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saimo

Re: BOH - first draft of the developer's manual released

Posted on: 2009/5/27 17:08 #521

Quite a regular

Hi everybody,

another quick update to inform you that the first draft of the developer's manual is now available for download on the DOWNLOADS page of the website.
At the moment it covers only the creation of missions, but the rest is already being worked on.
This release allows who wants to make his own missions to get started without having to wait any longer and, at the same time, will be useful to see what needs to be changed/clarified/added (so, please, do not hesitate to give feedback).

Enjoy,
saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH - C64 theme released

Posted on: 2009/5/20 10:46 #522

Quite a regular

Hi,

another quick note to inform you that the C64 theme is now available for download on the DOWNLOADS page of the website.

Enjoy,
saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH - demo for AmigaOS available

Posted on: 2009/5/12 10:12 #523

Quite a regular

@Fred

Quote:

Sadly enough, it is definitely not my kind of game...

No problem, no game can ever please everybody

Quote:

but still : Please keep supporting the Amiga Platform, it?s worth every Bit of it

I would love to, but...

saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH - demo for AmigaOS available

Posted on: 2009/5/11 9:33 #524

Quite a regular

@Gebrochen

Quote:

IMHO, although it is a good idea, I would have expected in light of recent events, for your product to sell out of stock very quickly.

Unfortunately, it's quite the opposite

saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH - demo for AmigaOS available

Posted on: 2009/5/10 18:10 #525

Quite a regular

Hi all,

the AmigaOS demo is now available on the DOWNLOADS page of the website.
At the same time, the demo mission has been released also for BOH owners (downloadable from the same page).

Enjoy,
saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH

Posted on: 2009/5/8 10:16 #526

Quite a regular

@jabirulo

Quote:

Spanihs:

2 options:

1) "Ampliar/Reducir mapa" more or less it means "Zoom in/out map"
2) "Mostrar mapa" it could be translated as "Display map"

..and well a 3rd one "Zoom del mapa" as your original "Zoom map"

your choice

Thanks a lot for the help

I'm sorry to say that your effort is kind of wasted as I was already done with the translations - I didn't mention it here because it seemed that the issue was closed: apologies.
Anyway, I had chosen the 3rd option, as the other two weren't suitable and lacked with uniformity with the other translations. So, at least you've helped checking the correctness of my translation

saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH - update2 & Swedish translation available

Posted on: 2009/5/7 20:45 #527

Quite a regular

Hi again,

I'm back to announce that, thanks to Ricky Johansson (AKA Yaroze), BOH has now also a Swedish translation! It's available at the DOWNLOADS page of the website.

saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH - update2 available

Posted on: 2009/5/7 11:01 #528

Quite a regular

Hi all,

a fellow amigan (thanks, Yaroze!) experienced problems on his SAM after installing update1: more precisely, it seems that the optimizations for 3x and 4x zooming were not well digested and even caused the program to crash. The fix is included in the update2 archive that can be downloaded from the DOWNLOADS page of the website. Installing this update is strongly recommended to everybody.

On another note, has anybody tried BOH on expanded classic Amigas yet?

saimo

P.S.: for the very curious ones, yesterday Troll in the Corner published a short interview with me here.

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/5/3 1:13 #529

Quite a regular

@Mason

Quote:

Drop shaddows are more important than you might think as they give the icon the 3rd dimention.

Not really: they try to give a third dimension to the space they are in, but, IMHO, they fail, as backgrounds never follow their orientation - not to mention that they even worses the fact that not all icons follow the same perspective.
Oh, well. I know I'm right, but I also know it's just me

Quote:

As for shadows, glow effects and alpha channels: With most state of the art paint programs it is quite easy to add them with a handfull of mouseclicks!

I know, but still it's more work.

Quote:

Your right, but it is not allways possible to make thing that easy. A good example are the Commodities in general as their function is not easy to visualize in a simple way. There several thesis about the recognition of icons. I like the one which says that just the colour and the general form of the icon is important, but on the other hand it is rather boring to paint red, green, blue, yellow and pink triangels, rectangles and circles
You could generate a example by yourself by having a look at the Workbench preferences. Just play with size definitions of the list mode and have a look at the results. Ok, I have to say that the current scaling algorithm of OS4.1 is simple and the icons are not optimized for scaling, but you just asked for a bad result.

