aros68k icon set proposal (wip)

[wawrzon]

im currently trying to come up with a graphical proposal for aros68k, in particular a planar icon set to be used on actual amiga hardware.
there is a number of challenges to make the icon set look rather well under all circumstances to be considered and though look reasonably good. for various reasons im not completely satisfied with any of available options:

1. i dont think its good to use png icons. png is designed for high color situations and takes comparatively long time to decode. many png icons may slow down weak systems to a crawl and the unlimited number of colors isnt totally necessary for a gui (which should remain ambient imho) while it encourages icon designers for kitchy, too colorful or soft-washed blurry imagery.

2. i dont like new and glow icons, because of similar reasons, namely i dont like the aesthetics of these icon sets.

3. i do like wagicwb style icons though i think the looks are still a little dated and a lot of horizontal lines tend to make the whole display flicker al lot on interlace screens, which i consider a true handicap when one tries to make a not particularly expanded amiga for limited productivity.

4. the genuine icon sets of kickstart 1-3.x are actually not that bad for what they are, but i guess they are not exactly appealing for the majority and thats the reason for the number of replacements in the first place. but also they are in many cases not very intuitively readable.

the task is to make icon set:

1. as far as possible displayable and readable even on a monochrome display (1 bit color depth) and especially optimally displayable on low 2-3 color depth displays that are sensible to use on unexpanded amiga.

2. reasonably displayable in interlace mode without much flicker

3. formally decent, rather good looking but not trying to steal the show of what actually should be put to use on a computer, namely applications.

i must admit i am an artist, but neither a graphic nor designer, and especially with rather little experience with pixel art. therefore, also due to open nature of aros im looking for advise, suggestions or if anyone was interested even a cooperation on this task.

for starters i have here some examples in about 64x64px resolution (which i wonder if is not to high, 32px is a little low, but 48px could be doable).

i will be trying to pursue the issue and (in case of interest) update here while hopefully achieving more consistent results

[wawrzon]

id like to add at this time i have adopted mwb 8 color palette, it may be not the most optimal choice. i did it partly for personal sentiment, partly because it is an element of amiga heritage.

now what im not sure about is why some gif images exported from grafx2 have apparently the first color set to translucent and others dont..

[wawrzon]

I guess the first thing to decide is not only the size of the sets, but also the aspect ratio. Native Amiga screens are awkward when designing GFX sets at 640x256 (or even 640x200), but since you are targeting AROS68k, which tends to shine on RTG hardware, you can probably choose 800x600 as your base resolution and ratio... Perhaps?

no, as i said i try to find a compromise best to suit all environments. the natural aspect ratio in my eyes is 1:1 which usually corresponds to rtg resolutions, especially those (a little irregular ones established by the mac dtp standards). 1:1 is (even if slightly visibly distorted) close enough to the aspect present in amiga highres interlace modes. icons squashed vertically are in my eyes less disturbing than icons too high, even if most people would prefer highres nolace for their workbench.

btw, aros icon library has even a functionality to control the overall sizes of icons if not their aspect, which i would prefer, so im trying to adopt the most considerable path of development here.

[wawrzon]

It was time someone solved this long standing Aros issue. Well done!
I believe you have set yourself reasonable goals.

I suggest, to get inspiration by searching in Devian Art for icons and then, choose a style that you find suitable, as a concept, and let it grow from there.

in case you had examples to follow, feel fee to notify me. the image of a hard drive that mimics the magicwb one, is taken of the net (admitedly it needs some work), while the others are genuine photos i have worked upon even if it doesnt look like that.

at that point another issue that comes to my mind is symbolism, originality or also orthodoxy of the imagery. that means  how wordy the representation must be, which should also be unified to an extent. for instance i thought of an icon for a printer. i would like to avoid to portray any particular model here let alone an outright product placement. would the image of a seal be appropriate, and if the what a seal.

personally id like try to keep up with the existing standards, especially if there are amiga-particular ones, but im open to suggestions.

