Scene Toolbar Icon Request

[Tarius]

How about something like this to symbolize fog?

If a cloud hasnt been choosen, that would be best for fog.

[Shnatsel]

I have some experience in icon design. So far I've contributed to the elementary icon theme and most of my icons have been accepted.

I don't have an icon portfolio, but to show off, here's how I approached presentation mimetype icon for elementary:

First, come up with a metaphor: presentation is typically a sequence of slides.

Try some concepts to portray a sequence and choose the best one:

sequence-showoff.png (3.35 KiB) Viewed 6082 times

Concepts for slides:

slide-showoff.png (2.87 KiB) Viewed 6082 times

Then combine it all together and refine into the final icon:

x-office-presentation.png (1.14 KiB) Viewed 6082 times

I could help with OpenCS icons, if you provide me:

• A list of icons to be done, including sizes - even vector icons have to be tuned to fit the pixel grid!
• A way to see the icons in context - right now OpenCS never gets me to the editing UI, regardless of what I click in it, just throws this error at me. I'm on a derivative of ubuntu 12.04.
• Style guidelines or icons to use as style reference.

So far you seem to have an awful lot of trouble with the fog concept. Well, here's a quickie for you:

fog_editing.png (2.09 KiB) Viewed 6082 times

Just a proof of concept and absolutely not polished because I have no idea about the context and specific concept it has to portray.

Cheers.

[Zini]

1. Size: We are currently dealing primarily with the scene toolbar icons. These are all 48 x 48.

Icon list: I am going to give you the list of toolbar icons that are currently missing in OpenCS (i.e. that have placeholder icons instead).

- Terrain
- Water
- Pathgrid
- Fog
- Cell markers
- Cell arrows
- Cell borders
- Run (this makes OpenMW run, starting up at the location currently viewed in OpenCS)
- Placeholder (using randam icons right now in situations where no icon is available yet, but it would be nice to have an actual placeholder icon)

I think for the first 3 we have icons (as attachments) here in the thread, but they haven't been integrated yet. Haven't checked if they are usable.

Please let me know if you need more specific information for any of these.

2. Odd. I can not reproduce this bug. Can you give us any more info? Can anyone else reproduce it?

3. We don't have any formal style guide. Try to mimic what is shown in the existing icons?

btw. I like your approach to fog.

[sirherrbatka]

I like the fog concept as well.

[Shnatsel]

So I've reported a bug about my OpenCS problem: https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/2081

While I'm trying to get OpenCS UI to show up, here are some placeholder ideas:

placeholder-base.png (1.08 KiB) Viewed 6044 times

placeholder_no.png (2.38 KiB) Viewed 6044 times

placeholder_scribbles.png (2.85 KiB) Viewed 6044 times

vertical.png (1.6 KiB) Viewed 6044 times

Not polished, etc. Let me know if you find any of these ideas satisfactory.

[Zini]

They are all nice, though the 2nd one is probably the least confusing for end users.

The bug looks like a broken project file. But I have no idea what could have caused that. When you load a content file for the first time or create a new content file, the project file is created as a copy from a default file. There is very little opportunity for breakage here.

Again, can someone else confirm this problem? Interested both in people on the same platform and other platforms.

[Shnatsel]

The whole point of icons is making the IU least confusing, so going with the second option.

I haven't noticed that Inkscape defaulted to Arial for the caption in the previous set - Oops! So I've redone the "icon yet" label in Droid Sand and alingned it to pixel grid - not perfectly, but I don't feel like spending a lot of time on a placeholder. Here are some options for you to consider, pick whichever you prefer.

placeholder_no_r3.png (1.73 KiB) Viewed 5982 times

placeholder_no_r1.png (2.33 KiB) Viewed 5982 times

The attachment placeholder_no_r3.png is no longer available

Now... I assumed that my issue with OpenCS is caused by a packaging fault or something along those lines, so I've tried installing and running in on Windows instead of elementary OS.
Lo and behold:
http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/origi ... 800483.png
http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/origi ... 800423.png
http://facepaw.net/
https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/2084
Am I #1 OpenCS bug spotter yet?

I don't have any Mac OS instances, so may I ask somebody to post a screenshot of where the icons will appear, point me to the repo with the current icons, and provide a brief description of what the control elements related to "my" do? For example, does the control element related to the fog icon above toggle fog display, or switch you to fog editing mode, or..?

[Zini]

Am I #1 OpenCS bug spotter yet?

Yeah. Unfortunately the amount of test coverage we are getting for OpenCS is still abysmal.

We can try something. You should have a file named defaultfilters in your OpenMW resources directory. Copy that to ~/.local/share/openmw/projects/ and rename it to the name of the content file you are editing with .project appended to it (e.g. morrowind.omwgame.project). Restart OpenCS and try again. If that fails too, we may have shipped a broken default filters file. If it doesn't something with the copy code might be off.

Meanwhile all icons are available in the OpenMW respository: https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw/tree/m ... les/opencs

All the listed icons except for run and placeholder toggle what is visible.

Edit: Actually, the situation for the toggle icons is a bit more complex. I would be best, if you could try it out yourself first. I completely forgot that we need them in two sizes. The one given above and at a size of (x-4)/3 with x being the size of the big icons. That would make 14x14 in this case.

[vv221]

Shnatsel:
I really like the icon you proposed for fog. It’s in my opinion the most intuitive I’ve seen thus far in this thread.

[Shnatsel]

Turns out the PPA package did not ship the default filters file. I've emailed the maintainer (or whoever is recorded as a maintainer) about it and attached a patch that will catch such mistakes at build time instead of producing broken packages. (I have a background in Debian packaging).

So I finally got to the OpenCS UI, yay! Thanks!

The 14x14 icons are really bad news. As of my experience, 14x14 icons are not workable, period. 16x16 is bearable, but in 14x14 there's no way you can do anything sensible. I have absolutely no idea on how to come up with metaphors that would work in 14x14, for example.

So, how about this: instead of displaying a set if tiny icons to indicate the current state, display one 48px icon that would aggregate all the changes? Like, if I draw one icon with all the stuff in it at once, like this:

very rough sketch, but you get the point

scrap035_f.png (45.66 KiB) Viewed 5935 times

This image has water, terrain, object (bridge) and distant mountains for fog. I can pick out individual things to display on toggle icons, and the aggregate state of them can be displayed in one 48px icon instead of lots of 14px ones.

The aggregate icon looks like the one above in the default state; if something is changed, the vertical dividing line appears like in earler fog icon so you could compare the halves and see what you've disabled easily.

Thoughts?