ICONS need COLOR. Ore icons, Components icons , Ammunition icons. Give them some color!

The "right" color means nothing else than the color it has when spawned in the world. A drill-tool should be red in the inventory for example.

A very small amount of people are colorblind, Example: Minecraft does not do this for it's general playerbase, but does have a colorblind mode.

I see no reason why this cannot be a thing.

What would be the reasoning for adding color to ores, ingots and tools but not components and ammo?

Sorry to sound disrespectful, but your GUI design sucks in some places - colorization is one of them.

SE UI is de-facto designed for very simple, one task only vehicles with disregard to resource conservation - anything that fits those 10 configurable buttons (without switching taskbar for another 90) and don't use same/similar icons (thus no 2 piston powered tasks).

The player should not find the UI confusing but helpful, he should not lose time to circumvent its shortcomings (player should be hooked up differently - and you are already providing it with engineering itself).

Borrow ideas from games such as WoW, they have the 'button' UI part solved quite good (and even it is improved by mods).

For other parts of the UI I don't know, but surely there will be people that can give hints of good UI desing.

Icons not having any color distinction makes them harder to find. Usability should be prioritized.

It also makes them look very similar, in case of ores and ingots, which is one of the reasons why I've been using the colorful icons mod for some months (apart from looking way uglier in vanilla)

What is the current GUI design? Color blind people only? That design is horrid for people who can see just fine. Seriously this suggestion is not asking for much. Just a drop down or something that lets us decide on a schema.

Anything that improves usability: Voted! Insisting on anything to follow a sub-optimal design just because it is *your* design is the same as coming to a professional recording studio and insisting that your shitty Line 6 practice amp be used on your band's next album.

Which GUI design? And why it counters it? You understand the necessity of colors and color contrast? You don't need a Mickey Mouse GUI. But some more colors then only one, would be fine. In your case it's a must have. I hate your progress tree. But not it's functionality... the graphical presentation. Because of a missing contrast it's hard to see if a technology is unlocked or not. There is no "grayed out". The same with your toggles. The difference between "is selected" or "isn't selected" is minimal. All ores are looking similar. Because of all sharing the same color.

Colors are one of the basic building blocks for the recognition of things. And this has nothing to do with people that are color blind. Why it counters your "design" that the yellow bumper on an ship connector is also yellow in his icon? Or gold looks like gold? That makes no sense.

It really should not be an optional feature. We can turn this around as an example.

What other game gives the player the option to make all icons blue-ish and harder to distinguish from other icons?

The blue-ish icons suck. People are used to them, but that does not mean that they're perfect. We should strive to make them perfect, and easier to navigate through. Not just settle for okay.

I was used to it before I met the mod.

And I immediately realized that it was better when I saw them colored on a server I joined.

It gives me a headache just imagining looking at those blue icons again.

Truth.

Short answer: Options aren't always good.

I could ask you the same as I did someone above. Turn the idea around.

If we had colored icons as standard, why on earth would we request all blue icons?

There's literally no reason for these blue icons to even be a thing. Let us have blue icons as a mod, not the other way around. Blue icons are not nearly as useful enough to deserve a place as an optional setting. It would just cost extra resources maintaining it besides a permanently better alternative.

Actually there are reasons. Maintaining a consistent style is one. When large projects that see a lot of different hands touching it, people tend to add their own color categories to call out what ever they added. Over time there is so much color that it starts to look like web sites from the 90s full of flashing text and animated “under construction. GIFs. “Metro” style UIs are supposed to take the significance away of color and shift it to structure but games, SE in particular, do that poorly. Mostly because there is no easy way to skin a standard form control and have it render on a HUD without a massive development effort. What we end up with are relatively basic controls (buttons, checkboxes, text boxes) but no organizational controls like panels that can be individually hidden or shown or accommodate showing multiple views while adjusting scaling on other parts of the UI so that they show properly at different resolutions. There are million dollar companies who do nothing but create user controls and those are for standard windows forms and web applications. It’s hard to imagine an indie game doing that kind of UI programming on top of making the game itself. Consider that SE didn’t have anything resembling a tree view until progression was added and still hasn’t flipped the ship/station/block control panel into a tree view instead of the per grid coloring scheme.

People who are colorblind is another. Since there as many variations from total color loss to things like the most common (not being able to distinguish red and green as different) type monochrome minimally works for everyone as long as contrast ratio is maintained. SE has issues here because contrast needs are altered by background conditions. For example, if your horizon indicator has a cloud behind it it mostly disappears.

Disability regulations in various countries also play a part. We can’t use game modding as an instructional method in k-12 education unless the game meets certain UI standards in addition to whether the content is age appropriate for a school setting. That’s because we were hit with an ADA lawsuit. Granted we are public education and it has little to do with SE on the surface, we aren’t that far away from EU regulations on games supporting visual disability standards. Gaming is just so much a part of human culture (not even western/eastern anymore) it is inevitable.

The general rule for color disabilities is that you can’t use color as the sole or primary means of conveying information. Based on all of this, I’d rather keep the coloring as is and leave coloring things to the modding community since it is a very easy thing to do without getting in to the next level argument about which color things should be.

Here is a sample of how that goes:

Keen Ingots have color.

Player: Wait, Iron isn’t red when you make ingots because that removes the oxide from the Iron.

Keen: But almost all metals are grey when refined, you said you wanted colored icons.

Players: we do, but realistically.

Keen: ingots are now greyscale.

