The point of this thread is that, to many players, the new icons aren't up to snuff yet.
Not "Why They haven't given TacoFang, a Fly Swatter"!
Many folks have posted that they have a problem distinguishing between the different types..., for various reasons.
Game Art should be so distinctive that one can easily figure out what the item does and/or what it is used for...
These are nice but way too similar in fashion.
That is a FAIL in my book.
It wouldn't hurt to do another pass at them to try and elevate their ease of use.
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
These icons are horrible, cartoonish, and the weapons consoles are waaaaaay too similar. It's like a comic book exploded all over my inventory, and all my ships' weapons are being powered by purple pineapples. Ya'll need to quit messing with things that ain't broke and fix some bugs.
Delirium Tremens
XO of Training
Tier 5 Starbase, Tier 3 Embassy, Tier 3 Dilithium Mine, Tier 3 Spire
Join us at www.dtfleet.com
I'm afraid I don't really think of the new icons as an improvement, in all honesty I feel they are a downgrade (not to be mean or anything).
The old icons were just fine, simpler and more easily differentiated and I never thought of them as ugly.
My opinion is UI elements should be designed with the same considerations as traffic signs, quickly and universally understood with a quick glance, unfortunately IMHO the new icons fail that test.
yep the new console icon art is not that good. they may look more like the blueprints from star trek but they all almost look the same and with the colored eng,sci,tac backgrounds blending with the colored ranks of them it is very visually confusing. the tac consoles are especially hard to see what they are. good idea but badly designed.
Many folks have posted that they have a problem distinguishing between the different types..., for various reasons.
Game Art should be so distinctive that one can easily figure out what the item does and/or what it is used for...
These are nice but way too similar in fashion.
That is a FAIL in my book.
It wouldn't hurt to do another pass at them to try and elevate their ease of use.
Exactly right!
It was a mistake making everything identical and making it so large, that when published it ended up small and blurring the details. The old consoles were distinguishable not only due to bright colors, but due to their contrasts as well.
This is what TCC needs to focus on.
Be wise if Cryptic reverted the changes until they could redo them.
The new icon are terrible. It's really hard to distinguish between tactical console, the engineering console are just as bad. In the end I just put the cursor over the icon and read the text, not the point of an icon, it should be recognized easily.
The problem is size. Crypticttc images on the first page, lets take the Tactical Consoles. The Energy Type Damage Bonuses at 100% displayed at 1920x1080, it's very hard to distinguish the type. Enlarge the image to 200% and you can instantly distinguish the type. The icons have too much fine detail.
Total Fail by Cryptic again. Change for no reason. That's why I getting feed up with this game. Thankfully in the next couple of months some epic games such as Rome Total war 2 and X Rebirth are coming out, I just can't take much more of STO.
Thought I better add this. There this nothing wrong with crypticttc icons, they are good detailed icons. The only problem is how they appear in the game.
The icons looks great. I think the principles used to create them were spot on. All of the icons that actually look different at a glance work really well. The new Science, Weapon Type Damage Bonus, Alloy and Miscellaneous Engineering icons are easily differentiable.
Individually the tactical and engineering consoles also look good, but they are not easily differentiable. We are used to different icon colors signifying rarity, not damage type. A single of these icons could be used, but the others also need different shapes, not just different details. Furthermore, the tactical consoles all have radically different names, yet all the icons are very similar.
Ironically when I look at the Hull Plating icons, I can easily tell the difference between Monotanium Alloy and Enhanced Monotanium Alloy, the two that I'd expect to be the most similar. I think the same kind of differentiation could be used for the other hull platings.
I look forward to some more changes to the console icons.
I find it difficult to believe that someone would deliberately train to just be an icon designer unless they like long periods of starvation.
You don't seem to understand what a UI artist is.
STO's probably comes from a background of Graphic Design and Front-End Web. They're capable of digital painting, but may not have a lot of experience doing character/outfit/environment design, if any. On top of that, they may have little to no experience doing 3D modeling and UVW texture mapping.
In short, they may have a wide skillset that goes beyond "icon designer", but that doesn't necessarily mean they can plug into any role in the art department.
They were hired as a UI designer. That's their job.
I'm sorry but I have to add my voice to the disapproves group.
