Eurekav2

[smoth]

Though it is the basis of coding as a practice in general.

in spring modding the basis is "copy over stuff until it works, wonder when it suddendly breaks"

for some people yes but you need to stop representing it as common practice.

[CarRepairer]

Hey guys, I'm glad to see the metal map analyzer is so popular all of a sudden. In light of this I just made some changes in easymetal in EvoRTS to the code which may help it go faster. Maybe not, but the code is slightly nicer looking now (particularly the MergeToFlag function which I had written dumbly before).

The easymetal code's strength is that it's designed work with those annoying metal maps with big blobs instead of exact spots.

[smoth]

woot

[FLOZi]

Hey guys, I'm glad to see the metal map analyzer is so popular all of a sudden. In light of this I just made some changes in easymetal in EvoRTS to the code which may help it go faster. Maybe not, but the code is slightly nicer looking now (particularly the MergeToFlag function which I had written dumbly before).

The easymetal code's strength is that it's designed work with those annoying metal maps with big blobs instead of exact spots.

In the S44 version it's all done in GamePreload and the performance impact is minimal (significantly less than the hang caused by texture loading when spawning start units)

[zwzsg]

Healthbars and selection squares are a necessary evil

Not true.

I deeply hate having fat shaded framed healthbar floating above all units, like it happens way too much often nowadays. It breaks the immersion more than anything else for me, for two reaons:
1) Healthbars are billboarded. They don't follow the game scene perspective, making it obvious they're not part of the game world.
2) Healthbars draw the focus of my attention, I'm not anymore watching a tank getting shot at, but a graphbar decreasing.

We can do without healthbars! The best replacment to convey the same information without breaking game immersion (but instead adding to it), is to have the unit looks more and more battered, by adding scars and cracks on the texture, missing limbs, random sparks or whatever. The downside of that method is that it can be quite time consumming to implement, especially if each unit kind get the damage represents differently. So we should look for a way to implement a generic scar & cracks texture overlay or something else that can be reused on many models without requiring lengthy customisation. Total Annihilation used smoke, the smoke got more and more dense the more damaged the unit was, and also changed from white smoke to black smoke: it's an exemple of a way to represent health without healthbar, that's easy to code for the modder, and easy to interpret for the player. Quake 1 used model texture with more and more blood streaks, but it got lost in the general browniness of the game.

Selection square are harder to do without. In some modern games I've seen it replaced with a highlight. Simply making the selected units brighter (without changing hue) is a now quite easy to implement, and can convey the info of which unit are selected without breaking immersion much: It just look like some units are under the spotlight of a powerful out-of-map spotlight. Or maybe I've seen it more used for "what's under the cursor" than for "what's being selected", but meh, could work for either.

But anyway selection square are less immersion breaking than healthbar. If only because selection square match the game world perspective. So it's much more believable that tanks travel around with some big green square attached to their underside, than with huge panel floating over them that someon always turn toward the camera.

A point that I've tried to get across for years, which I picked up from TA:K, is that healthbar and selection square can be merged into health-colored selection shapes. If we can't do without game breaking UI element, we might as well have as few of them as possible, so merge them to convey as much info into each element as possible. The selection square are always green, that's a waste, instead use the color of the selection square to convey extra info! The shading and framing of healthbar takes pixel space and draw player sight attention without adding mroe info, let's remove them!

So my personnal solution is to now use a "hightlight selected units with health color" widget (which you can find in KP installer). Seeing units get suddently surrounded by red/orange/yellow/green translucent shell is still a bit immersion breaking, but way less than a bar in a panel hovering about them. The drawback is that you only see the health of the selected units, but anyway they're usually the units you care about the health of, and for unselected units you can still hover the mouse pointer over them and check in the tooltip individually.

[Pxtl]

Sorry Z, normally I agree with you, but every game I've ever played that threw out healthbars or decided to hide them when units weren't actively taking damage or non-selected frustrated me. Especially when they use a vague concept like "how much is it smoking" or a colour-shift.

There are three different notions a number. The level of precision conveyed, accuracy of the information the user gets, and how quickly they can get it at a glance. For example, a gradual color-shift gives the user a good idea of incremental differences, because it's high-precision. The user can see that unit X has a little more health than unit Y - this is better than large, discrete stages where this information is not available. However, a gradual color-shift fails the second test - the user has no sense of accuracy, that one shade of colour represents 25% and another represents 75%, because colours don't really work that way. You can't see a colour and say "okay, that coulour is exactly 38% of the way between colour X and Y.

The colour provides a good at-a-glance info, that's it. But when you've got a small battle with 5 units slugging it out, you don't care about the at-a-glance, you want the exact numbers.

