Pick a buildicon size/ratio and STICK WITH IT

[Caydr]

The way build icons are rendered now is extraordinarily bad. Bad, bad, horrible. Pick a size, and make them always render at that exact pixel size. Or, if you prefer for the sake of compatibility, pick a size ratio. BUT MAKE IT ALWAYS APPLY REGARDLESS OF SCREEN RESOLUTION. Currently buildpics resize themselves depending on the aspect ratio of the user's screen, for instance, so I can't even apply a proper fix to undistort the buildpics, since they will still be distorted on either:
A) people who own an LCD display (since these commonly use the 5:4 ratio instead of 3:4, for some reason)
B) everyone else.

This is incredibly frustrating and should've been fixed literally years ago.

Build pics must, at the very least, always render at one ratio, be it 1:1 (as it was in TA, with buildpics being 64x64 iirc) or 3:4. Currently, on 3:4 displays, they're some asinine 0.6875:1 thing....

[FLOZi]

1:1 plz.

[Caydr]

1:1 seconded, for sure. It's a misunderstanding that 4:3 magically allows more icons in less space. If the icons are properly scaled in the first place, not nearest-neighbor and distorted all to hell, you can EASILY tell 50x50 unit icons apart, which is way smaller than they are now.

[Snipawolf]

+1 for 1:1

[trepan]

Using the 4:3 ratio makes more sense when icons are using text.
Look at all of the words in the previously sentence and find one
that would fit better in a 1:1 ratio than a 4:3 ratio (and not with
a lame font...) A lot of unit types (buildings, vehicles, planes,
ships), also fit better into wider aspect ratios.

LuaUI can now detect a texture's xsize and ysize, so you could
setup a control panel that used the native texture aspect ratios.
Would be nice if someone who feels strongly enough to complain
about it stepped up and did something about it

[KDR_11k]

But the only mod I can think of that uses text in the buildpics is GINTA and that never got very far. Besides, you could only fit a few letters in there before it's too small to read anyway.

Should be 1:1 because the files are 1:1

[Caydr]

But the only mod I can think of that uses text in the buildpics is GINTA and that never got very far. Besides, you could only fit a few letters in there before it's too small to read anyway.

Should be 1:1 because the files are 1:1

He's meaning that since the orders panel has text, for some reason buildpics need to work under the same system... which they don't, really. TA had different sizes for commands and icons, and I'd prefer that to having ultrasqueeze text right next to ultrahuge text right next to ultradistorted buildpic.

@Trepan, I'd gladly do something about it, but I don't know LUA from Java... I think I just embarrassed myself. Anyway, I do plan on designing a custom UI for AA at some point... just there's not a lot to draw on right now. Not a lot of examples of how different stuff can be used.