Warzone 2100 Forums

This thread was split from: Re: A newcomer. Me.

Soo, about those cursors. Wesnoth forums autopruned your topic, and I'm not familiar with this place, enough to go find what the specifications were again. Could you find me that sheet of the original cursors and tell me what they need to be like?

...are you sure it was autopruned? I can still see it...

The specification was basically "do what you want, as long as it looks good and fits Warzone's style".

Ah, well, here's the post I made to the Wesnoth forums:

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This would probably reach more of its intended audience in an art section, but since it's not Wesnoth-related, I guess I'll just put it here.

Warzone 2100, for those of you who don't know, is a FOSS 3D real-time strategy game. As such, most of the active artists are 3D artists - I'm really the only 2D artist on the team right now. So I was hoping, since there are some pretty good pixel artists here, if one of you guys might want to help out a bit. Not long-term or anything, but just to improve the cursors a bit.



The bottom half of this image are what the current cursors for Warzone look like. They are, in order:

(first line) enter transport, demolish structure, normal, build, attack-move, move-and-disembark-transport, attack, guard,
(second line) repair, select, use-repair-facility, pick-up, not-allowed, move-here, observe-with-sensor, jam-sensor,
(third line) link-to-commander

(The last two are unused, so feel free to ignore them.)

They must be within 32x32, but the "center" can be anywhere. Right now, the color scheme is red=attack, green=move, yellow=action, white=select. Although some actions are green, for some reason; feel free to change that. Also feel free to add your own color scheme entirely (especially since the current color scheme makes attack-move look too Christmasy).

Anyway, as you can see, they're passable, but they could use a bit of improvement. The green seems a bit bright, the red seems a bit dark, and they're all a bit flat. If any of you could redraw them or something, that wold be great (anti-aliasing would be nice, too).

Well, maybe I was just a bit too hurried in reading the thread list I'm trying to multitask this and working on something for Doofus.

All the bottom cursors look white to me in the game. Ah whatever. I'll just provide frames and you super-code-wizard guys can process it. You're probably going to have to move this to artwork once I post some initial cursors.

...Wait, we can demolish buildings? xD I am such a noob at this.

Zerovirus wrote:All the bottom cursors look white to me in the game. Ah whatever. I'll just provide frames and you super-code-wizard guys can process it. You're probably going to have to move this to artwork once I post some initial cursors.

Start Warzone -> Options -> Mouse Options -> Coloured Cursors

Zerovirus wrote:...Wait, we can demolish buildings? xD I am such a noob at this.

The first option in the build menu is "Demolish structure".

Wow. I feel quite inadequate now.

Can I make animated cursors like in most of the Command and Conquer games? If not, that's okay.

Zerovirus wrote:Can I make animated cursors like in most of the Command and Conquer games? If not, that's okay.

I wish. :/

I think that might be possible in the future, but not right now.

Let's get base frames of all the cursors, first?

Wait whoa I got a thread here whoa.

Cool.

I'll be trying not to change the cursors up too much- the veterans of this game are probably already used to how they look, and changing that too much wouldn't be a good idea.

True veterans are used to white cursors. The colored cursors are already new enough. Preserving the vague shape might be a good idea, but otherwise, take it wherever your creativity leads you. Alpha transparency is just fine, too.

Also, are you sure you have the go-ahead to replace the cursors? Wouldn't want to get a set finished only to hear that the people rejected it by consensus or whatever.

Zerovirus wrote:Also, are you sure you have the go-ahead to replace the cursors? Wouldn't want to get a set finished only to hear that the people rejected it by consensus or whatever.

Well, there's consensus that they need to be improved. We'd obviously need to see what your replacements look like before we decide if yours are an improvement, so feel free to post your progress. Same way it goes on Wesnoth forums, really.

So. How's this for a pilot? If the colors are too bright I can always change them to be less saturated.

About the current cursors, in Zarel's post:
Overall, the shape of them are interesting, shouldn't be changed pretty much. The attack-move could be changed to an icon similar to the move & unload transport one, but with a target instead of the transport for obvious reasons.

As for the color scheme, I think that Green should be for friendly actions, such as Build/repair, guard (mantain), assign to sensor etc.
Then, red for offensive actions such as the target symbols on my attack-move proposition and the attack cursor itself, demolish cursor, observe with sensor, jam sensor and so on. And then, the others should be of a neutral color, as they would mean a neutral action.

This way, there wouldn't be a green+red button, because there aren't any friendly & offensive actions, and the color code would be more intuitive, I think.

About Zerovirus' cursor:
It is very good, as it's shape is sharp, but not rough as the current one. However, I'd prefer a more darkened and less saturate tone of red - that is - because the player is meant to be looking at the cursor when he points at an object, the cursor itself don't need to be too eye-catching, otherwise it would distract the player when he is merely moving the mouse over a neutral building or something like that, for example.

The small 3d effects on it are very good and should be mantained as an overall quality of other cursor designs! Taking this into consideration and making the arrows a little bit smaller would make for a really good cursor, imo.

And welcome to the forums!

Regards, Olrox

Alright. I see you're one of the major artists around here

I'm rather new to the whole game; I haven't even seen what most of the cursors mean yet. So I might have some trouble with what would be colored neutral and what wouldn't. And of course, we could always do an alternate color scheme.

(I should be working on that thing for Doofus but whatever, I'm tired of it anyways.)

I haven't made the first one's arrows smaller. But I do have a second one

Zerovirus wrote:

Quite nice, quite nice. I like the new color, too. I think now would be a good time to mention that you're restricted to 32x32 pixels (although the "center" can be anywhere).

The "move here" cursor is probably going to need the most change from the original... the original looks like a misshapen attack cursor right now. I'm a fan of making it less like a crosshair. I think, at the very least, we need to take out the circle part, that makes it look the most like the crosshair. In addition, I think we may want to make those double-arrows closer to each other, so they don't look like "fast forward" signs. Four "fast forward" signs just look kinda ugly. :/

Eh, I was trying to emulate the original cursor. It had roughly a similar design. I kinda agree though, the move cursors going to be getting some more work.