Open Darthagnon opened 3 years ago
Ideally, I'd use CorelDraw 2020 to make a vector character and do a crisp outline, then export a PNG of that, but I need to reinstall it (or restart my computer); it's giving me Visual Cpp Redist dependency errors. Ugh.
Anyway, Raw PNG is 512px, ICO will use a max of 256px of that, so any errors should be negligible (compared with more glaring issues with the program, e.g. the horrid key remapping window)
I researched and found among my old notes (source here): (NB the original ICO for this program had all the colours in the ICO; we shouldn't need less than the best RGB/A, as the program probably won't run nor be used on computers set to 256 or less colours. You got bigger problems than keyboard accents if your PC is running in that sort of colour space)
An icon file for Windows must include only the following icon sizes:
16x16 px (Details/Small icons view in Explorer or system tray; will usually need modifying/touching up to recognisable)
24x24 px (standard size for menus in Win7 and software)
32x32 px (Content view in Explorer)
48x48 px (Medium icons/Tiles in Explorer)
256x256 px (PNG) (WinVista+ only; incompatible with <=WinXP) (Extra Large icon size views; Explorer live-renders 96x96px icons from these for Large Icons views)
DO NOT render any other sizes; these will be ignored by Windows, and will bloat filesize. Any larger than 256 (e.g. 512px, 768px) is a bit overkill, and used by Win10 only
DO NOT render less than 32-bit icons (24bit colour, 8bit Alpha transparency); these will appear low resolution.
8bit (256 colours, 1bit colour transparency) and 4bit (16 colours, 1bit transparency) are legacy standards.
ENSURE that non-square icons fit within the square icon canvas, to avoid distortion.
ENSURE icons are centered on the square icon canvas, unless deliberately off-centre.
IDEALLY, work on icons at at least 2x resolution, before resizing to the planned resolution. This will hide mistakes.
System tray icon is a black Spade Suit symbol ♠️.
Windows 10 has a very dark taskbar by default. The icon is almost invisible.
I will fix this; already started.
I want to preserve the original icon for now, so I'll just render a white outline around a ♠️ glyph in Paint.NET at 512px by 512px. Export a PNG of that, import into Axialis IconWorkshop, render the required sizes for Window into a new ICO
While I'm at it, I'll also give the EXE an icon in Visual Studio settings.