I sort of lukewarmly oppose the use of "realistic" graphic images in ATF, although I have made a few of my own mainly to honor precedent, because IMHO they'll never really look very good. Images that small are always going to look cartoonish. The pixel density of a typical computer screen just isn't there. Part of the problem is the map scale; even at max map zoom a typical ATF tank piece is going to work out to about 100m long. At realistic spacings, they're going to overlap. Good animation would go a long way towards improving the appeal, but ATF's facilities are primitive. The vehicles like tanks are bad enough with their twitching turrets, but the dismounts are even worse, static as they are. And the use of color keying rather than a proper alpha channel makes everything very jagged when rotated, since edge dithering becomes impossible without causing the dreaded "pink border".
Even in a game like Close Combat, which had a lot more attention to appearance and animation and a much closer map scale, you can see that the tanks and men were deliberately "oversized" because you just can't make the detail look good any smaller.
Another problem specific to ATF is the variable zoom of the icons themselves. If you haven't noticed, "100%" is actually 50%. If there was no stretching, you could carefully hand-optimize your images to look better, but given that you don't know what the stretch is going to be, and that usually it will not be 100% in any case, it is almost impossible to optimize the bitmaps.
I personally would design a game of this sort to use only graphic icons, which don't carry expectations of photorealism and therefore don't disappoint when they get a bit jagged or don't match the map scale, can have a clearly demarked center point, and are easier to tell apart on a cluttered screen. They don't have to be NATO-style icons; stylized tanks and whatnot would be fine, too, just so long as they don't try to look like real tanks. In this sense, Curt, I think you're on the right track by not trying to simulate a "God's-eye view".
--- Kevin
