User talk:DeathStrike

Your Underworld Item Icons

Thanks for uploading these item icons for Ultima Underworld, but there are several problems you clearly are not aware of, being new here.

• All graphics from the VGA era on this page use Scaler x2 (two times the original size), while you used Scaler x4 (four times the original size).
• The size of that item graphic them should be 65x40, as we do for all weapon and armour icons (unless the graphic is bigger).
• None of the icons are in the correct category http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Category:Ultima_Underworld_Icons

As I said, great work, but I have to make you aware of the conventions here so that it can fit in correctly.--Tribun (talk) 08:16, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. To address your points, I wasn't aware of the Scaler x2 convention. The icons ended up tiny and scaling the image in the markup results in ugly interpolation. I figured if you wanted them Scaler x2 you can use the markup to halve them without any visual difference. Size-wise, as PNGs, they aren't much larger.

None of the items in the Ultima Underworld Icons category were 65x40. Nothing had consistent sizes. This is what I used to make my judgement on. Furthermore, none of the existing icons had transparent backgrounds, which I made sure mine had.

The icons are positioned within the square image in the exact way they are in the 16x16 inventory slots within the game. This means that the square images allow the items to look exactly as they do in the inventory, scaled x4 and with transparency information kept.

I haven't got around to adding the icons to the correct category. Apologies for not doing it initially. --DeathStrike (talk) 09:41, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

I've updated two icons (crossbow and chain gauntlets) to show you how the correct appearance should be. BTW, the transparency, while well-meaning, is not neccassary, since this wiki doesn't have a dark theme. White background is the norm here.--Tribun (talk) 10:45, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, but could you point me to the guidelines for this? Because looking at the existing items in the category, the bedroll is 80x50, the talismen are all 40x40 including the sword and shield, the rings are 65x40, the splinter is 29x29 and the keys are anywhere between 32x15 to 34x18. All these files were uploaded by you. There is no convention.

I disagree on the transparency. There's no harm at all in including it, and it better represents the icon. If there ever was another theme, suddenly you'd have to re-do all the icons to add transparency. Why do this when you can have transparency from the offset? --DeathStrike (talk) 10:54, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

There's no fixed guideline, it grew by concensus, mainly due to the need to have a fixed width for most of the icons in in Armour values and Weapon values for the games from Ultima VI to Ultima VIII (V and IX have their own icon size). It's still a conversion in progress however and is not yet applied to normal icons.--Tribun (talk) 10:59, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate the information and your reasoning. I'll just regurgitate the age old wisdom that aligning elements within a page by padding the images themselves is bad practice, especially on a wiki where the images can be used in multiple pages for multiple purposes. The alignment should be done within each page to get everything to line up nicely.

Personally, and I'm in no way trying to dictate any policy, the icons should be in their most natural state for each game. In the case of the UW icons I did, I carefully aligned each one to the 16x16 box they inhabit according to how they align with the 16x16 inventory slots in game, made sure to keep the transparency information for maximum portability and flexibility, and then chose to upscale them x4 as they can always have "|32px" after the image to halve them, or |16px to bring them back to the original resolution. Having x2 images with |64px will create ugly interpolation, in which you have to use CSS to avoid (switching to nearest neighbour).

Another thought I had regarding the x4 decision was that the game ran at 320x200. Modern monitors are likely 1920x1080p or thereabouts, which is x6 the original. I figured x4 would be better to see the actual detail of the icons as intended. Similarly, I'd probably have used x2 for games that ran natively at 640x480.

Ideally the icons would just be their original resolution (16x16) and all scaling done on them on the wiki would use nearest neighbour interpolation to achieve x2, x4, x8. Unfortunately that's not the case. --DeathStrike (talk) 11:35, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

We never trust the scalers of the page to do the job to make something bigger, since it'll always be blurry.--Tribun (talk) 12:03, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Exactly. Hence the bigger the better as you can always divide by multiples of 2 and not get any blurring. --DeathStrike (talk) 12:15, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Still, if nothing is done, I myself will rework all the items into proper format.--Tribun (talk) 12:24, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

So no discussion then? You want me to scale down the images to x2, stick them in a white 65x40 box and get rid of the transparency? --DeathStrike (talk) 12:40, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

This isn't how we do things here. If consensus can't be reached, then we usually default to doing nothing. You need a tiebreaker. I'd be it, but you guys are discussing issues that I've never really put a lot of thought into. I will say this, however: DS talks like he's aware of standards in other places that are tried, tested and true. That's a polemic that can't be so easily dismissed.

