FreeOrion

Bigjoe5 wrote:I'm definitely dubious about having an option for something like that... We have really a lot of options already, and the typical user never changes any options. I think coming to an agreement about what is most useful for the player will be better than just copping out and making an option for it.

I think that tech icons with uniform style and color palette (or even palette could depend on the branch of the tree) would be best. The could have the same overall shape (for example, hexagonal outline), but different contents. That is a lot work to do, though. Alternatively, there could e a set of generic technology icons, for example one for growth technologies, one for detection, one for weapons etc. and the technology could specify which of these icons use in sitreps (and maybe other suitable places - for example buttons for filtering technologies could be simplified from a label to an icon).

Bigjoe5 wrote:I'm definitely dubious about having an option for something like that... We have really a lot of options already, and the typical user never changes any options. I think coming to an agreement about what is most useful for the player will be better than just copping out and making an option for it.

I don't really see a problem with offering many options, the "typical player" can always stick with the default if he chooses to. Also, I think making it an option makes sense in this case because fo is played on many different screen resolutions, and depending on that the players will likely decide if their sitrep should show a generic or a specific tech icon.

em3 wrote:I think that tech icons with uniform style and color palette (or even palette could depend on the branch of the tree) would be best. [...]

I agree, and this is what we actually already have with some exceptions. Most of the tech icons have a monochromatic color palette and a consistent style except for newer ones (that were not created as tech icons, but ship components etc.). The monochromatic tech icons can be sufficiently distinguished from other sitrep items as well as each other as long as they are at a reasonable size. (I can provide a screenshot in a couple of days.)

New planetary stealth icons, ok to commit?

And one more.

For the techs? Looks good to me.

Actually, I had intended them for the sidepanel. They may be a little too detailed for that:

Hm, I'd say, commit them and lets see how they work out. If they don't, we can switch back to the old icons easily enough, or you can tweak the new ones.

Done. https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... 852216e206

Love the recent change to the tech icons, nice work, Geoff!
I would suggest to decrease "UI.tech-layout-horz-spacing" to 0.5 though, otherwise the panels spread too far horizontally. There's some other things that could be improved on, like showing a population icon for techs that increase the planet capacity; will do more testing and give some more feedback in the next couple of days.
Smaller horizontal spacing:

The Silent One wrote:...like showing a population icon for techs that increase the planet capacity

Problem is, for a lot of techs doing things like that, the tech doesn't actually do anything. Rather, there's a species or building effect that checks for the tech and then does something. So, without a lot of scanning through effectsgroups of other content, there's no easily determined list of other content to refer to with an icon on a tech panel.

Geoff the Medio wrote:

The Silent One wrote:...like showing a population icon for techs that increase the planet capacity

Problem is, for a lot of techs doing things like that, the tech doesn't actually do anything. Rather, there's a species or building effect that checks for the tech and then does something. So, without a lot of scanning through effectsgroups of other content, there's no easily determined list of other content to refer to with an icon on a tech panel.

Couldn't that be accomplished with tags in the techs?

Cpeosphoros wrote:

Geoff the Medio wrote:...there's no easily determined list of other content to refer to with an icon on a tech panel.

Couldn't that be accomplished with tags in the techs?

Not really, no. Tags are just strings, and knowing what specific content from the numerous types of content would require embedding some metadata into the tags and then parsing that in the GUI code. Something like that would be better implemented with an actual parser, possibly by extending the values of UnlockableItemType and using it in another context... essentially adding a way to specify in a tech script what stuff should be listed / shown as the benefit / result for that tech, in addition or instead of the autodetermined stuff as is shown now.

The main reason for those being implemented elsewhere was because of processing order, right? So now that there's a priority system, they could probably be re-implemented as EffectsGroups on the techs themselves sometime.

wheals wrote:The main reason for those being implemented elsewhere was because of processing order, right?

Not necessarily. Should an effect related to a building but modified by a tech be scripted with the tech or with the building? Both make sense.