Players: all you did was remove the blue, otherwise it’s the same as it was before

Keen: ...

If only every other game out there worth its salt didn't already have a vibrant high contrast carefully designed interface. Even Medieval Engineers uses coloured icons FFS. No, excuses like 'disability regulations' and 'impossible to make realistic' are just bs.

The reason why the UI is as dreary as it is are twofold: First, Marek wants a dismal UI and Play environment to contrast against the built creations. He wants everything except what the player builds to look like crap so they think whatever was made is amaz0rs, and supporting this policy is only evidence of a sunk cost fallacy. Second, they've got away with this cheap half asked UI for 7 years now so why spend the money on improving it when the artists time is better spent on creating new coatings to smear on your ships for oNlY fOuR dOlLaRs?

Great job guys resurrecting an almost 2 year old idea that was officially declined btw.

Even though Geneticus0 brings up very fair points, solving these issues shoudn't be million-dollar rocket science.

Sure, dev time is required, but it'd permanently improve the feeling of using the block menu a fair bit.

"Great job guys resurrecting ..."

It's also officially labeled "Considered (Not Planned)". It should stay relevant for discussion as long as the feedback is needed.

I still have a hard time finding blocks in the menus. Probably some colorblind people also. Icons have little contrast.

I believe that if the keen improves the contrast, including placing a contour on the artificial horizon, such as being on the signals, gps, etc ... That speech would be well minimized.

Unfortunately, the textures are already at full color; Keen removed the color from the icons to suit their aesthetic. I've done some very basic icons myself, and yellows remain yellow, etc.

It is just that Keen is bent on doing monochromatic blue for their icons... and the rest of their UI.

We know but we wanted it to be official with a button toggle between the styles.

I do understand what you want and it's an good idea to make it an official feature especially for the Xbox players.

One problem with deferring to mods is that, for multiplayer, it's either everyone or no one.

Plus, you might even find yourself having to become familiar with MULTIPLE sets of icons at once because some icon mods outright replace, not just recolour, vanilla icons with their own images (Architoc's Icone Coloree Realiste, anyone?), all at whim and mercy of the taste of you and the respective server operators.

Hooray.

The fact that a player made the option available is what highlights how trivial it would be to implement.

It's not that they can't. It's that they either don't want, or can't be arsed to expend the necessary effort, for their game to not look like Fifty Shades of Female Hygiene Product TV Commercial Demonstration Fluid. (Seriously. Imagine being so without substance that you have to be compared to a substitute, a fake, a phony, an ersatz.)

See https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/icons-need-color-ore-icons-components-icons-ammunition-icons-give-them-some-color#comment-3099

"Counter to our design" – Our design, as in, someone at Keen consciously and intentionally came up with this look, someone at Keen consciously and intentionally approved its implementation, someone at Keen consciously and intentionally approved spending the man-hours drawing all the icons and implementing the UI style, someone at Keen consciously and intentionally got paid to spend that time doing those tasks, someone at Keen consciously and intentionally signed off on shipping it with some release to the public, someone at Keen is currently consciously and intentionally not raising this as a revision-worthy issue to the effect of this actually getting revised, and has, or have (yes, plural), been not doing this for FOUR YEARS.

There are literally no innocents involved in the proliferation of this outspokenly unwelcome, eye-insulting exercise in how not to make a UI. This isn't some typo. This requires intent. Intent for the product their names appear in the credits of to be less than what it could be. Imagine that guy's LinkedIn profile:

"UI designer on Space Engineers. Yes, I am responsible for the feebly-blue, contrastless, space-wasting, click-expensive interface that's not been improved on for at least half a decade, and likely for eternity until the end and past the end of time, as in, when SE2 (lol) comes out, likely with equally as dilettantish a UI. Which is probably just going to be the same crap except tinted a different colour. Like purple. Like Deus Ex: Invisible War. Which everybody hated. Because it had to be castrated down to a pale shadow of its trailblazing predecessor because consoles. Kinda like SE. All hail consoles."

Last I checked (years ago) you can fumble with the data folder in steamapps and add whatever content from mods you want in there. Of course, if the server doesn't have the mod and the mod isn't purely clientside then expect undefined behavior.

Yes, for anything non-functional and cosmetic like textures and GUI elements, you can substitute whatever you want. Which, all thing said, is not entirely unremarkable on its own. Best used to replace the grimy, electro-haze overlay of the camera with an empty texture, a thing that is, thankfully, no longer necessary since Warfare 2.

One could think the UI design is deliberately this, ahem, technically tolerable to bully players into coming up with, and publishing, better designs and looks.

Which could then be "gratefully incorporated" under the (purported, I shall add) excuse of that one laughably delusional clause and/or clause interpretation that, supposedly, automatically makes any and all such content exclusive-eternal-unconditional-license-granted property of KeenSWH … —

My cynical take on this, anyway.

This have been mentioned before, and I'll just recap quickly on why it being an option is a shitty idea.

We have all learned to live with blue icons, and it works, but it's still objectively the shittier option if you compare the two. This isn't even an opinion. It's just factually worse in all readable ways for humans.

If you have the option to have clear and readable icons vs all blue and sometimes confusing and very similar looking icons, why keep support for the the shittier option? I can manage just fine with blue icons, finding exactly what I need quite fast, but that's not the point. I want to never have to glance twice. Ever. Since it still happens, 3000 hours into the game. It's a QOL change that have zero negatives.

Give us color, we have been in black and white long enough.