Yes, drawing meaningful icons is often difficult and requires more stuff that one would ideally want, but still they key is: keep it simple

The fact that one has a large canvas (let's say again 128x128) does not mean that one should fill that space with all the imaginable details: icons must be drawn keeping in mind that they should be readable at small sizes as well. If icons were drawn with:
* as few elements as possible;
* clear shapes (which often means effective contrast);
* few (no) eye-candy effects like reflections, transparencies,
they would be easily scalable and readable (and, no, I'm not advocating coloured geometrical shapes

).

Quote:

Windows and even OS X are using icons in different sizes and just scaling between this sizes if needed.
Please have a look at the links I posted earlier in this thread.

I know how they work (I have even recently prepared the BOH icon for MacOS), but the point is: having different sizes is useless unless one draws the icon at each specific size adapting its fundamental design; now, if one is able to draw a functional icon at - say - 16x16, what is stopping him from drawing the very same thing at 128x128? Of course at the bigger size he will be able to add antialias and little enriching touches, but still the icon, when downscaled, would look OK.

Quote:

Quote:
Oh, well, it's the other way around: it's the effect that has to be chosen to suit as many types of graphics as possible. Then, once the effect (or effects, if the system is designed to support more than 1) is set in stone, artists also have the required information to draw effective icons.
Just to make an example, if the glow we are used to was calculated on the fly, I guess no amigan would have a problem with it

Your talking of one effect, so it would be ok, but that wouldn't be a real benefit as we allready have one effect provided by the icon.

No, I'm also talking about multiple effects. And precisely to avoid the embedded effects of icons (language barrier, maybe?).

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/5/2 22:13 #530

Quite a regular

@PEB

Quote:

This set might be more to your liking:

www.os4depot.net/index.php?fun ... ics/icon/micollection.lha

Thanks, but I'm not after an iconset (BTW: I know those

).

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/5/2 21:37 #531

Quite a regular

@Mason

Quote:

The new icons are mainly allready a result of user suggestions.

I hope this doesn't mean that no other suggestion can be made

So, here's one that crossed my mind right now: drop shadows altogether. They add little (if anything at all) and not having them not only saves you lots of work with the alphachannel of the normal state, but also makes it a lot easier to add the glow.

Quote:

If you have a big icon with much details it will look very ugly if you scale it down. I have made several test which allways lead to the same results...

Having too many details in icons is a mistake in first place: icons are supposed to be symbols immediately readable by the eye that convey few but clear pieces information; moreover, no matter the technique utilized (multi-size bitmaps, vectors, whatever) they will never look good at a small scale.
Anyway, I'm curious... could you show an example of icon that does not look bad when scaled down?

Quote:

Ahhh, now I understand and I have to agree! From this point of view it is of course nice to have such a feature. But it is also a little hell for the icon artist as he has to guess how any icon will look with any effect.

Oh, well, it's the other way around: it's the effect that has to be chosen to suit as many types of graphics as possible. Then, once the effect (or effects, if the system is designed to support more than 1) is set in stone, artists also have the required information to draw effective icons.
Just to make an example, if the glow we are used to was calculated on the fly, I guess no amigan would have a problem with it

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/5/2 20:05 #532

Quite a regular

@Mason

Quote:

If you will ask five people about icon styles you will get seven opinions.

Fully agreed.

Quote:

1. The visualisation used for the new icons is my own individual style - love it or hate it, but I will hardly change it. I know that tastes are different but I also know that another well know artist in the Amiga community is working on an alternative set.

See, I wasn't talking about tastes. Of course you are the one to decide how your icons look

I only suggested to reduce the usage of gradients because that lessens the contrast (and thus icons are harder to read): that is not a matter of preferences.
You're absolutely free to accept/reject such suggestion.

Quote:

2. The new icon size is, as Ken allready mentioned, a tribute to the bigger screen resolutions available. As I said earlier: Having scaleable icons is not a solution - the system must also be prepared to use different sizes of icons.

