User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Sun Jul 11, 2021 10:09 am

Hi all,

The past week, I've been working on a tool to convert icons so they show up as intended. The core functionality works, but I need to polish everything up before I can release it. In the mean time, I'm looking for icons to test the tool on.

Now here the background:

Under Workbench 1.x, the color scheme was blue, white, black, orange. Then WB 2.0 came along, changing this to gray, black, white and blue. Also, all icons now had a border around them. So WB 1.x icons really don't look as intended on 2.0 and later systems. And also under 1.x the assumption is we run 640x200 or 640x256, while under 2.0 everything's designed for 640x400 / 640x512, so 1.x icons look flattened.

Then we got MagicWB, which uses 8-color icons with a slight change to the four WB2.0 colors. However, when you run in a screen mode with more (or fewer) than 8 colors, this will throw off MagicWB's palette. Even worse, under 3.0 colors 4 - 7 will automatically change as needed by the content that's displayed on the Workbench screen. So you see MagicWB icons change from ugly to garish to interesting and back.

Then we got NewIcons (and more in OS versions past 3.1), which puts the icon's palette inside the icon, so these issues are no longer relevant. But that doesn't fix old icons.

This is where my tool comes in: it converts old icons into NewIcons and encodes the proper palette show from now on, they'll show as close to intended as possible considering screen mode and palette limitations, if any.

I've already been testing with some random icons have lying around, but I would be very grateful for pointers towards more icons to test with and I believe there are MagicWB competitors that do something similar. If I can find those, I can add them to the tool, so please let me know if you're familiar with anything like that.

Also, I sometimes see "Color Icons" mentioned along with NewIcons. However, finding the proper name "Color Icons" with Google on a web full of icon talk that also mentions colors has so far been impossible. Any pointers would be appreciated.

[Edit to update the title.]
Last edited by iljitsch on Wed Jul 14, 2021 2:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Jul 11, 2021 12:38 pm

Hi,

You can download some from here or here, which I created a couple of years ago. They are all designed for the original 1.3 color palette. Seeing how your program converts them will be interesting.

Right now, if you move them over to the 2.x gray, everything is 'flipped' almost like a photograph negative.

And welcome!

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Sun Jul 11, 2021 2:40 pm

Ok, here's a preview. I took four of your icons and an 1.3 disk icon. This is how they show up (made twice as large here) on a system running 3.1.4 on a 32-color Workbench with no customization of the colors:
SmallGrab9.png
This is with the conversion done, with color 0 made transparent:
SmallGrab8.png
So the negative effect is gone, but orange on gray is... weird. So this is with color 0 not made transparent:
SmallGrab7.png
Still not great. Let's add some extra blue on all sides:
SmallGrab6.png
And remember, 1.3 icons were made for displays with a higher horizontal than vertical resolution. So let's double the height:
SmallGrab4.png
(This does tend to make the icons rather large, though.)

Final touch: a 3D-ish border around each icon:
SmallGrab5.png
Of course different people will prefer different versions and probably even different versions for different icons.

One thing I want to add is a flood fill to make the background surrounding the icon transparent, but leaving in the blue elsewhere.
Last edited by iljitsch on Mon Jul 12, 2021 12:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:09 pm

Do you see the images above? For me they are all broken. If I use just the image URL alone I can see it. But by wrapping it in the IMG tag like you do (you aren't the only one who does this) the image breaks for me here.

I've done a bit of research about this issue tonight and the best theory I've found is your site/ISP host has some sort of hot-linking protection. If after you post the image your images appear broken, feel free to post the images using the "Attachments" feature below the Post a Reply submit buttons.

Not to derail the thread, but this is what I've been seeing and I'd like to figure this out:
Screen Shot 2021-07-11 at 11.08.11 PM.png
In one of your previous posts I simply downloaded your image and re-uploaded it here to bypass the issue entirely.

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Mon Jul 12, 2021 12:05 am

Yes, I see them just fine. But on another forum that also uses BBCode, images that add in this way won't show because the forum (like this one) uses HTTPS while my own website where I host the images doesn't support HTTPS.

