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Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 15 Apr 2016, 19:50
by Shnatsel
Zini wrote:Wow, I didn't knew you were still with us. Was already starting to worry about the icon situation. Thanks for sticking around.
Hey, you could've simply emailed me to check ;)

Thanks for the detailed info! So here's my basic idea for the icon:
scrap050_a.png
This assumes that all 3 of the elements would be enabled. I'm not sure about how the cell marker would look because I haven't actually seen it in the editor yet (there are no 0.39 builds for Linux yet, AFAIK).

I was going to take the same approach as with view switcher and add/remove these elements one by one. I see a major problems with this: it's not clear what this button even does when all 3 elements are disabled - it would be simply a blank icon. That could be remedied by adding some clearly outdoors-looking birds eye view ground behind all that, but I'm not sure how well such a flat icon would interact well with the 3D-ish view switcher icon.

Alternatively I could depict a piece of terrain with perspective, like in the view switcher icon, but that may make it seem like their roles overlap:
scrap051_b_crop.png

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 15 Apr 2016, 20:41
by Zini
I'm not sure about how the cell marker would look because I haven't actually seen it in the editor yet (there are no 0.39 builds for Linux yet, AFAIK).
Pretty much exactly as you have drawn it.


Not sure what the best approach would be. A way to counter the empty button might be to show deactivated elements faded out instead of completely removing them. But your second proposal is indeed more consistent with what we have.
The two buttons kinda do overlap in functionality since they both show/hide elements of the scene. One handles stuff that actually goes into the content file and the other marker stuff that exists only in the editor.

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 15 Apr 2016, 20:45
by Atahualpa
IMO, if your icon clearly shows terrain with square base area, its purpose seems really obvious to me.

Btw: Great work you've done so far! :)

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 18 Apr 2016, 23:25
by Shnatsel
I thought I'd share the work-in-progress state
terrain coming along okayishly.png
terrain coming along okayishly.png (2.88 KiB) Viewed 11231 times
Still gotta to add the cell marker and make the terrain brighter

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 19 Apr 2016, 07:54
by lysol
Niiice! :) Looks very good.

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 19 Apr 2016, 08:59
by Zini
Looks good.

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 19 Apr 2016, 21:02
by Shnatsel
Okay, I have a release candidate.
release candidate 3.png
release candidate 3.png (3.84 KiB) Viewed 11123 times
Since the icon has transparency I've tested it a variety of backgrounds and based on that made the terrain brighter and added a bright halo around the cell marker (helps with legibility on greyish backrounds). Then I've tested it in-place and desaturated the arrows because they were drawing way too much attention to themselves and also added a slight dark halo as a backdrop because on light backgrounds it had too high contrast and also was attracting too much attention.

I'm now seeking comments/suggestions/concerns, if there are none then this is going to be the final version.

To clarify, the elements will be individually togglable (except the terrain, which is togglable in another control element) and the icon will show both the default state and your current configuration with a separator line between them, same as in scene element visibility toggles.

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 20 Apr 2016, 16:25
by Zini
That should do the job nicely IMO. I don't have any further modifications to request.

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 20 Apr 2016, 16:36
by Shnatsel
Also, I've looked at my view switcher icon in place and it has occurred to me that it can be made much more intuitive, which I have entirely overlooked back in the day.

Here's what we have now:
opencs_current_state.png
I think this is much more obvious:
flipped_icon_mockup.png
That should be as easy as flipping all the image files, which I can do in batch. But it should be decided before I finalize the current icon which cannot be flipped that easily.

Re: Scene Toolbar Icon Request

Posted: 20 Apr 2016, 21:03
by Atahualpa
You're definitely right! Didn't think such a small change could make that much of a difference.

Also, great work on the cell marker/border/arrows icon. :)