Aren't those screenshots a bit excessively big?
I just didn't have time to size them down. That's the resolution I took them at.
Is it possible to handle the wormhole names under the new icon system? Perhaps the two mantis issues I opened regarding difficulty reading the names on a bright background(0019056) and how the wormhole names don't rotate when you rotate your view(0019057) can be easily fixed with it.
We could do that if we switched to a bitmap font for those names, but you run into potential clarity issues with that. It was one of the things that always held us back in the fonts in older Arcen titles. That said, needing a stroke around them pretty much requires bitmap fonts, and given that it's a pretty good bet we should use our old system. Trying to do a stroke in realtime is a suuuuper slow operation for fonts in particular, so it's pretty much prerendering or bust. Which means that you're basically right -- we have to go to that other system for that bit at least.
I do think the readability could be improved a bit more just by thickening the borders of the icon glyphs with a darker shade of the same color. That way, when you have a pile of multiple icons they remain a bit more distinct. Sort of like how right now, when you select them, you get a white border; if the unselected state had a slightly dimmed orange/blue border rather than just having a single color, I think that would help somewhat.
There actually are already borders that are there, but not super clear. But... that said, using the borders that we see for selections is a great idea! I was going to do something way more complex.
I agree that should help a lot.
It looks amazing! It's a wonderful improvement over what we had before, and I am a huge fan. I'm sure I'll have useful feedback going forward, but the icons look wonderful as a first pass.
Thank you!
the icons are still "too uniform" and bright, frankly, on the black background my eyes water a bit when I try to make out details.
Too uniform in size or in gradient? I'd like to get more done in them with gradient for sure. That was something that I'd been aiming for from earlier in the process, but it's something that was really hard for Blue to shoot for with no way to visually see the end results. Now she can see the results, so that should help a lot.
Eh, seeing this, I definitely want non-shaped colored blips now as an option more than ever....
We can potentially make a settings option, since what you're asking for doesn't sound that complicated.
You're an artist -- can you give a rough mock of what you have in mind, or point to some other example? Do you just mean literally little dots that are colored?Okay, I understand what you want, you explained that further down in the thread. The white artifacting is something relating to the shader and mostly-transparent pixels. I need to look into that bit more.
The bright green neon wormhole could be toned down a bit.
I'll see what I can do -- I'm looking at bloom in general first probably, so we'll see what that does to start with.
I would definitely want to see options that we can customize to our own tastes. E.g. for the person who thought AI War had a good sidebar (not me mind you), and one for someone like me who would like to see ships grouped up like Bombers: Me# Friend# Enemy# in one row, so I don't have to hunt for the particular bomber that is mine, I can look for bombers once, and see immediately which is mine.
This is a decision for Keith, not me, but I would like to give my support to this idea. If he thinks it is feasible, I would also appreciate this sort of thing.