Because I do see the images show up here without trouble, I assumed that was not a problem here. But apparently it is, perhaps only for some browsers.

I'll change my previous post to use attachments.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Jul 12, 2021 7:19 am

Hey - I like your conversion tool quite a bit. It's a huge improvement over the default "negative" effect. I'd definitely give it a shot.

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Wed Jul 14, 2021 2:22 pm

It took a lot more time than I anticipated, but the first release of the tool is ready. I've uploaded it to Aminet, and you can also get it here.
Iconverter is a tool for converting old icons so they look as intended
on Amigas running a more recent operating system.

In particular Iconverter will convert OS 1.x and MagicWB icons to
NewIcons format using the palette those icons were created for. (Also
OS 2.0 - 3.1 icons, but those usually look correct without
conversion.)

Note that you need to run the NewIcons extension or the new IconLib_46
on an AmigaOS 3.0 or 3.1 system in order to see the converted version
of icons created by Iconverter. AmigaOS 3.1.4 and 3.2 will show them
"out of the box".

Iconverter is a shell / command line tool written in standard C. As
such, it should compile and run on any system that has a C compiler.
Example.png

User avatar
Crispy
Sunhillow

Posted Thu Jul 15, 2021 8:37 am

Very slick. I really like the transparent option.

I wonder if there's a way to hook into NewIcons, and do the conversion on the fly.

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Thu Jul 15, 2021 9:20 am

I chose this approach using a generic C program and interpret all the file formats "the hard way" because I have zero experience programming for the Amiga, or any graphical system, really...

The issue with adding this functionality to an existing system such as NewIcons, the 3.1.4+ icon.library or the replacement IconLib_46.4 is that you can't reliably detect the type of icon.

MagicWB is relatively simple: those have 8 colors. So it's a relatively safe bet that an 8-color icon is a MagicWB-style icon. However, it's not always clear what kind of transparency or backfill makes sense.

The real problem is with 1.x icons. There is actually a revision number that lets you tell the difference between 1.x and 2.0+ icons, but when a 2.0+ system "touches" an icon, it always updates it to show the 2.0+ revision. So moving an icon somewhere or change any of its properties will update the revision, but it still looks like a photo negative of how it should look.

However, I think a good way to address those issues is to simply implement one or more tooltypes that tell the icon.library how to interpret the icon in question. Something like:

IconPalette=WB1;backfill

If someone wants to make that happen, I'd be all for that. In the meantime, I'm converting icons scattered around my harddrives, and enjoying the results. Remember, programmers usually set out to solve their own problems. ;)

Too bad though nobody looked at this 25 years ago. But that makes some sense: with the move from 1.x to 2.0, you could flip black and white (there's a bunch of tools that do that) but you can't make the 1.x icon look the way it should on a 2.0 system, with still only 4 colors but 2 are different.

MagicWB was an incredible effort, creating tons of great looking icons within the limitations of a fixed eight color palette, but it still requires a fixed palette.

Then with NewIcons we finally got icons with their own palette, but by that time 1.x icons were probably too long ago to go out and do something about those. It would have made sense to address MagicWB icons better, though. Very, very many icons use the MagicWB style, and on a 3.0+ system that means that they show up with different colors all the time. If you don't know the background, that makes no sense at all.

But I guess that's a more general issue with the Amiga these days.

User avatar
PerspexSphinx

Posted Sun Jul 25, 2021 3:53 pm

Hi,
Great tool, anyway I was just wondering if it could be tinkered with to work with larger icons?
Tried it on QuitDemo.info (DigiPaint3) and other slightly larger icons, and it said…

skipping QuitDemo.info, too large (103 x 41)

What is the size limit, why is there a size limit, and could it be increased to accommodate larger and more unique icons (103 x 41 just doesn’t seem that big).
It’s nice to have another graphic tool to work with icons but without a size limit it would be much more nifty.





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