Trinkets friend
Sudden Buggery
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Posted - 2015.02.27 04:45:46 -
[1] - Quote
I think this change is necessary, but you've ignored Robert Downey Junior's advice on winning Oscars here.
I have been expecting this move from CCP for the last couple of years, and it's good you are getting around to distinguishing, eg, destroyers, cruisers and battlecruisers, and battleships, dreads and carriers within those groups.
The problem you have is that you are using SIZE to distinguish the ships, not iconography. Remember - an ICON is a representative shape which the user recognises as having a particular meaning or function. In, for example, the toolbar above the text box for posting upon this here forum, the icon for BOLD is a bold B, italics is an Italic I, and Underline is a capital U with said underline.
You are NOT distinguishing these icons by sizing. No one would accept as a sensible foray into iconography that Bold is b, Italics is a B and italics is B.
Therefore what is the value of creating icons for frigates which are so small that eyesight problems, screen resolution choices, hardware choices (some monitors and screens don't go the whole way, or GPU's are incapable of max horsepower 1980++ resolution) will render the distinction between frigates and destroyers basically meaningless.
Admit it, you just googled up 'iconography for dummies' on the interwebs, spent 20 minutes skimming the book, and made a hash job of designing icons, and ended up with as said above, Space invaders.
Sadly, I believe you'll just go right ahead and make life terrible for everyone just like with Neocom icons have. It's been months and I still get confused between the bloody ship fitting icon, the contacts icon because they are too bloody similar from the corner of my eye (and for the record, twin 27" monitors and max res).
I cannot fathom how you think that the frigate, rookie ship and capsule icons could possibly be distingishable at either small-screen resolution on laptops, or at the other end of the scale as a tiny red/white dot in a list of other tiny red/white dots.
You need to divorce yourself from the ego and pride invested in your work with ISIS, and begin moving to icons for ships that are completely distinguishable from one another by shape, versus size.
e; frigate = triangle
destroyer = square
cruiser = open diamond
battlecruiser = solid diamond
battleship = hexagon (blops or marauder = solid)
capital = star (filled = carrier, empty = dread)
supercarrier = open circle
titan = filled circle
HOW SIMPLE IS THAT?
Further, your drone icons are going to be basically useless. For a start, no one uses anything except DPS or ECM drones 99% of the time. It's irrelevant from a gameplay perspective to know whether someone is using hull bots, armour bots, or shield bots. No one, ever, says "Shoot his armour bots but leave those hull bots alone!"
ECM drones and utility drones are too rarely seen for me to lose sleep or pay attention to what the crap they are. medium SD drones? hahahaha. Who cares, you may as well make trollface.jpg the icon because if anyone uses them they are a fool and are dying to your rifter.
You risk putting too many arcane icons into a game and causing intense confusion and attention-sapping annoyance.
Right now, if drones are launched i mouseover them to see what they are (DPS usually hobgoblin II, hammerhead II, Warrior II or Valkyrie II and heavies are almost always Geckos; ECM is always either Hornet EC-300 or Vespa EC-600) and that's that. I don't need to have visual information in my eyes which my brain struggles to comprehend because it's a tiny drone with an inward-facing wiggle and a round or is it square or is it triangular thingy, and then it's got a red plus or an orange plus.
Blergh. Sorry - too convoluted and unneccessary and hence this undermines the whole purpose which is to convey information in a visual format that is easy to understand at a glance. Drones are drones are drones.
The part of the whole iconography for dummies book you apparently didn't read was the part where it said "If there are too many icons, in this case, over 200 before you even get to structures, then the system breaks down."
Finally - pods are eggs. Leave it alone.
Prolapse. Taking fights since 2014.
Sudden Buggery. Got duumb? Hola, Batmanuel!
http://www.localectomy.blogspot.com.au
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