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Clicked A Few Times
Threads: 2
Posts: 10
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| 4:05:31 PM - Tue, Feb 15th 2011 |
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These are awesome Turner850! 
I've been really anxious to see any update, especially some categorization of the icons.
But I've haven't been been able to help myself, and I've sorted through them anyway trying to find icons I can use (I hope that's ok lol, just struck me now that it might not have been).
But anyway, until we get all these icons structured, named or in some way categorized, I've got some tips for those who feel patient enough to search through them unstructured as they are right now.
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Okay so this is what I've been doing to help me find specific icons in the heap all these icons. So this won't work with icons you don't have any reference of, like a screenshot. It also helps to have Win 7, or an OS with similar sorting/indexing abilities.
- First of all moved all the UI related images/icons to a separate folder:
Easiest way to do that is to, in Win7 or XP, choose to sort (or group) all images based on Dimensions. In Win7 this option is not available at first glance, you'll have to right-click in the folder, choose "Sort By" > "More..." and in this long list find "Dimensions" and check it, then you will be able to sort all images by Dimensions (ex. 20x20 is a Dimension size). So now select all images that aren't 48x48 and move them to another folder, and you will only be left with item and spell icons.
This can be done in many ways, and I'm sure my solutions are the best. But they work for me. One way is to simply sort all the images by file size. So in Win7 right-click in the folder, choose "Sort by" > "Size" (again if its not available look under "More...") and this will sort the icons based on how "vibrant" the colors are in the image. So icons that has like a dull gray sword with a black background will show in one end, and icons that displays many different colors (gems and enchanted stuff) show up in the other. This is not really any great way of sorting, but at least it better than having them randomized. And I've noticed that "low-end" gear and items usually show up in one end, and high-end gear and especially spells and abilities show up in the other. This is because gear gets "fancier" as you progress, so does their icons, and icons with more colorized pixels take more space (don't worry, only about 3 KB more).
- "Ok, that sucked, what now?":
What else you can do, thats worked great for me, is using a freeware called ImageSorter that will "sort" all the icons for you. It's not as great as it may sound. But what it can do is load all the thousands of images, and then sort them all based on color and display them all at once in a structured "table" that charts them by color in a way that kind-of looks like the color picker in Paint or Photoshop. It takes some time for it to structure this (about 5-10min) but once its done it operates surprisingly fast.
Some example images: All Icons 100%, All Icons Zoomed In
So this way, you can search on icons based on color. So this is obviously more effective with icons that have stronger colors. But still, it helps narrow down the number of icons to search through for you quite effectively. It's kind of like playing "Find Waldo", lol. I've found more or less all my icons this way, the only icons this technique those not really work with is equipment (armor/weapon) icons that lack any specific color scheme, so if they have a brown/gray/dark dull color. But it's still better than sifting through them all mindlessly in folder view.
Okay, so onces you've found the icon in this software, you click it (or right-click it) and you will get a small window, on which it says the icons name. So for instance it will say "00000c7b.jpg". What you do next is use a search function in the root folder of your icons, or if you're using Win7 like me you can use the search bar in Windows Explorer, it's quick and effective. And through this you search on the filename and locate the file, then you can rename/move it/copy it or what ever you want to do with it.
I move them to a folder where I store all my "sorted" icons, then I copy it and rename to the items equivalent name (so I keep one source icon and one copy with the item name). Then I either convert this to .png and upload, or just upload as .jpg.
This may sound like a long procedure to find one little icon. But once you've figured out the routine, the part that takes the longest is locating the icon in ImageSorter (or whatever method you use), the rest becomes a "rinse repeat" type of thing.
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I hope this is to some help for those that want to "hunt icons", but thrust me it's quite a dull thing, requires patients and no life... which is perfect for me! xD
I'm sorry that this post got so huge, I like to be detailed in my explanations. If some moderator finds to too long for the forums, tell me and I'll move the "tutorial" part to some external source, like my blog, and link it back here.
Cheers. 
EDIT: So I suppose that this post just became seriously irrelevant now when Ciovala released the whole icon database server-side. Yay for my awesome timing! xD
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Edited On 11:52:11 PM - Tue, Feb 15th 2011 by Aethyr
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