Homogenizing the Icons is a bad idea. I'm sure this has already been voiced in this thread but you've given no thought to people who play STO with color vision impairments. Yes there are subtle differences in the icons but they are not sufficiently different to be instantly recognized. Using color as a major differentiator is a mistake when the differences are so small.
An important rule in UI design and mechanics is accessibility. I think you may have just broken that rule.
You have gone from something that informed AT A GLANCE to something you have to squint at and use the tool tips to differentiate.
I do appreciate that this has taken a job of work to do but its effort that would have been best directed elsewhere. If it aint broke, don't fix it :P
what gets me is that sto has soooooooo many outstanding bugs that have needed fixing for years in some cases yet they take the time, effort and money to change something that was fine the way it was!
The new artwork is terribly confusing. I like the idea of a 3-color scheme for engineering, science, and tactical. But the new artwork has way too many similar consoles to be considered an "improvement" -- barrels, spheres, circles ... and they represent what, exactly? The old artwork with a new background color scheme would have been helpful and easy to understand; instead, it's a confusing mess.
I do not like the new Icons. I think tey're confusing. We already learned all the old consoles. I agree they needed a background color change in order to tell which is a sci one or a tac one. I specially don't like the look of the embassy and mine consoles. They were really awesome. Now they are lame.
Maybe you should think about making it an option, just like the ui color. You should let players choose between the old and new console images. I know it's not the same thing as the UI, but I REALLY REALLY dont like the new artwork for images.
Whether you like the changes or not is irrelevant. Cryptic wanted them changed and gave the orders to the UI artist - ThomastheCat.
You seem to have some concept that if you don't like it everyone must not like it. That's not the case at all. As I always say in threads like this: If you get 1,000 people to agree with you on the forum, and there's 300,000 playing the game, you've managed to get 1/3 of 1% of the player-base to agree with you.
No one is going to like everything added or changed in a game. That's just the truth of it. But doing 1 thing in a game has nothing to do with something else not getting done.
True. However from what I saw in game most people disliked the new icons on the main reason of difficulty telling them apart but they liked the work put in and the conept of them. Boiled down they generaly gave an A for effort but an F for execution/implementation. Obviously this is only a snap shot so should not be taken as a majority view, but the fact they were essentially saying the same thing means there is something wrong with the way the new icons look.
Now I orignally said the concept art shown here were too similar, now with the colours and the other splashes I find it harder to tell the differences than I thought I would and I have no real problems with my sight. It is worse with the hull plating than the weapon consoles but even they are not that easy to tell apart, as such I dread to think how they look to people who do have problems in this area and the difficulty they may have.
It is even worse that the whole "making it more Trek like" was one of the reasons for doing it. Erm sort of has no feet to stand on. The anti-proton ground weapons look like inflatable toys, let alone the disco balls, balloon thingy, armour and kit visuals being allowed, and let's not forget your signature cosmic.
As I said originally this seems to be more doing something for the sake of looking busy than for any real reason. Will this be changed? I don't think so, such talked up stuff rarely is.
Do you know whose job it was to redo the icons, how long it took him, or what his other duties are? Maybe he did them a little bit at a time, or maybe he did them in his off time (as happens fairly often in the game industry).
And maybe if they fixed bugs 'a little bit at a time,' or maybe did so in their off-time (as happens fairly often in the game industry), I'd have, say, Rom boffs without missing body parts by now.
Not liking the new art work either. It is very confusing, as the old style showed me what was what in a glance.
Now I have to double and even triple check icons, as the description it say doesn't seem to match the icon.
^^ This, times a million!
The icons are simply too hard to tell apart. Take the old Polaron tact console, for instance. It kinda looked like a windshield wiper, LOL. But... you could immediately tell it apart from everything else. There was no strain on the eye, no need to squint, no 'find the differences' excercise required.
As has been better outlined by others a already, the rationale was to make em look similar, so as to have you recognize them by group, as it were. Thas was, quite frankly, a blunder. It works wonderfully well for, say, color-coding on the tray bar: you immediately see what's Engineer, Science, or Tactical. For console icons, however, making them look so similar only hinders the brain: it makes you have to really examine them closely to see what's what. For one, because icons are simply, by their nature, very small. It's actually one of the first "Icon-making 101" lessons: 'Icons, foremost, need to be easily distinguishable, not pretty.'
'Icons, foremost, need to be easily distinguishable, not pretty.'
