Suggestions & Ideas for strategic icons

I have indeed read your thread before. I do want differing radar blips as well. But maybe only for advanced radar (building & satellite), would make a nice difference between the two, encouraging to upgrade move to advanced.

well one of he main points I do push for there is the sticky ID of buildings you've already scouted which you seem to be for as well.

this. x1000

keeps bugging me. so much so that I went search for this post (remembered reading it a few weeks ago) and was going to make another thread and reference back here.

but since this thread got resurrected already, i'll just draw s'more attention to it. haven't noticed any official comment on it - i really, really hope it's something they're working on!

'resurrected' fancy vocabulary right there.

I hope Uber does read this, and hopefully they will give a reply to tell us what they think. After all we're just suggesting stuff, they are the only ones who can apply our stuff. Or we'll use mods. Whichever.

The camera thing is A MUST though.

And I added the radar blip thingy from Tatsujb to the list, with the link to his thread. The discussion about that is all his.

If anyone has more links to share with ideas that haven't been mentioned yet, feel free to request.

One thing tho,

Has anyone used 'show terrestrial' option in the UI UBERFACE config?

It was one of my suggestions to add, but it was already in the game. Though it needs to be improved. Well the zoom acceleration needs to be removed/fixed first. And instead of having terrestrial icons disappear completely, have them become transparent, while orbital stuff remains normal.

I saw a nifty mod related to transparency, by Moldez. I asked him if he could do dual-colors as well.

For me the worst thing in Strat Icons right now is that they are blured, and borders are white.

Seriously, who the hell made white borders!? OK, this gives us black team color, but it also made white color not avaiable. I changed shader to have black borders.

Textures for icons are not pixel-perfect, and blured. This looks like texture filtering or mipmaps. I can't wach them for long time because my eyes hurts.

Agreed with the blurriness, needs to be fixed.

The white borders would be replaced with the secondary colors if they support dual-color icons. Why the hell not Uber?

I'm not sure what you're talking about with making white unavailable as team color. Are you talking about primary or secondary color?

Right now borders are white. This means that white color can not be used.

I don't like the idea to make borders to secount team color. Role of borders is to cut icons from game view, something like shadow. I just can't imagine blue icon with eg. yellow border. This will look bad.

Edit:
I thing icons in supcom are made rly good. Yellow border is when unit is selected. This look like these selected icons glow and we still see our team color. Changing team color to show sellection, like this is now, is not the best way. This is not clean that this is our unit. This looks like different unit on map, not unit with other state

Yes but the icon inside the actual Icon (circle, triangle) will have that color as well. It won't look bad, trust me.

Just look at this

That does look bad. But that's not how icons are done right now... They have a shadow in and around them, giving depth. This why you can play with white, because there is depth between the borders and the icon.

It won't look bad if they have depth. And aren't as bright.

Edit: have a look at the unit icons in Civilization 5, they are similar, they also have two colors. They don't look bad because they are smooth and have depth. I don't have time to find an image, I'm going offline right after this post.

I'm not here to discuss art in detail, if dual-colors are implemented, they won't look as bad as this. Everybody gets that. You can't judge by a personal visual without having seen the actual result. They'll get this right.

Edit #2: Well the civ 5 icons don't have that much depth as I remembered, but they certainly are smooth and they aren't too bright to look at. The icons do have a shadow around them, which is only visible in an actual gameplay screenshot. It's very tiny, but it makes the icons stand out from the terrain behind/around it

Agreed. The blue is a bit confusing, though it's not a player color right now. The reason why it's this color is because selection rings share the same color.

So that will need to change when they add more colors... The yellow glow is nice, but it could be around the icon, and the icon itself could change to slightly brighter state to differentiate. The selection rings would then also need to change to yellow.

With the civ 5 icons as an example I found an okay image for showing:



Have a very good look at the icons. (click to zoom in)

You can see depth in the form of shadows on the lower left of each icon. The actual image in the icon also has dark edges in the same orientation. It makes them stand out. There is also a tiny shadow/shade underneath the icon, making it stand out from the terrain more, though it's presence is hardly noticeable.

Of course icons in PA aren't that big, but that's not a problem since the images (the crossbow, axe, helmet,...) in PA are simple things like circles (for fabbers) or triangles.

In the example you can also see dual-colors in action. The colors aren't too bright and the icons are smooth.

If icons had the same style in PA, I would be terribly happy.


Back to my original question from last week:

What work should be done to the 'show terrestrial' option? Should terrestrial icons become transparent instead of completely disappearing?

I like the idea of strategic icons flashing red for units that are under attack. To add to this, something like a red X over the strat icon for 1-2 seconds when a unit dies would be nice, instead of it just vanishing from view. This would make it really easy to see where units are fighting and dying at without having to zoom in and see the shots being fired.

Pretty nifty idea right here. Added to the list.

I would like a combination of Transparent Strategic Icon's differentiation between key units and everything else, and some of SUPCOM's better use of shapes to differentiate units operating in the same layer.

Stonewood1612 said: "-Dual-color icons (so your secondary color is used for something)
The second color could be used for team armies, where teammates share the same primary color, but have a different secondary color. - Idea from Twinstar"

This would be great! In fact with 9 different colors It would be possible to distinguish 72 different teams by using stripe color for Strat Icon Outline and by allowing any color combination except same color for both stripes and main color.

I have always been puzzled by the limitation of eligible stripe colors with different main colors.

Man this thread sank into the forum pretty far down... Let's revive it.

I really hope the devs take a look at this! It's feedback after all.

Updated the OP a bit, I found an idea a while back but I can't remember...

Cheers

Not so much a strat icon suggestion as a UI suggestion in general, but grouping units as one entity.

Basically, you press a button and many units suddenly all click when one is clicked, and share one strat icon in the center of them. Press button again and they un-group and go back to being multiple individuals.

Would reduce unwanted strat icon clutter if you actually want to see most the units and only one icon to see them. Also speed up clicking specific unit groups by being a single click after the first time.

ALSO. Flashing icon when attacked, make it vanish-flashing rapid-flashing, because flashing red would obviously not work for one team color type or at least not as visibly. Vanish-rapid-flashing works for all colors equally.

Not sure about that. Is that basically squad making? What if the units have other types mixed in their blob which you didn't select? Or is that something that let's you select all units in a radius? (area command?)

Maybe strat icons should be spread out a tiny bit when you zoom very far out... would help if they were a tiny bit smaller too.

I understand that red flashing wouldn't be so great when you're red. Having the icon disappear and reappear as flashing would work, but I'm not a fan of that. The same thing with the building nano lathe fading suggestion, make it different from the actual color player red and have the border (whatever color that might be, not red.) flash red too. That's better, but still not as clear is if you were playing a different color. So I understand your point here, but I feel vanish-flashing can be used for something else, don't know what at first instant. But before I change my thoughts, I like to test things out first. Only if had more modding experience.