Strategic icons

Icons are blurry because they're not scaled 1:1 icon pixel to screen pixel. This is not intentional, that part of the UI just needs a ton of work. Unfortunately other things have been higher priority for a while. Strat icons and health bars are in a "playable" state; kind of ugly but functional.

Health bars are effectively first pass, though they've gone through a few revisions art wise, they've not gotten much work from the programming side because, well, see above.

Icon grouping is planned, but ... see above.

We have an option for icon scaling (fixed, not size relative) but that's also part of the reason they're blurry.

In answer to "Make strat icons == SupCom!", no. We certainly have more we can draw from what has been done on other games, but we're not those games and we kind of do have to be different. (Both from a legal and from a respect to other devs standpoint.)


A little insight into game dev:
Frequently when a new feature is put into a game it goes in what is affectionately known as "programmer art". This is a kind term for ugly. This also isn't always unintentional. Many programmers I know will do the worst art they can do, even if they are capable of less ugly art, and they do this 100% intentionally to get a real artist to do a pass as well as make it obvious it's a first pass implementation. This can stay in a game for days, months, or even years, but it's often helpful as a way to keep track of what still needs work.

However, two things also tend to happen:
An artist sees the very crappy art on the first pass implementation of a new feature and does a "pretty" pass on it, usually with out a fellow programmer available to finish functionality. So now we have a first pass feature with what looks like it could be final art but isn't final art or even fully functional, and it stays like that until late in development because polish tends to happen much further along.
For us we also tend to do a little bit extra art on what would otherwise be temp artwork because we've been sending the game to consumers for a while and that tends to lead to premature pseudo-polish passes on features that aren't yet ready for a polish pass. We as devs can often be much more resilient to ugly stuff than the average player, so we try to do a little extra clean up than we might normally on a less public project.

Thank you for reply.

I said copy how it works not Everything about it

seriously I never had any probs with the icons there no matter the amount of units or anything on the ground.

sure it needs to be different in look or something and needs some extra for orbital stuff but why fix or change something that works ?

its almost like that anyway....

Still not going to work because SupCom is flat and PA is multispherical.

And what do you mean by "how it works" aside from the fact that they are pixelated?

In the meantime, anyone wanna try these?

try the shader first.

if it doesn't work, patch the files and try the icons alone, if the shader works, you can use the two together.

I've mentioned this before but it bears bringing up again as it's relevant. There's a mod for Forged Alliance Forever that resizes the icons and changes a lot of the markings to make them easy to differentiate. This is excellent because it means that it is much easier to identify important threats and so on. Specifically the way that long-range offensive buildings are highlighted in such a way as to make them very obvious, but also things like colour-coding similar types of buildings.

bigger icons isn't better for a game with massive scale. It's smaller icons that you need.

personally I couldn't use the above.
I need the screen space, i just couldn't play competitively with these.

One of the main motivations for the FAF mod was that the standard SupCom icons are too small in high-res.

If you're playing in 1920x1080, it's so much easier with those icons. Obviously the PA icons will have to be scaled correctly (they seem fine now in terms of size), but it would be nice if they had more identifying features like the FAF mod.

That really depends on your screen resolution, size and distance from it. I think icon scale and overall UI scale should be in the options.

We are planning to do an overhaul on strategic icons, if that helps you any.

Is it possible to make them re-loadable during a game? I tried to make a framework that would let people have multiple icon sets loaded and choose which one to use via the settings screen, but the current method doesn't seem to allow this, at least from my (admittedly limited) testing.

why do strategic icons not use your secondary color? You'll need it for those 40-player matches.

this is purely opinion. I play FA on 1920x1080 and i use the original icons, and I find it much better that way. i do however have the faf edits on them but i agree with all of them 100%

there's actualy a mod that does, it's xedi's icon set.

he showed me how to change the shader for my icon mod so i could have a separate color for nuke, inverting borders, so and so.

One more comment for the new icons system : currently, the commander icon seems to be on the lowest icons layer, as shown on this pic :



IMO, the commander icon should always be on top to easily find it.

I definitely agree with a lot of what is said here. The symbols that represent each unit are hard to distinguish between, clump like crazy, and I can't tell what the hell is what. I also can't find my orbital units for the life of me (literally in some cases).

I've been using this mod for the icons:

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-transparent-uniticons-version-2.55376/

Especially the bomber icons look great and are much more easy to distinguish from other air units.

did you try mine ^^ ?

No, actually I installed that one originally for the transparency but stayed for the bomber icons.

The spacing idea seems fine, but the army icon merging, not my cup of tea.

Well I hope we have team colours as an option, so that friends are green, enemy's red and me blue!