Although I didn't comment on the subject until now, I think that using nicely interpolated icons for downscaling gives good results (but source icons must be big - say, 128x128 - of course).

Quote:

3. Having system generated effects for icons is a nice feature, but you have to make shure it works in an acceptable way. There many, many aspects that have to be considered before implementing such a feature in a operating system and of course much work for the developers

Sure: as I said, it's a system-wide change. It is part of the overall GUI design.

Quote:

- it is easier to paint icons with the effect added.

I don't agree: pre-painted alternate states double the work to anybody who wants to draw an icon (and you are one of those who are most affected by this

) and leads to inconsistent look, because anybody will draw the icons the way he/she prefers/can (just as an example: when I created the icons for BOH, I tried to stay consistent with the usual glow look, but I couldn't make it exactly like yours or others').

Quote:

4. Different icon states is a nice to have if the state of the icon is relevant (on/off) but when it comes to toolbar images my opinion is: Let the developer decide what is best. Reaction uses frames for toolbars that indicate the state and even as it is still just a wink when you press the button.

Trying to clarify what I meant again: I was sort of advocating frameless-buttons toolbars because the resulting GUIs are cleaner and easier to use. The double-state considerations were based on that. So, I was saying: in the case of frameless-buttons, a calculated alternate state is desirable. Otherwise (i.e. in case of framed buttons), single-state icons are OK with me (better than double-state ones, indeed).
As for leaving the choice to the programmers, that's generally a good thing to do, but when it comes to GUIs, consistency has to be kept in mind. Right now, if there's one thing I don't like about AmigaOS is the GUI mess (which I don't blame anybody for).

saimo

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saimo

Re: Changing icons?

Posted on: 2009/5/2 19:00 #533

Quite a regular

@tommo1975

Quote:

Out of interest, can anyone tell me what DefIcons does in the Prefs draw?? Seems to be about defining file types or something.

DefIcons is the system component that recognizes the types of files and assigns a default tool to those files that do not come with an icon.
File type identification is very powerful and flexible, but for a full explanation you will need to look into the documentation (which IIRC should be available on the AOS CD).

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/4/30 16:58 #534

Quite a regular

@orgin

Quote:

orgin wrote:
@saimo

"OK, let me reformulate it this way: which is more complex? Which is simpler? Which is busier?"

Irrelevant questions. I already stated which I prefer personally.

Just to be clear: I don't discuss your personal preferences, neither I want you to change them.
That said, my question is not irrelevant because discussing these matters may help improving the GUI of AmigaOS, since the discussion itself could give more evaluation elements to the people that are taking care of it.
Moreover, the question is not subjective (as said in a previous post) because Filer's toolbar has more elements (namely, the button templates), which make it a bit more complex than a frameless-button toolbar.

Quote:

"but how much does it count, really?"

Another subjective question.

My question was followed by a few words that explained what it exactly meant - and it meant that the context icons are placed in tells immediately the user which is the action they react to and that the template created on the fly around the pointed icon helps even more in understanding its functioning in an unmistakable way - all of this, together, means that the functional importance (i.e., as the initial question colloquially said, how much it counts) of having frames around buttons in toolbars is basically zero (even the most unexperienced user after a couple of clicks would learn the difference between a button in a toolbar and an icon on the Workbench).
Edit (forgot to add the conclusion): this means that my question is subjective only if we consider users that just cannot come to terms with computers.

Quote:

To me it's everything.

You're perfectly entitled to your own preferences. But that's not what I was talking about.
In all honesty, I must say I'm under the impression that you're just defending the correspondence between a conceptual difference (which, BTW, I fully acknowledged since the beginning) and its rendering, without even realizing how useless such effort is. I say this both because you are an experienced user and a developer (hence I'm sure you would have no troubles using framess-buttons toolbars) and also because this discussion reminded me of a set of icons of yours which I didn't like because it brought back the button-like aspect of the old icons (here's a screenshot from you): if you didn't even notice the icons you drew yourself blurred totally the difference between icons and buttons (in the picture we can say which is which only by the context), why do you have problems now with frameless-buttons toolbars?

