FreeOrion

The new icons for organic and subterranian structures are marvellous. Excellent work!

As for the ship category icon, I like the one on the left, 2nd line:



Looks like three triangular ships with one fiery trail behind them. It's round.
Looks nifty.

I like those 2 new icons as well, especially organic structures.

As for the ships category, I like the first one(first line) and the second one(third line) most. I'm not too sure, what this 'fiery tail' is supposed to be, but I've turned it into a gear. This is consitent with one of Mystiqq's prior icons and makes sense, because this category includes all kind of technologies, including all ship parts. So, how about these:

Love the redone icons Josh

PD, both of those look lovely; I prefer the second one myself.

Great job! I prefer #1, but the other one is also great.
Yup, a gear makes good sense... the previous arc looked like it was propelling the ships, and my imagination saw flames, but a gear - nice.

I don't like the gear in there... The gear represents industry, and there's nothing about ships related to industry output, unlike the production category which includes industry-boosting techs.

I've crudely modified the icon to something more ships-specific, with multiple sizes of ship visible, to represent the variety of hull sizes and shapes that should be available.

I get the feeling a mean face is looking at me from this one. Also the bottom large triangle kind of shape is not a good symbol for another ship hull IMO.

The gear alone doesn't symbolize industry, but rather some complex functional object or process, made up of multiple interacting parts or brought together by different suppliers. The production icon uses the gear as well, but together with a factory and smokestacks, which all together illustrate industry.

Personally, I prefer the second version. Those repeating stripes somehow say military to me. I think it's because there are similar looking badges but I'm not too sure.

When looking for badges I found the airforce logo, which looks like a mix of a medal and some wings to me. Maybe wings could work for us as well?

It does in FreeOrion, because it's the industry resource symbol.


Is that really the essential property of "ships" that needs to be emphasized / highlighted? Most of that is just the production process, which is covered by the production category.


In the production icon, the industry symbol (the gear) is fused with other stuff to show that "Production" is not just "Industry"...


Nautical symbols could also be used. They are called "ships" after all... The connection to an air force is mostly through fighters and bombers, which are just one of the types of weapons a ship could employ. (Which doesn't mean an air-force symbol couldn't be used, though...)

You tell me. You'll know better than anyone what is actually in this category. But I remember you saying, it's not just ships alone. So I tried to capture this broadened meaning a bit.

Nautical and naval symbols can and should be used, but I think it's important to stay away from everything related to water. Our ships are flying after all.

I will know, but I don't yet. Right now it's just a category to put ships stuff in because I needed to put ships stuff in and thus needed a place to put it. It wasn't intended to be the finalized category, and I certainly didn't carefully work out what would or wouldn't go in it, or even whether it would be a category in the end.

As we add more content, some of it will fall somewhere between "ships" and other categories, and I suspect there will need to be a bit of reorganization of some of the tech categories. We might have a "weapons" category that would have ship and non-ship weapons, or a "logistics" or "infrastructure" category that would have relevance to ships and non-ships... which was what I was thinking of when noting that the ships category has more than ships in it previously. (Specifically, the tech that lengthens supply lines for ships also makes it possible for planets to exchange resources further, since there's only one supply meter).

There may need to be discussions about tech categorization, but this insn't the thread, and now isn't the time.

So... if we want to have an icon for the current "ships" category, I'd suggest making it just have something that evokes "space ships", and not get into any other specifics. Such an icon has a better chance of being ideally useful long-term without modification, I suspect.

Okay, I haven't read the past 6 posts or so in the thread, but it seems that somebody is saying they don't get what that spikey semi-circle I made was for. Well it was to represent ship hard points. Lame lame lame, I know...

I have to go take care of something really important right now, I'll come back and read the rest later...

edit:
I think I'm starting to get the picture. I'm gonna go with Geoff on this one, gears are not the way to go, but nautical symbols sound good. A nautical star comes to mind, such as is found on compasses, but I'm afraid that's too similar to economy, and a nautical star might therefore not read as a ship tech.
See, if this was Star Trek, we could just stick a symbol of the USS Enterprise on the icon, you know what I mean? So it might help if there is a universal FO ship that everybody could recognize easily. I noticed that there are pictures for some ships already, like the colony ship, so perhaps we could use those. Or perhaps the starbase might be good, it's not really a ship but it would definitely stick out.

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A wheel might work as well. Notice, that I couldn't find a proper english translation, that just includes the meaning of the nautical steering wheel. See here for what I mean, if it isn't clear. The so called Dharmacakra looks surprisingly similar and gives an idea of how this could look as an icon.

actually i'd like to change the "money" symbol because it's confusing to use the logo of the game to also indicate "$".

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Proposals are always welcome... you know the deal. Using the freeOrion logo is better than actually inventing some money symbol. "$" is not a choice either.

Yeah, i know... just haven't gotten around to it... until now.



Basically the same idea as the "trade" focus icon... except more to the point, and cleaner. Money is a medium of exchange, i.e. a convenient part of a two-way transaction where both sides can get what they want. That's the kind of idea i'm trying to get at.

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I like it graphically and it could maybe work for trade, but economics is not just about trade. It involves more and is a much broader term. But even for trade, there are some issues: Usually you'd have 2 sources of something(usually just the end of the arrows, not shown explicitly) and 2 arrows going in opposite directions. This creates a circulation.
While your icon has 2 arrows, starting from their sources and getting back to themself, without touching each other - creating 2 interlocking, but not interacting circulations. The exchange is not clear.
I'd like to see another take on this.

Just to compare this with the current icon: This one has some abstracted arrows(actually the simplest arrows possible - triangles) going in a circle, and a star/glare in the middle which resembles some kind of currency as I see it.