aros68k icon set proposal (wip)

[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.

[hairy]

With all due respect to the creators of that standard, I think magic workbench icons looks like cr... ahem... terrible.

And not just now, even back then. They looked terrific the first day, they were boring after a week.

I think the problem is that when you have limited palette, choosing to ignore half of the color space is always a bad idea: a few gradients might look better, but all the missing hues will be noticeable as soon as you need to represent something that absolutely needs to be at least in the same slice of the hue wheel.

So in the end, in my humble opinion is always better to use a palette spreading all the color space (e.g. 16 color RGBI), even at the cost of more grainy dithering.

I remember that, back at the times, I found ProLite set to be particularly pleasant and consistent, even if a little "cartoonish".

All that using only 8 colors, the basic system 4, plus the standard extended 4 (non-pure red, yellow, green and blue). There was also an alternate set made to look ok on 1280x512.

The cons is that they need newicons, IIRC.

[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.

[hairy]

Yes, that's the one! Try it if you have the chance.

That 8 colour palette also works reasonably well for dithered (non-remapped) backdrops, since the yellow is a bit orange-ish, and you already have cyan-of-sorts as the 4th base color.

One of the factors contributing to the tidy look is standardized height.
Variable size sure is a plus, but better reserve it for huge game icons only :lol:

-----

Well, another random thought/reminescence occurred to me:
about the same point back in time, I tried extensively HAM workbench modes, both 6bit and 8bit.

Now, the visual result were already excellent at HAM6 (on AGA obviously).
By using the 16 fixed base colors, you can have 4+4 system colors, add 4 MWB colors, and still have another 4 free (which I used to enhance MUI widgets, magicmenu, etc.). And avoid using 8 planes, which is the main point, I guess!

But the little detail that made all concept to collapse, was that the system insisted in picking the last four (the "extended" 4 system colours) from the end of the WHOLE 64c palette, which gave rise to that "nice" green stripes on some of the OS elements. :mad:

I never understood why nobody tackled the problem, it looks to me a matter of a simple patch? (at least, maybe simple to someone skilled with system and patches programming = not me :laugh1:).

[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

[NovaCoder]

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.

[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.

[NovaCoder]

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.

[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
};