In a nutshell, I'm just saying that toolbars made of frameless buttons (that do get a frame when pointed) cause less clutter (thus improving the usability of the GUI) and are functionally valid. That kind of toolbars is not an invention of mine and is widely and successfully used in many GUIs. I wanted to stress this aspect in the hope that some AOS 4 developer would consider it. That's all. I never wanted anybody to change his/her own tastes.

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/4/30 16:04 #535

Quite a regular

@orgin

Quote:

"which toolbar causes less strain to the eyes? Which is easier to read?"

Subjective question.

OK, let me reformulate it this way: which is more complex? Which is simpler? Which is busier?

Quote:

Personally I prefer buttons to be buttons and icons to be icons.
They are two different things to me. One you click, the other you double click.

The usage difference you underline is true, but how much does it count, really? I mean, the context they are placed in tells immediately the user which is the action they react to. Moreover, the method I suggest does create a template around the pointed button.

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/4/30 14:40 #536

Quite a regular

@orgin

Quote:

orgin wrote:
@saimo

Nah, I think it's enough that the toolbar button changes border type as it is now. Adding a second 'selected' image for each toolbar button doesn't really add anything to the user feedback, prerendeerd or not. It's quite obvious when a button is clicked or not.

Yes, true.
I must say "sorry" again because when I suggested the calculated alternate state I was rather thinking of a system-wide improvement involving other aspects of the GUI. I'll try to explain it better this time.

One thing that all GUIs should aim to is comfortable readability. One thing that impairs it is the clutter caused by useless elements. Button borders are often one of those elements. F.ex., a long time ago Workbench was improved by allowing the removal of the icon borders*. I wish Reaction moved in the same direction, just like other GUIs already did. Have a look at this screenshot, showing Filer and YAM side-to-side: which toolbar causes less strain to the eyes? Which is easier to read? YAM uses a MUI** class that I could configure so that buttons have no border, except for the currently pointed one. This is indeed the best button handling method I can find in modern GUIs (which, BTW, implement this feature even in a nicer way than that shown in the screenshot).
In such a context, it's easy to see why an alternate state is necessary - and that's what my suggestion was based on.

*Everyone is so used to such a thing that all the icons found in the archives are never frameless, because everybody uses the "no border" option in the Workbench prefs (I don't, so that's why I spotted this problem).

**Please note that I prefer Reaction over MUI precisely because it's generally simpler and also because MUI has troubles with consistency given the high number of variously-configurable third-party classes.

saimo

Edited by saimo on 2009/4/30 15:05:12

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/4/30 13:16 #537

Quite a regular

@orgin

Quote:

orgin wrote:
@saimo

The filer never had double state images in the toolbar. To have a second state the code would have to be updated to load a second image for each button.

Let me clarify that I do *not* want pre-rendered double-state icons. I suggest that the alternate state is obtained programmatically, by some effect calculated on the fly (this is a system-wide suggestion, of course).

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/4/30 13:03 #538

Quite a regular

@broadblues

Quote:

broadblues wrote:
@saimo

You should look a little closer if you think the filer icon has no double state, aprt glowing yellow the mouse pointer moves....

Sorry, I did not mention I referred to the toolbar icons (although the same suggestions apply also to the icons for Workbench )

saimo

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saimo

Re: new icons ?

Posted on: 2009/4/29 22:39 #539

Quite a regular

@Mason

Quote:

New OS4.1 style...

In the hope that it may be of some help, here's my personal opinion.
I preferred the less saturated colors you had before. If you are looking for better contrast, my humble advice is to reduce the amount of gradients, which is what causes readibility problems.
I realize you have already done a lot of work (which I thank you for), so I also understand that what I'm suggesting could demand some serious effort.
A nice thing I notice in filer is that icons have lost the double state: that not only saves you a lot of work, but was mostly useless, as the subtle changes were not sufficient to perceive the states difference - the different state should be obtained by some other effect calculated on the fly (like, f.ex., the glow).

saimo

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saimo

Re: BOH

Posted on: 2009/4/29 20:19 #540

Quite a regular

@kas1e

Quote:

Cool. SDL it's good think for sure :) Solved tons of problems for programmer who want to make somethink.

It's got its quirks, but surely it's a big help

Quote:

Thanks for answer

You're welcome

saimo

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