Call to Action - Weapon Icons

[ness 710]

Gooba made some pretty nice weapon abstract/ammo icons. I agree that the weapon ammo/abstract icons would be better in most situations but I guess Epic has their reasons for preferring the weapon icons.


Here's some of Gooba's icon concepts, some of them are really nice:

[FirebornForm]

Yeah I remember seeing that. But Gooba made the icon symbols for the weapon pickups. While it would be best for clarity to have the pickups and the weapon bars themselves be identical it's not necessary and we could have the traditional icons for the weapon bars and the symbols for the pickups. Hologram pickup symbols would inform the player better than just an object which is what it always was.

Update to icons!
-All .ai vectors.
-Merged set with piemo's powerup boot symbol.
-Redeemer

Ai vectors.
While I can fine tune the weapon icons all I want... Joe is gearing up to get the icons into the game very soon I wanted to get the weapon bar icons into vectors to be replaced ASAP so we can have the new icons into the build.

Merged Set
This is a personal opinion but I think piemo's boots and other power ups work very well with the icons I've developed. Epic already picked his boots, and my icons but I want to expand on it and get more included.
I'm looking to include other people's icons with a fully consistent look and I will possibly merge the set with gooba's or henrik's or piemo's symbol icons later on!

Deemer
To make the most of the space I've given myself for the bounding boxes I cut the deemer bottom thingy off a little more, and shortened the fin blade at the top. With this extra space I made the deemer missile itself about 10-20% bigger. I also changed the "trims" to have a more solid shape, it wasn't showing as well as I'd like on smaller sizes. There's also a bit more extra detail and I'm well aware that no one would ever see the skull in it's glory but I wanted to toss it in for fun. I will probably remove this later on.


I think most of the icons are very good where they are at but the hammer might be too busy and inconsistent with the rest of the set, or I might be over-thinking it. Interested in hearing people's opinion on this.

[Lethargy]

Gooba made some pretty nice weapon abstract/ammo icons. I agree that the weapon ammo/abstract icons would be better in most situations but I guess Epic has their reasons for preferring the weapon icons.

Wasn't aware of these, they look really cool. I'd love to see a variant of the hud with these or something similar up the side bar. Though I think some of them are still pretty unclear at a glance, and could be more impactful.

[ness 710]

While it would be best for clarity to have the pickups and the weapon bars themselves be identical it's not necessary and we could have the traditional icons for the weapon bars and the symbols for the pickups.

Yea I agree it's totally not necessary. I just think that with the weapons in the HUD you are limited to how small you can scale them before they are readable, whereas those abstract icons can get pretty small and still be read. This would solve the issue people have with the weapon bar taking up to much of the screen. While the hidden weapon bar could work right now it just shows numbers for weapons and that can be difficult for a new UT player.

I think most of the icons are very good where they are at but the hammer might be too busy and inconsistent with the rest of the set, or I might be over-thinking it. Interested in hearing people's opinion on this.

I think the Hammer looks fine personally. I think the Rocket Launcher, Shock Rifle, Link Gun, Bio-Rifle, and Lightning Gun could all be modified more, right now they still look too old school. Really we are kind of working backwards as the icons should represent more or less the final UT4 weapon silhouettes just like how the Flak cannon changed to look more like Kazeo's model.

[FirebornForm]

The other icons change as per the UT4 weapons are chosen. I'm still waiting to see if the Shock changes even more so but the icon right now I developed is the UT3 shock. All of the UT3 weapons are icons in the beginning. the lightning gun is a 2k model icon since it was only ever in 2k but I'll develop a icon when we have an actual new lightning gun. I initially said that it was too early to develop icons without having the weapons locked down but Joe said to go ahead and do it anyways. Overall we arrived at an icon style much faster than if we waited for all of the weapons to be picked (only 3 have been picked so far!) Shock, Enforcer and Flak.

