I'm not sure about all of them, but many modern desktops support .svg icons and backgrounds. That may be a valid direction if it's supported across the board.
I believe Windows added support with IE9, no idea about OS X.
I like the idea! +1
Not all games seem to have big picture in grid mode view. Maybe more pictures need to be made there too?
TF2 has low-res icon too which looks ugly in GS (it gets upscaled).
@MrSchism If you make ultra-detailed svg icon, it will look awesome in high resolutions. But it will look terrible when all these details will be cramped into a tiny icon. See http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-icons.html
@johnnynoone I'm familiar with the issues of vectors when they're small. The statement was regarding scaling up. Frankly, not much can make those tiny icons look much better.
So you meant leaving current small icons as they are and replacing only bigger ones with SVGs? In this case I agree.
Recently stumbled across a little application called icns2png, it allows you to extract the .png images from a Mac OS .icns file with options to filter images based on colour depth and size.
Ubuntu has a manual page for it here: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man1/icns2png.1.html
Any updates?
Nothing extracted yet.
I think it would be nice if Valve titles where updated with higher resolution desktop icons, especially older titles such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Counter-Strike: Source.
I would suggest 256x256 pixels in PNG format, this could also be a recommendation for non-Valve titles.
Obviously this is only a very minor issue, but it could also potentially benefit other platforms too.