Maybe if you made side-by-side samples of the current style vs DS's proposed changes it would be easier to judge.The Ultra-Mind (talk) 13:32, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Sure thing. That's a great idea. Using the leggings I uploaded vs the existing ones (not exactly the 65x40 proposed by Tribun but a similar 67x43 that exhibits the same issues:

DeathStrike's proposition

No longer representative

Tribun's proposition

Image	Description
	Double size (x4 scale)
	Full size (x2 scale)
	In game size (x1 scale)
	Double size (x4 scale) on ugly green
	Full size (x2 scale) on ugly green
	In game size (x1 scale) on ugly green

I hope Tribun finds this representative enough of his ideal. --DeathStrike (talk) 14:02, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Then to make things even more complicated: do we want things to look better or more authentic? The full size ones look almost the same on my modestly sized laptop screen (I double checked on a phone), but the original one looks slightly better while the jagged edges on DS's don't look as good--but maybe the uglier one looks more authentic? I can't tell the difference between the double or in-game sized ones.

I was a bit confused reading this at first, but then I realised by "full size ones" you mean the biggest ones, and by "slightly better" you mean that you like the blur caused by the browser's image scaling technique. That's fine. It's a matter of taste after all. I personally went for pixel accuracy over smoothness as I believe it to be more representative. I'm not too strongly against falling back to x2 scaling though, with my main fear being that if I doubled the size of the icon in a page someone will reduce the size back down due to blurriness. Even Tribun stated "We never trust the scalers of the page to do the job to make something bigger, since it'll always be blurry". --DeathStrike (talk) 16:06, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

But that's just about the white background ones. The transparent backgrounds look ok when it's green against brown/black, but if the contrast between the foreground and background were less, then we'd have a problem. For this reason, I think images should have solid backgrounds. Although, maybe the above example could do w/a cropping or canvas reworking.

I disagree with this point because instead of baking a background colour (white, for example) into the image, you can just set the background colour for the element the icon sits in to white instead. Same result, no loss of flexibility. In fact, Wikipedia has a template to specifically categorise and add a warning to images with opaque backgrounds: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Opaque resulting in the following category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_that_should_have_transparent_backgrounds

The added flexibility has many usecases. One great one is that table rows that are alternately tinted can nicely have the icons in.

One thing we haven't talked about is the padding around Tribun's images. I'm strongly against padding all images to fit a specific page when the padding can be added on the specific page itself.--DeathStrike (talk) 16:06, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

BTW, anyone who cares about the images here should probably triage Ultima IX first. Those screenshots require a different wisdom, than for any other game, because of its engine. Consequently, we have a lot of screenshots that looks like they were taken w/a traffic cam.The Ultra-Mind (talk) 15:20, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Tribun's gone ahead and resized my icons while this discussion is happening, which has butchered my examples in the table above. I guess we are to bow down to his judgement. I suppose we're done here? --DeathStrike (talk) 16:14, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

There're a lot of social media where the best thing you can do for yourself is pick your battles. This is one of them. Since I could barely tell the difference between the samples you provided, I think this is an excellent time for that. Like I was saying before, the U9 images need a lot more love. Tribun will agree w/you on that, at least.The Ultra-Mind (talk) 18:44, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, especially since I have no way to make those myself and those we find are often badly compressed jpg. Not to speak of the item icons I'm forced to extract from these compressed pictures.--Tribun (talk) 18:48, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

That's fair, but not everyone comes to contribute to a wiki for all topics. I came to add some missing things for the Ultima Underworld games, not Ultima 9. My battles will never be picked with Ultima 9. Anyway, good luck to you guys on the U9 images. You've done excellent work here. --DeathStrike (talk) 20:25, 11 August 2020 (UTC)