Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > The Modding Workshop

Geometric, Generic Radar Icons (WIP)

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jadeddragoon:
Update warship icons to 64px in-game size for better consistency with small craft icons

mjn.mixael:
These are really cool and that's a good change for sentries. I didn't mention it before, but I'm especially a fan of Installations, Unknown, and High Energy Sources. I don't know if I can put my finger on why, but I really like them for their use-cases.

I've been playing with the older radar icons for so long, it's going to be an adjustment for a Destroyer to have a bow shape, lol. But it did always other me when a Typhon, for instance, had an icon that looked like an Orion.

jadeddragoon:

--- Quote from: mjn.mixael on August 30, 2021, 04:26:00 pm ---These are really cool and that's a good change for sentries. I didn't mention it before, but I'm especially a fan of Installations, Unknown, and High Energy Sources. I don't know if I can put my finger on why, but I really like them for their use-cases.

I've been playing with the older radar icons for so long, it's going to be an adjustment for a Destroyer to have a bow shape, lol. But it did always other me when a Typhon, for instance, had an icon that looked like an Orion.

--- End quote ---

The design for Unidentified is actually lifted straight from the mvps icons (it was only used for the pirate ship tho)... though i did remake the icon as a vector image so it could be scaled infinitely (i plan to release my psd files as well). The same is true of fighters, bombers, transports, freighters, waypoints, and cargo. Did that to keep it as consistent with expectations as possible but, yeah, the mvps cruiser and destroyer icons werent generic enough.

The rest are original designs. I went with the bowtie look for destroyers to ensure they would be visually distinct even with only a glance. I too am very pleased with how the High Energy Source icon came out. It's evocative but still very simple and distinct. With installations I wanted to evoke the Arcadia's profile while still being very simple and generic.

In any case i'm glad the community seems to like them. Im gonna work on writing the tbm for them tonight and do some in game testing. I'll post screenshots.

jadeddragoon:
Hidden Text: show screenshots • Show
These images are at 1:1 scale from what they were in-game @1440p. I didn't zoom in or resize them, just crop. The second one also has Lafiel's hud icons enabled... which is intentional cause I plan to use them together in my mod packs. Clearly need to take steps to better differentiate the two.


Fighter and bombers are too big. May reduce them to 24px or 20px final rendered size. Already reduced cargo icons in the first one to 20px. May actually reduce the medium icons (48px) to 32px and the large (64px) to 48px. Need to test at 1080p (the above was 1440p) before deciding. Radar ico0n legibility is a balancing act. Too big and they end up all over top each other... too small and you cant tell which icon you are looking at even when it's by it self. Using geometric shapes should let me go smaller than normal, however.

jadeddragoon:
Okay I like this. Here, Screenshots first. 1:1 scale @1080p. I've updated the icon sheet in the OP.

Hidden Text: expand for images • Show[
I like them at this size. When everything is on top of each other you can still make out _some_ icons, which is about as good as I think that can get. BTW, this was taken from Apocalypse... the final mission of the FS2 Retail campaign. The one where you have multiple convoys trying to escape the system and the shivans damned and determined not to let a single ship escape? I figured this would be the hardest mission for the radar icons in Retail.

Some in discord had mentioned increasing the size of the cruisers, then making the corvettes and frigates bigger than that (more so than the chevrons already do), and the destroyers and juggernaughts bigger still. Like the cruisers-juggernaughts are all 48px here. It would be more like cruisers 56px, corvettes and frigates 64px, destroyers 96px, and juggernaughts 128px. The only advantage I see for this is when you have many (5+) larger ships on top of each other they might be easier to tell appart... but as you can see from Apocalypse most of the time that happens with freighters and transports, not warships. I might try a test run on BPC's... Universal Truth? Forced Entry? the one with all the warships fighting...  to get an idea what it would be like with large numbers of warships. But generally my strategy was to leverage the added clarity of geometric icons to allow me to keep icons small so that having a bunch of ships on top of each other would be a less common occurrence.

As before, open to suggestions and critiques.

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