[wawrzon]

You only need hi-res workbench when playing games. I doubt many people would use it if they had another choice.

im not sure if i understand it, for what do you need workbench when playing games? except if you are using whdload probably (im not familiar with that).
now workbench on amiga resolutions was set to highres nolace by default, for obvious reasons, because the interlace was too tiring (and perhaps to limit the (chip) ram consumption). my intention is to reduce this drawback by choice of imagery that doesnt appear to flicker so much. also the availability of flicker fixers could today encourage more people to use high res for workbench on non rtg amigas.

i think the ergonomic advantage of bigger resolution desktop is obvious. highres nolace has always been a barely acceptable handicap in my eyes, especially when not able to move windows outside the screen. luckily aros supports that out of the box, but still...

my intimate wish would be, that aros icon library automatically recognizes the display resolution and scales the icons accordingly on the fly to the correct aspect, either 1:1 or 1:2, that means for instance leaves out every other horizontal raw of icon image for planar nolace screens. but even if this idea was accepted by aros team i would hardly expect it would be implemented any soon, as its only usable on amiga, and it isnt aros priority platform.

[wawrzon]

nevertheless im going to look at 1:2 aspect icon option later today maybe on one or two examples.

[wawrzon]

I realy like the Magic WB icon set a lot.

me too, especially the drawer icons, however as i said it would be good to reduce the usage of single horizontal lines (especially get rid of icon frames), and also the readability of the icons is not always very good because the imagery contains returning style elements that actually carry no information, but are there only for formal reasons, for instance the dithered gradient in the background.

[wawrzon]

you mean this here:
http://aminet.net/pix/wb/ProLite.jpg
?
i must have missed on that. it is not bad, newicons style but better. would address a number of points ive made above, must see how it looks in practice. one thing is, im not sure how much amiga characteristic is that "lego" aesthetics probably because i have not paid much attention to such details.
what concerns palette, yes, mwb might not be optimal with its cellar shade, but i think it would be good to have rather monochrome toned one with only few colorful pens. now i see that aros when geared down to 3bit depth seems to use some other own palette, and i dont know how much influence currently is on that. must ask toni i guess.

[wawrzon]

alas ham is outside the topic for now as aros doesnt support it. and as you see my main concern os to find or produce a usable icon theme for aros68k

[wawrzon]

Well obviously vector based icons are the best but not an option here.

As Aros68k is only practical for chunky displays you can target it at a decent RTG level, say 16bit 1280*720.

Thats exactly is a problem i want to address, to make aros practical on amiga screens. Of course there is several other places where aros still lags behind the genuine amiga os, but i definitely observe that folders filled with the large full color png icons are a part of the problem.

Btw. The same applies to decoration. Its perfectly possible to make a low color depth iff ilbm formatted theme without unneccessary transparencies (that in my opinion are rather annoying and kitchy than practical) which is pretty fast with aros even on amiga display.

[wawrzon]

From what I understand (I could be wrong) it sounds like Aros 68k drawing functions are all chunky based and so it has to do C2P every time it updates the screen.

This will make it slow on AGA, probably best to just target RTG.   AGA users could just use the AROS ROM and boot to 3.9.

yes, aros is primarly chunky oriented. im not the one to tell where exactly the bottlenecks here are, the right person to ask were toni. however after few fixes toni did last two weeks planar screens start to be usable on aros at least on my 060 machines, though it should be the case for lower cpus too since blitter is used where possible. in any case its definitely not like aros updates the whole screen all the time using c2p or so. also i trust that the situation will still improve in the future, at least that is the goal.

what concerns using aros rom to boot to 3.9 i dont think its possible. you can use paricular 68k libraries with loadmodule, like peters icon.lib but it would be interesting if one can load the whole 3.1 workbench upon aros rom. it may be a good test for compatibility but im not sure if its practical to lose aros advantages like dragging windows off screeen espacially on low res desktops.

[wawrzon]

okay, got the palette information from toni. i think its best to align with the defaults, so it seems i need to start over

in case anyone is interested:

/* Default colors for the new screen, the same as in AmigaOS 3.1 */

const ULONG coltab[] =
{
    0xB3B3B3B3, 0xB3B3B3B3, 0xB3B3B3B3, /* Grey70     */
    0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, /* Black      */
    0xFFFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFFFF, /* White      */
    0x66666666, 0x88888888, 0xBBBBBBBB, /* AMIGA Blue */

    0xEEEEEEEE, 0x44444444, 0x44444444, /* Red        */
    0x55555555, 0xDDDDDDDD, 0x55555555, /* Green      */
    0x00000000, 0x44444444, 0xDDDDDDDD, /* Dark Blue  */
    0xEEEEEEEE, 0x99999999, 0x00000000, /* Yellow     */

    0xbbbbbbbb, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, /* Default colors for mouse
pointer */
    0xdddddddd, 0x00000000, 0x00000000,
    0xeeeeeeee, 0x00000000, 0x00000000
};