Zeylon Rho
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
3326
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Posted - 2014.02.03 20:52:00 -
[1] - Quote
First off, great work and effort invested here! I like the idea of custom HUDs.... but there are some elements I'd want to function differently.
For starters: transparency. You can already toggle this to some degree, but ideally you can turn the HUD anywhere from full brightness to completely off. The reason is two-fold: you can turn off the HUD to avoid screen burn-in on plasma type sets, and you can turn off the HUD to record gameplay in a more cinematic fashion. For the latter, being able to have no weapon/hands up would also be a large thing.
Next: color differentiation. Thematically, the colors are fine, but Dust already suffers somewhat with respect to restricted or ambiguous color differentiation in matches. The color difference between the "team blue" and "squad green" is not particularly large, for example. Color in general is not utilized to a great extent in the interface, with most of the tacnet and messages to the player being either red or blue. Though not always a large factor in design, making provisions/options shade-wise or shape-wise to accommodate color-blind gamers is usually a nice move as well.
For racial HUD differences, I think it would be best to offer an option of toggling racial HUDs regardless of the suit you're wearing (or the race you chose). Perhaps the default could be to tie the racial HUD to the current suit, but you could switch a toggle in the options to always force "blank" race's HUD when in dropsuits and "blank" race's when in vehicles. This would ostensibly be to remove racial HUDs as being a major factor in suit selection, but it would also allow players that identify more with a given faction (say Amarr) to vary their suit/vehicle use without having a jarring HUD-shift or without feeling like they're betraying their faction mid-match. Lore-wise, we can say the HUD is just an operating system.
And speaking of the racial HUDs, while the color differences are nice, I think more dramatic differences in information placement, borders, style, and color presentation would be preferable.
I realize these are initial mock-ups, but I think the difference in battle HUD would likely be much more stark between races than just a color difference. I'd like the differences to be so large as to appear that they were each the creation of a different designer (as lore-wise, you would expect them to have developed separately). Obviously, they all have to present the same information in some way, but much in the way that Deus Ex, Killzone, Halo, or Borderlands would have different visual aesthetics and placement of information, I'd expect different civilizations to vary their approach to a very large degree.
You might also expect a different racial HUD for vehicles, as mentioned earlier, and slight HUD variations dependings on suit type (e.g. - slight cosmetic differences in a light suit vs. a heavy suit). Some minor differences between a militia/standard suit and prototype suit in terms of HUD would also be interesting, though I wouldn't want dev hours invested in that early on.
Something like that anyway.
Dren and Templar equipment stats, wrong since release.
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