Why not both? :P
The science icons are in fact easily distinguishable and pretty, though I'm having trouble getting used to them. It's just that the vast majority of non-science icons is a bit too generalized.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
The art itself is beautiful. And now my ship UI does look like it's stocked full of federation tech instead of a hodgepodge of alien tech. However.... those in the same family are far too similar to be able to see what they are at a glance. They have to be hovered over and read the tooltip to know what they are. While this is not a major problem, it does make it easier to get the wrong thing in, especially considering tooltips have been known to be wrong in the past.
And for those who say the colour also helps....... I'm colourblind. I don't really see much difference between the colour of each thing. Case in point: The Alloys are pretty much all the same to me. Still, I like them and I'm sure I'll get used to them.
*******************************************
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
OK......ive slept on it, considered it and even tried to embrace it.....and yet i still think these icons are really bad!
In my view...a successful icon is one that can allow you to identify an item without any other information being given......if this is the case....these are an epic fail.
Im sure a lot of work was put in this but unfortunately it has made the whole process of identifying things a bit of a visual nightmare.
In my view...a successful icon is one that can allow you to identify an item without any other information being given......if this is the case....these are an epic fail.
Exactly. Now we have to hover over the icon to determine what it is. An icon should impart its meaning "at a glance". The old ones worked perfectly well.
I'd love to see the business case for changing these?
After looking at feedback we reviewed the icons for the engineering alloys and decided that they indeed did look too similar. I've already checked in new art for these icons that still has a uniform style but is more distinct:
For the love of god, just change it back to the way it was! This "new art" idea of yours is just a waste when the time to make these changes could have been used in a more productive manner; like say....bugs, stability, you know, those issues that have been around since day one but no one seems to get around to.
Sorry, lack of sleep
For the love of god, just change it back to the way it was! This "new art" idea of yours is just a waste when the time to make these changes could have been used in a more productive manner; like say....bugs, stability, you know, those issues that have been around since day one but no one seems to get around to.
Sorry, lack of sleep
Different department, they have nothing to do with bug fixes, stability and that sort of thing. In much the same way I doubt you would want your plumber to do surgery on you, these guys should not be touching bugs or stability matters.
I imagine this is the art department doing these. Nothing to do with bugs and whatnot.
The new alloys still look very similar to me. But then, I am colourblind.
*******************************************
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
For the love of god, just change it back to the way it was! This "new art" idea of yours is just a waste when the time to make these changes could have been used in a more productive manner; like say....bugs, stability, you know, those issues that have been around since day one but no one seems to get around to.
Sorry, lack of sleep
This is getting a bit repetitive now, someone moans about the art guy not fixing a coding bug and then having it explained to him that they are two seperate entities. Rinse and repeat. Nice work with the icons, nothing wrong with a bit of freshening up every now and again, I look forward to seeing the deflector, shields etc getting the treatment.
If you'll excuse me I have water on the knee, anyone know a plumber...D'oh :mad:
The Continuing Voyages of Bridge Commander Captain Lee Drake - USS Sovereign Captain Draxon - IKS RanKuf Commander Torenn - IRW Soryak Captain Gregory MacCray - USS Geronimo
Different department, they have nothing to do with bug fixes, stability and that sort of thing. In much the same way I doubt you would want your plumber to do surgery on you, these guys should not be touching bugs or stability matters.
You're missing the meta-view of this: it's not about an artist having to fix bugs, but about management having decided that the art department is being alloted X number of rescoures, vs. Y number of resources for those who fix bugs (the Y in this example being close to 0).
You're missing the meta-view of this: it's not about an artist having to fix bugs, but about management having decided that the art department is being alloted X number of rescoures, vs. Y number of resources for those who fix bugs (the Y in this example being close to 0).
Exactly.......i think what people are trying to say is.....we want bugs that need fixing fixed instead of icons that did not.
Also....these icons dont have enough blue or green......difficult to tell the difference with some of them in loot drops.
While they are better looking than the old ones, they're confusing as hell. Now you have to look twince to even identify the quality of an item, let alone what it's used for. Especially tac consoles and armour have suffered heavily.
It reminds me of the change to the doff frames. Took a system that wasn't perfectly looking, but working fine and changed it into a system where you had to take a magnifying class and look at the background to be able to determine it's faction.
Do the people who design those icons actually play the game?