[ness 710]

The other icons change as per the UT4 weapons are chosen. I'm still waiting to see if the Shock changes even more so but the icon right now I developed is the UT3 shock. All of the UT3 weapons are icons in the beginning. the lightning gun is a 2k model icon since it was only ever in 2k but I'll develop a icon when we have an actual new lightning gun. I initially said that it was too early to develop icons without having the weapons locked down but Joe said to go ahead and do it anyways. Overall we arrived at an icon style much faster than if we waited for all of the weapons to be picked (only 3 have been picked so far!) Shock, Enforcer and Flak.

Yeah I guess I was kinda stating the obvious. The only ones I can really critique are the Enforcer and Flak since they are based off the new models and both of those look great. You're doing a great job Fireborn keep up the good work.

[FirebornForm]

Update to icons
-Shock

UT4 Shock icon

I somehow glazed over the fact that YemYam posted an updated sideview but I'm positive this is going to be the official shock rifle so I went ahead and did a new icon for it. This was tougher than the old shock to crack on where I want to add my trim lines, I intitially had lines all over the place but it just made the shape look broken and weird.

I had to break my own rules of refusing to crush the gun, because it was just too long to fit in the box. The barrel was too long, and the stock was too long. I also had to make a little more extreme edits to the sillhoutte strengthening it as a solid shape instead of a general thin very shallow angled shapes here and there. I ended up going with a very similar look to my UT3 shock icon which is pretty much along the lines of what nes710 asked for me to update it to the new model, it's simple and gets the job done with trims that aren't really confusing to look at.

[piemo]

It looks great, but fear that the "filled" image at low dimensions would look not that good, since the colored space on the barrel is really thin.

also I wouldn't really put much effort in this, since the design is likely to change, even substantially.

It's a good first pass!

[FirebornForm]

Thanks!

The thicker barrel hole is due to recognizing it as a kill-streak icon. Not a whole lot I can do when the overall sillhouette of the gun is so weak. I strenghtened the sillhouette quite a bit more than the actual model. I initially had a thinner barrel hole but it just looks sloppy as a kill bar icon. Since I have to think both in terms of the large scale (weapon bar) and mini scale (kill bar) things have to have some sort of balance in between.

Here's what happens when I put a thinner hole in the center.




The bottom one is the thinner hole, and the middle one is the larger hole. So you can see, it's a better icon for the small scale with the big hole. And this is without even pushing it with pixelation! Ultimately I would prefer to make 2 separate icons for large scale and for small scale but for now Epic wants to only use 1 icon and re-use it for large and small scale.

If I use the larger small scale version (UT3 size icons) then it's not as problematic but Epic is using the small tiny scale versions in the black space as far as I'm aware.

[piemo]

I actually prefer the second one even at small sizes :P

[FirebornForm]

Well alright then I'll give the the second one a fair shot for the icon for now. If problems arise then I'll change it.

[FirebornForm]

Happy new year guys, onward to 2015 iterations.

Update to icons.
-Stinger
-Nearly all of them

Stinger
It's been a while but I finally decided to drop out the sharp thing under neath the stinger ala what I said I would most likely do similar to Piemo's edits long back in the thread. I think it's safe to assume that we wont have that jutting out thing underneath in minigun concepts for UT4 once we finally get an official one so there's no harm in having it removed.

All the rest
Testing out some small (about 10-20%) crushing of the icons together to fit it into the same space. My old cut off point was the impact hammer but for the new attempts to cut down on how much they take up and used the old bio rifle measurements as the new bounding box to fit all of the icons within. I hope you guys appreciate the on going fine tuning of the icons! For reference, the old icons had a breathing room of about 30 pixels from the beginning of the icon to the end of the number tag. The new condensed icons have an additional room of 40 pixels. It's not a whole lot but some people can react to even a 1-2 pixel change so every little bit helps. I'm trying to make the vertical weapon bar as painless as possible It might still be best to use the old uncrushed icons for the kill feed icons but I'll leave that to iteration.



I'm going to include these icons as an alternative for people to plug in to go along with the uncrushed icons if they so choose.

[DarkAp89]

Stinger feels better this way

[RPGWiZ4RD]

These look great! For me it's quite perfect like so whatever the final weapon designs then will be like.