I'm facing the task to rework all the menu icons for my pak set. So I'm wondering, what is a convenient icon size for players?
When it comes to icons, I really don't know much.
I have seen that the large theme of the pakgerman has extremely large icons that I suppose are for use on large screens (4k or more), I also know that there is an error since when choosing that theme with said icons, simutrans does not recover its icons again normal for some reason.
I'm also not sure what are the parameters in charge of managing the icons for the themes.
I think there are many mysteries regarding this (or have I just not investigated well?).
Captura desde 2022-11-21 08-41-14.png
I'd like to investigate this from the players view first. Which icon sizes are considered convenient ones? I had been using 24 pixels so far, which is very small nowadays.
Once a good size is figured out, I'll check the code if that's possible and if not, use the closest size that is possible.
wiki theme.tab (https://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/en_ThemeDef?latest=1&page_ref_id=1696#Sizes)
Quoteicon_width Size of toolbar option 32
german forum (https://www.simutrans-forum.de/mybb/showthread.php?tid=7717&pid=110296&highlight=icon_width#pid110296)
The size depends on the screen size/resolution and operation (mouse/touch).
Today I would probably create 48x48 and then scale it by theme parameter.
I've been checking some other programs which I personally found to have easy to use tool bars and at the moment I also think 48 pixels will be fine.
48 pixel seems reasonable. If a user is playing in 4k he can also use the recently introduced scaling option.
I'd argue that there is a different thing to consider as well.
The icon size is set in the theme. Some themes don't set a size, but that has it's own issues (the error of icons not resetting after a theme that does set them is used, as Yona-TYT mentioned)
Even if we agreed that 48 is the ideal icon size per se, they are only going to be shown as such if the theme used alongside the pakset sets them to 48. It will look worse if the pakset is used with a different theme that scales them up or down, and the theme setting them to 48 won't play as nice with other paksets, typically using 32px icons.
In this regard, it might be better to focus on 32px icons for low resolution screens. If you play on a 4k monitor and use a 'large' theme upscaling them to 64px, the loss in quality isn't as bad since the pixel are smaller and no details can be lost.
Have not looked into themes for a while, so I'm unsure whether the pakset can come with a preset theme by now. If so, I guess it's less of a concern.