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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Geosphere Icons.


Guest drewid

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they need obviously a better texture (and perhaps a glow?) but very good work :D
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I've had some queries about this so I'd better explain the idea a bit more. These are the icons for the geoscape globe.

I'm deliberately leaving them plain to show up better on the different colours and shades of background. The glow/flashing/transparency will be down to code.

These are going to be pretty small, though the scale will vary with the level of zoom. (the icons you see when zoomed out will be oversized to make them visible. the zoomed in version can be smaller so as not to look too chunky).


Blue - fine, no worries.

Mamutas - heres an idea. could we tint the object verts to change the colour? That would make it easy to do flashing red for a craft in trouble. :D I'll do a version with a white texture to pick up the tint better.

and yes the square ones are bases.


here's another set, with a "terror site" icons and three different sizes of UFO Edited by drewid
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Those are some cool icons.

I wonder, will there be a different color icon when the craft are landed?

It may be difficult to do, but what if there was a translucent layer around the UFOs? It would reveal the edge of radar detection, so you know when a UFO will be outside of detection range.
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If we do vertex tinting then different colours or flashing icons is easy.

For those who don't know, each vertex of a model carries information with it, stuff like which direction the vertex is pointing (for edge lighting / smoothing), the UV texture coordinates but also a colour and transparency value.

Tinting this value mixes the colour with the texture of the object. This is often the way that dynamic lighting effects are done.

This should also mean we can flash the colour values to get flashing icons, or tinted icons. This works best with a greyscale texture.

SO yes we should be able to change colour when it lands, or when a craft is hit we could flash it red.
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you don't seriously mean that we'll have craft icons flying around on the globe? I prefer the simple dot style of the original...
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These aren't going to be much bigger than dots, but it makes it easier to see who's going where, which ufo is the supply ship versus the small scout, etc. Consider these icons might be 1/10 their current size, they should look fine. As the Ogre UI mockup develops we can insert these little guys in orbit and see how they look, don't worry they'll look cool before they're used. :D
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The simple dot style was nice, but when there were UFO swarms, it was impossible to keep track of everything. Icons would be a great idea, IMO.

Also, maybe having a label next to the icons would be nice. Base names especially, but Ufo/X-Corps craft numbers would be nifty, too.
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You could have the icons for x-com craft parked next to the base icon on the globe.

I would suggest the following codes to show the health of craft.

x-com craft:
flash white - craft hit.
blue - craft structure OK.
orange, craft structure lightly damaged
red - craft badly damaged,
flash red - going down / dead

on base
red, flash green- badly damaged, being repaired
orange, flash green - light damaged , being repaired
blue - ready to go.

UFOs
Yellow in flight
flash white craft hit.
flash red badly damaged.

There are specific icons of alien ground incursions.
ie terror sites, landing, crash.
The outer ring could revolve and flash red/orange or red/white.
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Or you could not use the lightning because it wouldn't really fit in. :D

I think the Xcom icons would look better as an dark aqua color.
And, the textures need to be improved (no offense.)
Maby some color variations?
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Dark aqua may not show up on the globe, but we can try it when we get there.

It might be I'll have to do the textures in a slightly different way to stop the edges breaking up when they are very small.

Edit - They may even end up just a single colour with no black lines. remember these are going to be very small, and no anti-aliasing unless the user has it on his video card. Edited by drewid
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Those are good icons. I am not sure about parking crafts near bases though.

As well as changing colors for different damage level. I think we should not concentrate on that now, but try it after we saw how regular icons look like.

And I thought when UFO has landed, it becomes a landing site and we display site icon, not the ship icon. Right?
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Have we got a definite interface laid out?

I'd really like to see these icons being used with a highlight/select system.

Basically, you select an icon on the geoscape and the infobox on the control panel is filled with the relevant info about it.

When a new UFO is detected the option "center on UFO" would highlight that icon.

We could even have "Lauch button" factored in that would launch at a highlighted icon, without having to re-click on it.
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All good usable ideas I think.

Might have to be more 2D. (small texture on a few polys, so the texture does the work), they break up a quite a lot when very tiny.

We can try them on the globe and make a decision. Edited by drewid
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[quote]Those are good icons. I am not sure about parking crafts near bases though.[/quote]

Perhaps just have the car park on the highest zoom level? Just an idea, it's not important.

[quote]As well as changing colors for different damage level. I think we should not concentrate on that now, but try it after we saw how regular icons look like.[/quote]

Sure. no point in writing code to make them flash if they look crud anyhow. We'll have to try them out to see. We might well end up doing them a different way

[quote]And I thought when UFO has landed, it becomes a landing site and we display site icon, not the ship icon. Right?[/quote]

Yah. correct.
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Are there any I've forgotten?
from the top
Foos
x-craft with added lightning,
terror site, crash site, landing site.
foo base, x-base Edited by drewid
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Those are great icons. Are they all ready to go?
Could you send them to my email @ project xenocide?

Also, I will be putting them in CVS as well as globe model and all relevant textures. I think it is a good time for artists to use CVS as their central repository, since this is what we will be using in game. Breunor was asking me questions about our directory structure hierarchy, cause he explained it is important for relating texture to model.

We are going to use OGRE format for model and textures called mesh. I saw some of you guys have already looked on that, but I did not. Can someone explain here what it takes to take the model in 3ds for example and make it OGRE friendly?

EDIT: I don't think any icons are forgotten. Edited by mamutas
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Here's a small ufo as a test. The material is shared between all the Icons. I've stuck the .xml file in there as well just in case.

edit - and the texture in .tga and .png formats Edited by drewid
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To add something else which sort of goes here.
My son has suggested that we put these small icons on the screens in the x-net pedia alongside the craft models, to make the connection stronger between the craft and it's icon.
I think it's a fine idea, but then I am biased :D
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Well, don't forget that the bases are all underground so the base location icons are really just the access lift locations.

And yeah, a 'very large' icon would be cool. That would be the icon that you'd be like 'awww crap, my Firestorm's getting damaged on this one...'
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Everything will be scaled to look right on the globe, so scaling icons to each other can happen then. They aren't supposed to scaled to real life, just visible on the screen. So having a craft larger than a base makes sense so you can tell which craft it is. The base icons are already unique.
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  • 1 year later...
I'm not absolutely convinced of this myself, but perhaps the landed/crashed saucer icon should also come in three (or four, if very small is included) sizes? because it might look weird when a huge ship lands and turns into a small "landed ship" blip. so basically, the "landed" icon would be an extension to the "ship" icon. and for the "crashed" icon, as cool as it is now, a different "extension icon" would be used, instead of the broken saucer... ?
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IIRC the final versions did have multiple sizes for the ufos but if now I think that they could be scaled ingame.
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