I kinda like "Illustrated" if that's not too long. It implies that there's pics
and something else. Although, I don't know that anyone would really get confused in the AAR section anyways. But "Illustrated" totally gets the point across, as to what's intended.
For background, there should be some kind of rad ass gun or violent weapon, from SMAC. Or a shiny Alien Artifact head maybe. Visually those track well. I'm trying to remember what the Conquest victory icon looks like. I'll open up SMAC and poke around for a minute, see if I find anything "label worthy".
Looking at my own screenshots, a Drone Riot head as appears above a city is definitely a candidate.
Monoliths are distinctive on a map at least, although this wouldn't be my 1st choice. And might not translate well to a horizontal format.
"Images" is shorter than "Illustrated" and gets the point across.
The guy in the corner who can be Nerve Stapled is a good look.
I notice that the message icon can be animated, although maybe that would be distracting if used post after post. Makes me think of the rotating unit designer.
Well I just tried scaling the conquest icon to the size of a 15 pixel high image. It looks terrible. Back to the drawing board.
I'm learning that artwork with continuous tones, does not scale readily to a 60x15 message icon size. Hmm.
Highly discontinuous images seem to be needed, like what was probably the source material for the "DISCUSSION" icon. Hard edges of letters will show up. And then the actual pixel result, is chopped to heck according to filtering algorithms. It doesn't look at all good when blown up. Only looks good when small.
I wanted to see what can happen when downscaling, so I created the following 60x15 proof of concept, based on part of the title lettering of Alien Crossfire:
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alien60x15 |
I came up with another method of generating a background. Just apply a 60x15 cropping rectangle to any part of the game, as taken from a screenshot. Here's a snippet of the nerve staple guy's face, for instance. Unfortunately this doesn't carry over well, the features aren't distinct enough in this small a format. But it's a valid way of thinking about / examining what is and isn't possible.
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nervestaple |
Compare now, the drone riot head captured in its native resolution, 120x30:
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droneriot |
and the same image reduced to the 60x15 format:
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droneriot60x15 |
With the right background, that could almost work. I'm sure there's a "clean" version of the drone riot head in the unit sheets somewhere.
However, I went a little nuts and worked with the nerve staple guy some more. I continued his background on a pixel by pixel basis.
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nerve |
I find that basically half of the area is usable for a word. 30x15 on the right part of the message icon. I'm going to look at fonts in the game and see if they fit in that format or not. An anaysis of the fonts is that they are simple monotone aliased things, that anyone could draw manually as pixel art if need be. A lifted sample in 30x15:
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LABS |
I've realized that I can use the "rename base" function in the game, to generate a visual image of any text I want. Getting it to be white takes a bit more doing, such as making the base very happy, or using the University. I use the "very happy" method and find that "IMAGES" is 45 pixels wide:
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IMAGES |
"PICS" only needs 28 pixels:
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PICS |
So now I have this prototype "nerve staple PICS" icon, but I don't know how to get the colors on the left into the background on the right. It should be a trivial operation, but the GIMP is too obtuse for me to figure it out easily. Maybe I can manage it in a lesser paint program.
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nervePICSgray |
After some attempts at paint programs that sucked, I found
AvancePaint which didn't. I managed to sample the colors and fill the background stripes, and I moved the letters a little to the left. Thus:
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nervePICS |
Now I felt very clever for having done this, and it's almost 4 AM, but I have to wonder if that red face is too subtle. Let's try with a drone instead of the nerve staple guy, hoping that eyes are easier to perceive.
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drone60x15 |
I'm afraid it still looks like red junk to me, not a face. I will try some of the other people. I have found that the icon artwork for Talents, Workers, and Drones lives in newicons.pcx. Here's a sample of the talent's faces. They're a lot clearer than drone faces, but I'm going to look at other things to sample before committing to working on this one.
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talent60x15 |
A sample of Yang's eyes from hive.pcx. I think I could get the singular "PIC" in there.
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yang60x15 |
I learned how to select a single pixel brush in the GIMP and manually drew the white letters in there.
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PICyang60x15 |
I'm sold! I think that looks very professional. Ok you've got the needed message icon.