Comments
Arguing about who does what!
The point of this thread is that, to many players, the new icons aren't up to snuff yet.
Not "Why They haven't given TacoFang, a Fly Swatter"!
Many folks have posted that they have a problem distinguishing between the different types..., for various reasons.
Game Art should be so distinctive that one can easily figure out what the item does and/or what it is used for...
These are nice but way too similar in fashion.
That is a FAIL in my book.
It wouldn't hurt to do another pass at them to try and elevate their ease of use.
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Change it back please!
XO of Training
Tier 5 Starbase, Tier 3 Embassy, Tier 3 Dilithium Mine, Tier 3 Spire
Join us at www.dtfleet.com
The old icons were just fine, simpler and more easily differentiated and I never thought of them as ugly.
My opinion is UI elements should be designed with the same considerations as traffic signs, quickly and universally understood with a quick glance, unfortunately IMHO the new icons fail that test.
Hope they can be either improved or rolled back.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Fleet Admiral GRIZZ
U.S.S. Chicago NCC 1833-C
Sector 31 ANTKB
ANTKB Gaming Community
Exactly right!
It was a mistake making everything identical and making it so large, that when published it ended up small and blurring the details. The old consoles were distinguishable not only due to bright colors, but due to their contrasts as well.
This is what TCC needs to focus on.
Be wise if Cryptic reverted the changes until they could redo them.
The problem is size. Crypticttc images on the first page, lets take the Tactical Consoles. The Energy Type Damage Bonuses at 100% displayed at 1920x1080, it's very hard to distinguish the type. Enlarge the image to 200% and you can instantly distinguish the type. The icons have too much fine detail.
Total Fail by Cryptic again. Change for no reason. That's why I getting feed up with this game. Thankfully in the next couple of months some epic games such as Rome Total war 2 and X Rebirth are coming out, I just can't take much more of STO.
Thought I better add this. There this nothing wrong with crypticttc icons, they are good detailed icons. The only problem is how they appear in the game.
I find it difficult to believe that someone would deliberately train to just be an icon designer unless they like long periods of starvation.
Individually the tactical and engineering consoles also look good, but they are not easily differentiable. We are used to different icon colors signifying rarity, not damage type. A single of these icons could be used, but the others also need different shapes, not just different details. Furthermore, the tactical consoles all have radically different names, yet all the icons are very similar.
Ironically when I look at the Hull Plating icons, I can easily tell the difference between Monotanium Alloy and Enhanced Monotanium Alloy, the two that I'd expect to be the most similar. I think the same kind of differentiation could be used for the other hull platings.
I look forward to some more changes to the console icons.
You don't seem to understand what a UI artist is.
STO's probably comes from a background of Graphic Design and Front-End Web. They're capable of digital painting, but may not have a lot of experience doing character/outfit/environment design, if any. On top of that, they may have little to no experience doing 3D modeling and UVW texture mapping.
In short, they may have a wide skillset that goes beyond "icon designer", but that doesn't necessarily mean they can plug into any role in the art department.
They were hired as a UI designer. That's their job.
Homogenizing the Icons is a bad idea. I'm sure this has already been voiced in this thread but you've given no thought to people who play STO with color vision impairments. Yes there are subtle differences in the icons but they are not sufficiently different to be instantly recognized. Using color as a major differentiator is a mistake when the differences are so small.
An important rule in UI design and mechanics is accessibility. I think you may have just broken that rule.
You have gone from something that informed AT A GLANCE to something you have to squint at and use the tool tips to differentiate.
I do appreciate that this has taken a job of work to do but its effort that would have been best directed elsewhere. If it aint broke, don't fix it :P
Fleet Admiral GRIZZ
U.S.S. Chicago NCC 1833-C
Sector 31 ANTKB
ANTKB Gaming Community
Maybe you should think about making it an option, just like the ui color. You should let players choose between the old and new console images. I know it's not the same thing as the UI, but I REALLY REALLY dont like the new artwork for images.
True. However from what I saw in game most people disliked the new icons on the main reason of difficulty telling them apart but they liked the work put in and the conept of them. Boiled down they generaly gave an A for effort but an F for execution/implementation. Obviously this is only a snap shot so should not be taken as a majority view, but the fact they were essentially saying the same thing means there is something wrong with the way the new icons look.
