Color coded strategic icons

I'm working on a color coded strategic icons mod. Similar exists, but only uses the color coding for some structures basically.

The general idea:

• The inside of the icon shows the capability. The colors are the same as the range rings. This makes it easy to see the composition of an army at glance. See no blue? Send in those gunships!
• The size of the icon refers to the tech level. No longer do you have to look at those tiny tech level bars.
• The player color is shown as an outside "glow"
• Units that can hover has a pointy top. Units that can move on seabed has a pointy bottom.
• Naval units are very different between factions, their composition is shown as a "lego"-like structure. A bit messy maybe, but I find it useful. Naval is the most recent addition, so it's a work in progress.
• Custom (huge) icons for Experimentals. I'm not really an artist so yeah they turned out OK at best. (HELP ME)

I also integrated overlays to show the count of silos, idle engineers etc. Idle engineers / factories blink when idle. It's a bit annoying perhaps. Ideas welcome.

Thought I'd share to see if anyone is interested, have ideas and maybe someone even want to help me finish it because I ran out of steam a bit with quite little left now.

TODO:

• Finalize the designs for all "rest" icons. Totally open for ideas. A few are not changed at all and shows the Redux version that I forked from but almost all are there.
• Naval and experimentals have no player glow yet as I am still thinking about their design, don't want to do that work double.
• When all "rest" icons are done, make the "selected" and "over" versions. I'm thinking they could be just a copy but with a white glow, or something simple.
• Final touches for the overlays.
• Probably something else I can't think of now.

It is working if you want to try it. I use it for all my games, but units use the Redux icons when selected/hovered and the hover/seabed units become invisible when selected.. as of right now.

https://github.com/FreadyFishFAF/ColorCodedStrategicIcons

If you don't know what git/github is: Just click the green "<> Code" button, download as zip, and unzip it in your mods folder like: C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\My Games\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\mods\ColorCodedStrategicIcons\ (subfolders/files in here)

Let me know if you have any issues, have ideas or want to help out. If you havent worked making icons before I can help you get started, its basically like working in paint (but you use GIMP). Although, ask me, really, and show the workflow and some limitations that you need to know about

As a teaser I'll also let you know I have 36 mods running most of which I have customized (a lot) to add new functionality and to make them work seamlessly together. Eventually I hope to release them all as a complete package. More about that later, but, if any cool modders (I know there are a lot of you out there) want to collaborate on something like "the official FAF mega mod package" (name can be discussed lol), then let's talk.

// FreadyFish

The basic idea is good but personally I dislike the icons themself. Don't get me wrong, having a GC icon where the GC is literally in he icon is nice, but is it necessary? It makes reading armies a lot harder and only the dot is enough since exp. are simpy a thing you hover above one time and you know what exp it is.

Same with all the other icons. If you make two separate mods, this one keeping everything you have and another one, where you only add colors to the important things (e.g. flak) I could see ppl downloading it. e.g. personally I'd only add a color to stuff like Nuke, Smd, Game ender and then flak and if tanks have the same icons (e.g. blaze and obsidian) you could also make them a slightly dif. color, everything else will just take a lot of time to get used to meaning ppl prob don't want to change their current icon mod, especially the blinking part since depending on the size/freuency I can see it being quite annoying throughout the game.

Again, just a personal opinion, not constructive criticism. I wanna note that I use the basic icons and penguin's strategic one highlighting 3-5 buildings but that's about it.

I agree with Sladow here. Quite often less is more, which is especially true for icons. Imo, many different and colorful icons will scream to you for attention and make it kinda hard to decipher them. However, for some important structures I do find special icons useful. Personally, I am using a modfied version of the ASI mod, using only a couple of (for me) important icons like (TML/SML/SMD...) and deleted all the others (so using the base game icons). Works fine for me and doesnt clutter the screen to much.
Icons are a rather personal thing and usually come down to preference and habit.

Cool proof of concept, but too visually busy for practical use imo.

@sladow-noob Haters gonna hate! Juust kidding, I appreciate the honest feedback. It started like that, most important ones. But then I just felt everything is important. Many times I've been chasing down T1 artillery only to realize they were Seraphim and can retreat over water. Now I know exactly what to expect. But hey, I salute anyone who can keep track of all those details with the traditional icons. The idle overlay will probably get two versions in the end, blinking and some simple flag much like the idle enginers mod, and ofc an option to chose either or none. The blinking is rather slow and syncronized so not super annoying, but a work in progress still.