I've decided to avoid texturing until I can clean up my textures a bit (and models). :P Also, Empire: Total War has been a slight crimp in progress (considering I've been doing this for 2 months now).
That doesn't mean I have stopped working on the mod entirely, it just means that those particulars (which are the most visually effective) are going to be the same for a little bit yet.
I have been thinking a fair bit about how my mod will 'feel', and how it will look. When I look at other C&C Generals mods, they tend to follow the aesthetics of Generals. That is, everything is rather close to the real world with maybe some high-tech weapons and the like. The icons tend to be pictures of things, rather than anything informative. This is a particular problem for me, as I would like everything to be as readable as possible.
One of the points where this is most apparent is the difference between anti-tank infantry and anti-air infantry. Both of these function in a similar fashion (rockets), so pictures are most likely to be confusing for a player who is unfamiliar with the team, or the mod in general. Hence, I have gone down the information route. Rather than make the icons to be representative of the unit, the icons will represent the function of the unit. For instance:
The turtle image for Anti-Infantry is very readable. You know that whatever this unit this is, you use it for fighting men! Not aircraft, not tanks, not babies, men!
Hovering your mouse over the icon will give you a description with the unit's name, cost, time to build and a short description (usually reinforcing its role, but also how it differs in its role to similar units). In the case of Turtle buildings, their power consumption or production is also listed.
Of course, not all the icons will be easily readable. Some things are not really easy to describe in the form of pictographs, so a little in-joke ends up there instead. For instance, the Turtle's Superweapon, the Railgun, has this icon:
Anyway, I did think about some sort of anti-everything icon, like the NO symbol over earth or God or something.
Rush will have more toony icons, representing the unit. One of the reasons for this is so I can have a bit of fun drawing silly looking people with Kalashnikov and RPG parodies. The other reason is that Rush is a slightly more complex team compared to the more standard Turtle team, and is more "the competitive players' team" in that its primary goals are large numbers of units, lots of micro and map control. Hence, I expect players playing Rush know a little about what is going on after one game (especially since they have very few units, in which you may get all of them in a game).
The upgrade icons will be done closer to the turtle icons, although some of them may be more about aesthetics rather than function. The flamethrower will have a flame icon, where-as the anti-tank unlock will have the anti-fortification symbol.
In terms of units and buildings, I want each team to be distinctive from the other teams in the mod, as well as from other mods and vanilla Generals. Also, everything will be smaller. Infantry and buildable buildings will be scaled more than tanks (civilian buildings stay the same, but hopefully the infantry will look like they can fit through doors).
Airfields will definitely drop inside so they are not such a chore to make.
Anyway, that's all I can think of for now, sorry for the late post, and hopefully I will have more stuff to write about next week.
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