Now I orignally said the concept art shown here were too similar, now with the colours and the other splashes I find it harder to tell the differences than I thought I would and I have no real problems with my sight. It is worse with the hull plating than the weapon consoles but even they are not that easy to tell apart, as such I dread to think how they look to people who do have problems in this area and the difficulty they may have.
It is even worse that the whole "making it more Trek like" was one of the reasons for doing it. Erm sort of has no feet to stand on. The anti-proton ground weapons look like inflatable toys, let alone the disco balls, balloon thingy, armour and kit visuals being allowed, and let's not forget your signature cosmic.
As I said originally this seems to be more doing something for the sake of looking busy than for any real reason. Will this be changed? I don't think so, such talked up stuff rarely is.
And maybe if they fixed bugs 'a little bit at a time,' or maybe did so in their off-time (as happens fairly often in the game industry), I'd have, say, Rom boffs without missing body parts by now.
^^ This, times a million!
The icons are simply too hard to tell apart. Take the old Polaron tact console, for instance. It kinda looked like a windshield wiper, LOL. But... you could immediately tell it apart from everything else. There was no strain on the eye, no need to squint, no 'find the differences' excercise required.
As has been better outlined by others a already, the rationale was to make em look similar, so as to have you recognize them by group, as it were. Thas was, quite frankly, a blunder. It works wonderfully well for, say, color-coding on the tray bar: you immediately see what's Engineer, Science, or Tactical. For console icons, however, making them look so similar only hinders the brain: it makes you have to really examine them closely to see what's what. For one, because icons are simply, by their nature, very small. It's actually one of the first "Icon-making 101" lessons: 'Icons, foremost, need to be easily distinguishable, not pretty.'
Why not both? :P
The science icons are in fact easily distinguishable and pretty, though I'm having trouble getting used to them. It's just that the vast majority of non-science icons is a bit too generalized.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Yes. Which is why I said, a few pages back, "With the exception of maybe a few science consoles, *everything* looks pretty much the same now."" :P
And don't get me wrong, I'm all for pretty.
And for those who say the colour also helps....... I'm colourblind. I don't really see much difference between the colour of each thing. Case in point: The Alloys are pretty much all the same to me. Still, I like them and I'm sure I'll get used to them.
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
In my view...a successful icon is one that can allow you to identify an item without any other information being given......if this is the case....these are an epic fail.
Im sure a lot of work was put in this but unfortunately it has made the whole process of identifying things a bit of a visual nightmare.
Exactly. Now we have to hover over the icon to determine what it is. An icon should impart its meaning "at a glance". The old ones worked perfectly well.
I'd love to see the business case for changing these?
For the love of god, just change it back to the way it was! This "new art" idea of yours is just a waste when the time to make these changes could have been used in a more productive manner; like say....bugs, stability, you know, those issues that have been around since day one but no one seems to get around to.
Sorry, lack of sleep
Different department, they have nothing to do with bug fixes, stability and that sort of thing. In much the same way I doubt you would want your plumber to do surgery on you, these guys should not be touching bugs or stability matters.
The new alloys still look very similar to me. But then, I am colourblind.
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
This is getting a bit repetitive now, someone moans about the art guy not fixing a coding bug and then having it explained to him that they are two seperate entities. Rinse and repeat. Nice work with the icons, nothing wrong with a bit of freshening up every now and again, I look forward to seeing the deflector, shields etc getting the treatment.
If you'll excuse me I have water on the knee, anyone know a plumber...D'oh :mad:
Captain Lee Drake - USS Sovereign
Captain Draxon - IKS RanKuf
Commander Torenn - IRW Soryak
Captain Gregory MacCray - USS Geronimo
You're missing the meta-view of this: it's not about an artist having to fix bugs, but about management having decided that the art department is being alloted X number of rescoures, vs. Y number of resources for those who fix bugs (the Y in this example being close to 0).
Exactly.......i think what people are trying to say is.....we want bugs that need fixing fixed instead of icons that did not.
Also....these icons dont have enough blue or green......difficult to tell the difference with some of them in loot drops.
It reminds me of the change to the doff frames. Took a system that wasn't perfectly looking, but working fine and changed it into a system where you had to take a magnifying class and look at the background to be able to determine it's faction.
Do the people who design those icons actually play the game?
Doesn't seem like it to me.