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Topic: how many would rather go back to the old worker icons?

king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2017-12-09, 15:37

About one year ago someone made new worker icons for the warehouses. The old ones were very schematic and basically showed the tool (a hammer for a builder, a hammer and anvil for a forger...) while the new ones show the worker. All very beautiful, and I hate to ask that the work someone put into it would go for nothing, except that I am asking just that. I've wanted to ask a long time.

The problem is that those new icons are just so small. With the old icons, I could open the menu and immediately find the worker I wanted. They were clear, readable. Now the second page in a warehouse is a long list of people with only small differences. I can't take them in at first glance, I need to look in detail at each one. Often I have to put the mouse on them and read the text underneath to figure out what they are.

I wanted to make a poll to see how many would be in favor of going back to the old icons

old icons are better indifferent keep the new ones other opinion
king of nowhere gunchleoc trimard (change new ones)
worldsavior kaputtnik einstein (make even newer)
nordfriese
Edited: 2017-12-11, 16:22

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-12-09, 19:08

Good point. I vote for "old icons are better", too.

I've found the old icons of barbarians and empire: https://launchpadlibrarian.net/116125619/WorkerLevels.PNG

Atlantean icons looked similar.

And here are the new icons: https://wl.widelands.org/wlmedia/wlscreens/screens/Build%2019/Worker%20Icons.png

king_of_nowhere wrote:

About one year ago someone made new worker icons for the warehouses. The old ones were very schematic and basically showed the tool (a hammer for a builder, a hammer and anvil for a forger...) while the new ones show the worker. All very beautiful, and I hate to ask that the work someone put into it would go for nothing, except that I am asking just that.

The work doesn't have to be for nothing. If many people like the new icons, one could still think about an option in the options: "show old or new worker icons"

Edited: 2017-12-09, 19:09

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2017-12-09, 20:04

I rather like the new icons. They are prettier than the old ones. But when looking for a particular worker type in the list they are useless. So I also vote for the old icons.

The work doesn't have to be for nothing. If many people like the new icons, one could still think about an option in the options: "show old or new worker icons"

Only worker icons? It would make more sense to have a dropdown list of "GUI themes". Each theme could include one set of worker and building icons as well as icons for all the menus in the game and editor, and perhaps the cursors. I like this idea; but I guess this would be far too much work, especially as the benefit is very small.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-09, 21:01

The icons are in data/tribes/workers/<tribename>/<workername>/menu.png

Kaputtnik redid them a while back, because some of the icons were bad quality. The idea was to distinguish them more from the ware icons too.

If somebody would like to take them on and do another redesign, I wouldn't be opposed.


Busy indexing nil values

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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2017-12-09, 21:48

GunChleoc wrote:

If somebody would like to take them on and do another redesign, I wouldn't be opposed.

Yes, i think my work was not good. It's very difficult to understand them without having the String ...


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trimard
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Posted at: 2017-12-11, 12:52

Maybe we could find a way to have the new icons more easy to understand? Maybe make them larger? More contrast in colors? Have a background color?

So I would vote for new icons but with changes on them (not that my vote count for that much but whatever^^)


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einstein13
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Posted at: 2017-12-11, 13:39

From my perspective, both types of icons are not the best we can have.

It should be easy to get info what the worker is (name), what for (building) and what it is using (tool). Some of the workers are very simple (woodcutter, forseter), but some don't have explanation and you have to look for it in the help menu.

In settlers 2 I remember a small helptext area in the bottom of the window. It displayed any name of the worker hovered with the mouse. You hadn't have to wait any time to see the name of the object. Another thing is a "question mark" (can't remember if it was with S3 or S2), which could ask about anything on the menu. So you clicked "?", then clicked on any object (here: worker) and help window would appear on the screen.

So I vote for change the icons to even newer ones, maybe more expressive and ADD some functionalities, help links and shortcuts that will improve the UI.


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2017-12-11, 15:05

kaputtnik wrote:

GunChleoc wrote:

If somebody would like to take them on and do another redesign, I wouldn't be opposed.

Yes, i think my work was not good. It's very difficult to understand them without having the String ...

But the new ones are mostly better than the old ones face-grin.png

To dispaly more, ore better, information we need bigger images, which will make the menus much bigger at all. Say if we enlarge each icon by 10 pixel, the stock menu will grow about 60 pixel in width and 120 pixel in height (empire). Not everyone is playing widelands with a three monitor setup (Sorry for posting facebook links, but this is so awesome face-grin.png )

Edited: 2017-12-11, 15:07

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-11, 17:17

Yep, we are supporting 800x600 resolution, so everything needs to fit there. The best thing would be hover tooltips, just like we have when constructing or enhancing a building.


Busy indexing nil values

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trimard
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Posted at: 2017-12-11, 17:41

Yep, we are supporting 800x600 resolution, so everything needs to fit there.

Mhhhhh... Maybe dumb question but can we do responsive menus in c? I mean like on the web

Otherwise, maybe a X2 options like for the minimap. So more informations displayed if on X2?


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