Ship Icons - Too Dark?

[ckotchey]

I usually pride myself on having good eyes, but does anyone else thing that many of the ship icon designs are just too dark, most especially for the small ship designs? I just started a game as the Sallega, and I can barely see the Escort ship design, especially against a background image of stars! The ship's length is only 2 pixels wide, and the brightest pixel is only 136/136/136. Playing around a bit, I noticed that by doing a quick histogram adjustment (set bright value to 200 or 220) in PSP to brighten the image does WONDERS to improve the visibility of the icons.
Anyone else think that these icons should be brightened up slightly? Even a little bit makes a huge difference.

[Pax]

What would be better would be, just FLAG the ships int 4he system-map window ... put a flag wherever you have units, or you see OTEHRS units.

Or ships.

Or bases.

And so on.

[Elowan]

Originally posted by ckotchey:
I usually pride myself on having good eyes, but does anyone else thing that many of the ship icon designs are just too dark, most especially for the small ship designs?

I solved the problem by loading the offending images into Paint Shop Pro and using Automatic Contrast Adjustment. This typically lightens the ship by increasing the contrast - particularly if you use Darken (far right).

Your ship set guys -- remember that space is a very high contrast environment not a medium contrast environment such as we enjoy on Earth. Almost all of you are shrinking available graphics without regard to contrast adjustment and or image SHARPENING.

[Baron Munchausen]

There are different ship sets that are more of a problem with this than others. The Xiati set is really difficult to see because of it's color, for example. The Piundon, Praetorian, Sallega, and Terran sets were all created by one artist, Tim McElwain, before the game was available to test them with. Their mini images turned out to be rather smaller and harder to see than other sets which were created after the game was available. The original artist posted some time ago on the SE4 list at YahooGroups that he had re-rendered these sets, but we've never seen a thing from MM about releasing them. Maybe they weren't any better, or maybe he just doesn't like them??? Since MM owns the 'rights' to those designs it is up to MM to release them.

[ August 07, 2002, 22:42: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Gryphin]

I have major problems with dark shipsets. I also have bad vision and don't expect the world to change for me. * shrug * Life Happens.

[Wardad]

I heard of one fellow who modded the offending ship set bit maps with a thick red line.

Another player just renamed (alaised) a more visible set and used that in his PBW game's MOD folder.

[capnq]

Another option is editing the race's Main.bmp to make their labels brighter. This helps with everything but single ships.

I've also found that turning off the lights in the room helps; the dark ships stand out better without the glare on the screen.