same size, makes it easy to mistake them from each other.

personally I also generally have difficulties finding my engineers, as that small 3 pixel box isn't quite putting them apart from other units enough.

that's just my opinion, and we can always swap to using some custom icons, but I wanted to mention it and see if anyone agreed.

if there's a thread on this already I'm sorry about making this, and will move my opinion there instead.

I agree. The new icons are progress, but still have a ways to go.

Also, I think we need a panel/bar like in Sup com that shows idle commanders, factories, engineers, etc.

F cycles idle engineers now. Didnt test it so far, cause I forgot ingame xD

But I agree that the center is too small. You F5/F6 (what was it?) can fix that, but the default size should be a bit bigger already imho.

The next step will be changing what's inside the shapes. Currently I think they are TOO small, all they can fit inside is a little square or trapezoid, which is really hard to differentiate. They need different shaped lines like in supcom, (arches, crosses, etc).

I love the new icons. I had made about 5 icons for a custom set with rounded corners, and then I saw the new ones and happily deleted my work.

The only issue I have is the solid triangle vs the hollow triangle. It needs ~1 more px of empty space in there to be really distinguishable.

The icon size should be adjustable. I personally would keep them as small as possible because I am an ocular masochist.

try F5 and F6. You'll love it.

Oh then what are people complaining about? I think the new icons are totally boss at any rate.

This is neat.

Wishing out loud, it'd work better if the icons were SVGs so that we could keep borders a crisp 1px. The blurry borders make my designer's OCD kick in. Maybe I'll mod this in once I know the UI stuff well enough.

I've tried using SVG images, but it ends up still being pixel based.

Here's what it looks like with the strategic icons I made:



On the left is what the icon looks like in game after using F5 to make the icon very large, and on the right is what the SVG looks like. Just to be clear, the game is being given an SVG file, not a PNG file, but it still looks like this.

Of course that's not necessarily the end of the story, proper SVG support might come, but from the way the shader works so far it seems unlikely to me (but then what do I know).

To be honest, I don't think having resizable icons is a good idea if they're going to be pixel based, unless there are multiple sets of icons (small/medium/large). Stretching a pixel image never ends up looking nice, and when it's a simple geometric shape it's even worse.

You can use any size source files for the icons, so to overcome the pixellation, you can simply use higher res icons (current icons are only 32x32). PA will rescale the images to all be the same apparent size in-game (See [REFERENCE] Strategic Icons & Build Pictures)

No, I don't think that helps, unless I'm doing the wrong thing.

Both giving a high resolution PNG file, and giving an SVG file, give the same result: the icon is rasterised at a resolution of 32x32, and pressing F5 to enlarge the icon just upscales this 32x32 image. So even using a 400x400 PNG file (or an SVG file), the icons still don't look crisp when enlarged.

I have a habit of having to see for myself. You're right. This is a 400x400 png upscaled:

Assuming they're really being rendered by the UI engine and aren't actually 2D billboards then I assume this will be moddable in the future.

Good catch! I have some updates to make to the Icon guide, I'll include this information as well.

Strategic icons are handled in an odd way right now that'll be worked on as we go. Current version is brutally slow, though perhaps ironically the fact they're rendered into a web page isn't the reason. There should be no reason why when scaling the icons we couldn't also scale the page as well and using SVG as the source for perfect accuracy. Right now part of the problem with the current icons is they're 32x32 images being rendered at ~28x28 and being positioned at sub-pixel locations. Once we get them properly rendering at 32x32 and snapped to pixels they'll look much better.

Ah, so does that explain some artifacts we've been getting, with some black bars appearing at the edge of an icon?

That's color bleeding from other parts of the texture atlas, which is a related issue.

then check this out !

Switching to nearest-neighbor interpolation would be a good low-effort fix to make things look better, if the web page stuff doesn't make that more effort than a simple flag.