User talk:RingTailCat/Sandbox-12

I just uploaded a new icon from a losless source that replaces several quest icons. I updated all related pages with the new icon but can't delete old icons.

Can you check it out and delete them if all is correct?

The new icon is and replaces:

• File:Foul-smelling Draught-icon.png
• File:Foxglove's Wine-icon.png
• File:Northcotton Vintage-icon.png
• File:Promised Vintage-icon.png
• File:Time-worn Bottle-icon.png
• File:Wine-flask-icon.png

Moinante (talk) 17:39, 18 November 2012 (EST)

Good work. I notice your emphasis on lossless processing. It may be an impossible, or at least impractical goal, given the way icons are presented. As an experiment, take screenshots under different circumstances. If you are not using the Opaque skin, or something similar, observe the effect of different landscape backgrounds bleeding through the semi-transparent tooltip background. Even using the Opaque skin to make a totally black tooltip background, I think you will notice that there are slight variations in the pixel values for the icons from time to time. Also, there can be difference depending on if you use a windowed or full screen display. All of these video post-processing and display issues are mostly beyond our control.

What we should be careful to do is to minimize differences in icon imagery, and to avoid introducing distortion or image degradation in our processing. The wiki compares icons by generating a hash code, perhaps an MD5 or similar hash, from the image file. That only detects exact matches. The administrator can also run a utility program, on demand, which performs a comparison at a reduced colour resolution. This works very well to detect icons which have slight colour variations. It does a better job of matching icons which are visually identical while not bitwise identical.

-- RingTailCat (talk) 18:55, 18 November 2012 (EST)

It all started with some screenshots I got using the default capture hotkey ingame. I was not satisfied with the quality of some dark areas and tried several (a lot) of capture programs to figure out how to do it the best way. Some of them only captured black screens, some didn't noticed the hotkey, etc. The best I found was fraps with .png screenshots. At 1440x900 the filesize is between 1,5 and 2,5 MB and I can bind the capture to a mouse button.

All the captures are with max quality settings ingame and full screen to prevent reescaling. I crop the selected area and the export it to .jpg at 90% quality (best compromise between quality and size I found) using XnView. For icons is just the same, but I export it to .png.

AFAIK quality settings don't change the HUD and the icon itself is always opaque. I'll do some tests and will post again my findings. Moinante (talk) 20:50, 18 November 2012 (EST)

I made a couple of screenshots of the same legendary item in two different locations and cropped the icon in a couple of png. The first one with all ultra high, antialias x8, default skin and fullscreen (1440x900). Then the same item with all very low, no AA, opaque skin and windowed (custom res 1412x800). Then used imagemagick to compare (compare -metric rmse Test-high.png Test-low.png Test-diff.png). The result is no differences between them. On the other hand, I made the same screenshot in DX9 and DX11 and there were differences. I did not play with brightness settings, contrast or gamma, they are default.

The test shows that icons are not affected by settings (in the same DX version) or resolution. In fact, the UI is moved to adjust to different image sizes, but the icons are always 32x32 in size. Moinante (talk) 21:48, 18 November 2012 (EST)

Replacenments

replaces:

• Image:Klamath Weed-icon.png
• Image:Marigold (Enedwaith)-icon.png
• Image:Marigold-icon.png For some reason the wiki says a couple of pages use it, but they use Item:Marigold where the icon is replaced.
• Image:Spring Flowers-icon.png

Moinante (talk) 00:46, 19 November 2012 (EST)

Notice how I added "|icon=Flower 3 (quest)" to the Template:Barter calls to use the generic icon for Item:Marigolds on these pages: Gredlan Mugwort and Spring Festival. RingTailCat (talk) 01:21, 19 November 2012 (EST)