Food icons

Some interesting stuff considering food icons. There's five different icons programmed for type 9 (food) objects.

If an item is neutral then the default icon is shown. A magickal item shows the magickal potion icon, and the technological item shows the herbal icon by default. But then there's also chemical and therapeutic icons, these are shown if a specific food type is set for a tech item.

BUT! There are also icons for alcohol and poison in the game. They are even listed in interface.mes file, but turns out they were never added to the engine.


So I added them myself. 02 is now alcohol, and 03 is poison. Alcohol works for neutral items only, while poison is meant for only tech ones. The new .exe and edited protos will be available in a new version of the UAP, whenever it's released.

These items will have the new icons:
{10065}{Poison}
{10075}{Strong Poison}
{10093}{Wine}
{10126}{Chateau de Be'ron Brandy}
{10130}{Absinthe}

 

Cool.

 

Nice work!

 

Very good work, sir!

 

Interesting work, but I don't know about making alcohol a tech item. It seems pretty natural to me, or at the very least more natural than weapons of steel, which are neutral. The only kind of alcohol I'd consider technological would be the 97% pure alcohol that I assume can only be created through a careful chemical process.

Ought to keep the technophobes sober though, right? Gives a literal meaning to the phrase "I don't touch the stuff".

 

Personally, I think it makes sense for alcohol to be tech, and most likely the alcohol food type was supposed to be tech as well. Or maybe not. Alcohol was tech originally though, they changed it later, most likely because of technophobes.

Anyway, I got carried away. The UAP shouldn't have any balance changes. I've rewritten the code, and the alcohol subtype (#02) now works for neutral items only. Protos are neutral again, of course.

EDIT: BTW, I've always thought that the original therapeutic icon was misleading, since it had the wooden background, which is used for neutral items. The poison icon has the same problem. So, I fixed them:

I can probably release these icons as some kind of a separate pack, but I'm not sure if anybody needs them.

 

Now this I agree with completely.

You mean that since they'll be included in the next patch, only people who don't use that patch would need the icons as a separate pack? :???:

 

The next version of the UAP will have alcohol and poison food types with original icons. I'm not sure what to do with these new icons with different backgrounds. Should I include them in the Extra Pack?

 

Yes indeed! Add them them to the extras pack.

 

Anything that is not a bugfix, and does not influence game mechanics (i.e. artwork, be it restored, or new, in the spirit of the original design) should go in the extra pack.

 

I agree. It looks nice and I also agree with the new background.

 

So in the patch, the therapeutics icon won't have a tech background? I think of it more as a fix that should go into the patch, because therapeutics are by their nature technological. I also don't see why anyone who uses therapeutics wouldn't want icons that are less misleading. Perhaps it's not a bug though. Perhaps they went with the wood background to make therapeutics look more like something out of a snake oil salesman's wagon? The grey gear background does make it look a bit like something out of a factory.

Also, I see in WorldEd that the default poison has a tech complexity of -20, so perhaps poison should have its icon changed to a tech background as well. I guess the only problem would be if there's poison in the Arcanum module that uses the icon but has had the tech complexity removed, thus enabling technophobes to pick it up. They might be confused by their ability to pick up what looks like a tech item. Or perhaps some modulemaker would want to have non-tech poison in a module, while still basing it on the patch? I don't see this happening for therapeutics though.

 

Wow...pretty awesome stuff Drog! Well done!