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A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:42 pm
by impaktor
I'm always so confused by the wheel-up icon: the arrow (in my head) indicates a direction or an action, not a state, so when I see an arrow up, I'm thinking "It's telling me I need to raise my landing gear".
So inspired by the recent gif uploads seen on the forum, I did this:
compared to the old one:
I'd like to see what the opinions on this is.
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 6:49 pm
by mld
nice. old one can also be good enough if the wheel part is omitted when it is up(ie just an up arrow)
or a larger up arrow in the place of the wheel (which might add some nice animation)
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:35 pm
by FluffyFreak
I like it :)
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:53 am
by impaktor
mld wrote:nice.
thanks
mld wrote:old one can also be good enough if the wheel part is omitted when it is up(ie just an up arrow)
I'm just not liking having an arrow at all for the final down or up state. Any arrow is in my mind interpreted as a call to do something, "Look left", "Look up", "This way", "Follow me", "Go here", "raise landing gear"; and just removing the landing wheel wouldn't fix this glitch in my head, and I suspect it's not an unreasonable way of thinking about it.
If one wants an arrow in the animation, it could work like this:

(I haven't looked at the code, so I don't know about adding two intermediate states for the wheel up/down would be worth the effort?)
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2014 12:44 pm
by FluffyFreak
Might be worth adding the intermediates, I shouldn't imagine that it would be a lot of work but it depends on how they existing system is done.
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:22 pm
by mld
probably right
BTW why are those icons so small?
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:53 pm
by FluffyFreak
mld wrote:BTW why are those icons so small?
Pioneer is secretly an internet distributed eyesight test... some people didn't even notice that the stars were stretched in the skybox texture y'know ;)
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2014 10:14 pm
by mld
well

Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 5:20 am
by impaktor
@FluffyFreak
I've looked at WorldView.cpp and it's beyond me (which doesn't say much, since most C++ in pioneer is). I don't know if adding a 4-state icon as in my last post is something worth the effort, or if that effort should be invested in now, or when the WroldView is in GUI/Lua?
@mld
It's small because I don't want to overcompensate anything :-P. And because that's the size of the icon.png.
Re: A better "Wheel up" icon?
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 12:57 pm
by jpab
impaktor wrote:I've looked at WorldView.cpp and it's beyond me (which doesn't say much, since most C++ in pioneer is). I don't know if adding a 4-state icon as in my last post is something worth the effort, or if that effort should be invested in now, or when the WroldView is in GUI/Lua?
For what little it's worth, my opinion is that we should just switch to the new 2-state icon for now, since it's an immediate improvement and requires no further effort. If someone wants to switch to a 4-state icon, they're welcome to do it, but I don't think we should wait for that.
Also, looking at nozmajner's UI mockups it's pretty clear that the ship console design/flight control UI is going to change a lot, so the icons and controls we currently have will need to be updated anyway at that point. I don't know how long the current design will last when the world view is fully switched over to new-ui/Lua.
John B