The icons in Supcom, especially the building icons, can be difficult to tell apart. An FA modder named maxareuos has created modified strategic icons that make spotting important buildings much easier. This picture shows the icons as they appear in his mod: You'll notice he's used coloured borders to differentiate different types of offensive, defensive and intel structures, and also made tech levels more visible through the use of colour. I currently use this mod when I'm playing FA and it makes it so much easier to see things at a glance that it has improved my game noticeably.
I like icons. I like them easy to read and this looks awesome. But isn't there a camp of people that don't like icons? Wouldn't this be overly-intrusive to them?
The idea isn't to try to find the middle ground on every subject... That would create a wishy washy game that does nothing well but does everything.... The idea is to find the option that MOST people are either going to enjoy or be OK with. The option that clearly has good reasons behind it, sometimes these reasons won't be noticed by the public, and sometimes the public won't even understand why, but I trust the design team to know better than the public in some cases.
At the least, I trust them to know better then me at the design phase. Then during the alpha-beta I will report back on what's hot and what's not.
That image is hurting my eyes when I look at it, one of the things I liked about the stock icons is they they were crisp as hell, in that pic the icons look blurry and strain my eye a bit when switching focus from those to the rest of the elements. Mike
I also think that some of those icons are a bit pixel-ated. But I definitely like the idea of making them as easy to read as possible, as I am part of the "I could play this game with icons-only"-faction.
The icon system already does a pretty good job listing the exact unit (or at least close enough) which is being used. However, other details may be MORE important than simply knowing the unit at hand. Ammo capacity (such as in the case of nukes/antinukes) is a huge one. Health is a fairly critical attribute to determine if an army is healthy or critical. Construction progress is increasingly important as a project increases in size/difficulty. Weapon recharge is important for very slow weapons. The player may not be interested in exact values for any of these things. What matters is being able to see at a glance whether your army is ready to fight, if the big gun is going to fire, if things are hidden from enemy view, or if your base can survive the next nuke. That sort of stuff carries strategic importance.
Well some of those icons are pretty good. However, most of them still tell nothing to someone that is new to the game. A smaller square inside a bigger square doesn't really tell the function of the building. Good icon would tell the function of the unit clearly (examples from the picture: pgen, TML and SML) and be separable from other icons. But I wouldn't even mind if there was just one icon type like in TA. And the fact that the devs are trying to make units as readable and separable as possible is kinda against the icons imo, because you can't see the unit anyway if there is icon above it.
This is partially the fault of not showing icons with the unit construction. The connection has to be learned indirectly, which adds confusion to the process. I know it took me a while to learn how everything was connected. There are also some inconsistencies in Supcom's system that create unnecessary confusion. The big one is with direct fire (+) weapons. A ridiculous number of units are considered to be direct fire, despite not brawling with the enemy directly. This includes the long range shelling of a battleship and the heavy weapon damage of a bomber. One could argue that both units are different variants of artillery, with the bomber delivering its payload directly to target. The more colors and stuff you add to an icon, the more confusion it is going to cause. Connections between icon and unit status should be simple and direct. Some ideas can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=44022&hilit=strategic+icon+warfare
I don't think using colors would create confusion. Actually, I think simple color codes would make it much easier to recognize some unit types. For example: red borders: units that can shoot. yellow borders: construction units. green borders: units that produce resources. blue borders: support units (radars, stealth), unit that defend (TMD, SMD). Or something like that.
The problem with that, is when I see something red, in most games that would mean an enemy, or blue being allies, green being your own army. I think that colours would over complicate things.
Well yes, that may be a problem. Color codes should definitely be just a small part of the icon so the actual unit color is still recognizable, because the main reason of the colors is to recognize friends and foes. If they can make clear icons without using colors, that's great.
I would like to see a rethinking of the meaning of strategic icons. We don't really so much need a strategic icon to identify the exact type of every individual unit so much as we need a single icon to represent the information the player needs to know about a group from a distant zoom. Most importantly, its approximate size and current status. The player can zoom in on that group to get information about individual units.
How is a single icon going to do this? Knowing where units are is just as vital as knowing what they are and what they're doing. The only time when the battlefield isn't important is when you're scanning across worlds. Something else needs to help with that.
In the mod picture, orange borders mean AA/PD, yellow borders mean artillery, red borders mean tactical missile launchers. The nuke has a massive icon and a yellow and red border. Having played using this mod, it makes identifying and targeting high-threat buildings much easier without causing any confusion. The standard unmodded icons are all the same size and shape and have no highlighting, which can make finding a specific building hard in your own base, never mind the enemy base. The icons in the mod are frankly too big and a bit unsightly, but that is not really the point of this thread because Uber can design the icons from the ground up to look pleasing, it's just easy identification that would be a massive improvement on SupCom.
All that needs to be done is a good color scheme with good markings and also make it optional. It's always good to make interface stuff optional. I'm a terrible color person, I have no idea what fits and what doesn't but I can get used to anything so its up to the art team.
I downloaded the mod and tested it, I especially liked the metal extractor icon, it basically has a small green square in it and very easy to learn. I also liked the better engineer icon, it's a wrench, very classic, I would have used the exact same idea. However, I think that if the engineer icon had yellow borders, it would make this mod even better. It seems a very good mod indeed.
You know what would be a dream? - Scaleable GUI - Scaleable icons. - Transparency control. - "Icon Pack" can be swapped - 1-button toggle of icon "on" and "off" Modern games such as Torchlight 2 have some elements of GUI sizing and such. But a GUI overlay that the user can control takes me back to Unreal Tournament 2004. The GUI changes in the option menu were EXTENSIVE. PC games in the modern age simply don't give us users those options anymore.