Even accepting a discrete, staged system that solves the second problem, the discrete stages aren't properly conveyed to the user. I want to know when the unit is at 75%, 50%, 25%, 10%, etc. Even when a game includes color-shifts and whatnot at those land-marks, they never document up-front "this unit is down to 75% health! That's why it changed colour!". I suppose you could have a little immersion-breaking pop-up appear over the unit when it passes the quartile, so the user could know "ah, I just got the 25% pop-up and the unit has started smoking! Smoke means 25% health!" Most games that use discrete colours just have "unit turns brown at one point, starts smoking at another, smokes more and gets sparks at another". A health bar doesn't require a "smoke-amount-to-numbers" translation dictionary. It just *is*.

The health of the unit is the most important piece of state information about the unit. While it's fine just to give a vague notion in large pitched battles, when you're dealing with a handful of units you want to know the exact number (although this is available through the tooltip...)

Personally, my approach would be the stupidest possible one... physical healthbars as part of the unit model somehow.

Or just work with those selection-circle style things and project it onto the landscape.

[zwzsg]

Let's not forget it's about conveying info to a human brain, not to another computer. And our brains are wired to deal with quantitative values, not numeric ones.

So it's not about "my tank has 37% health left", but about "my tank is smoking badly, it's going to explode soonish unless I pull out". What I mean is that, with a little experience, you'll get the feeling of "how long will my tank live" from the smoke appearance without passing through numeric value. In fact using numeric values slow the brain processing down. By the way, healtbars are about bars, not digits. And your eyes-brain can't tell either if it's at 32% or 37% upon seeing a single bar (without comparaison I mean). You can try replacing healthbars by floating xx%, I'll assure you you'll have a bigger difficutly assessing situation than with colored hightlight, unless the number of unit on screen is super low. So let's bypass numeric values and just get straight to delivering the "feelings" about how healthy units are, which is anyway what your brain really works on.

And if you need to be picky about precision, there's always the tooltip.

I want to know when the unit is at 75%, 50%, 25%, 10%, etc. Even when a game includes color-shifts and whatnot at those land-marks, they never document up-front "this unit is down to 75% health! That's why it changed colour!".

(0,255,0) is 100%, (128,255,0) is 75%, (255,255,0) is 50%, (255,128,0) is 25%, (255,0,0) is 0%

[Pxtl]

Either way, I'd put the indicator right on the model. A big backpack with a health indicator in it, so you can see the health of non-selected units.

Now I'm fantasizing about adding little speech bubbles over units to units to tell you stuff. Stuff you wouldn't want to clutter the chatbox or audio with, but is useful when watching a unit in action. Event driven, so it just appears once things happen - if you miss it, tough luck.

"Health below 50%"
"I'm stuck!"
"Stun has worn off".
"Level up"
"Done my build queue."
"Retreating for fuel."
"Retreating for health."

[zwzsg]

Either way, I'd put the indicator right on the model. A big backpack with a health indicator in it, so you can see the health of non-selected units.

Tweak yourself a greyound serial number and get health numeric value as physical part of the unit model!

[knorke]

It breaks the immersion more than anything else for me, for two reaons:
1) Healthbars are billboarded. They don't follow the game scene perspective, making it obvious they're not part of the game world.

Somehow healthbars are so abstract my brain filters them out and they do not seem immersion breaking to me. Of course they should not show on full health and be reasonably sized.
If the bars are transparent or teamplatter-style, I actually often find them more annoying.

Now I'm fantasizing about adding little speech bubbles over units to units to tell you stuff. Stuff you wouldn't want to clutter the chatbox or audio with, but is useful when watching a unit in action. Event driven, so it just appears once things happen - if you miss it, tough luck.

"Health below 50%"
"I'm stuck!"
"Stun has worn off".
"Level up"
"Done my build queue."
"Retreating for fuel."
"Retreating for health."

Sounds good but why show bubbles if you could just have corresponding effects or animations on the unit?

"Health below 50%" - black smoke, fire, damage texture
"Stun has worn off". - when stunned, show some EMP style sparks flying around
"Level up" - unit gets more guns, more visible armor (see c&c generals)
"Done my build queue." - constructors crane folds back down

Though these could work with chat bubbles:
"I'm stuck!"
"Retreating for fuel."
"Retreating for health."

[Pxtl]

Because I speak English, not pictogram or special effect. At some point you end up with an illegible mess of undocumented glows and sparks that are meaningless to the viewer.

[knorke]

then the game is doing it wrong.

[oksnoop2]

Would someone please split this?