Dalmont Legrand
277
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Posted - 2014.02.27 16:28:00 -
[1] - Quote
KAGEHOSHI Horned Wolf wrote:The great and mighty CCP Saberwing flew to me from the heavens with his saber-sharp wings, and he has beseeched me, the glorious emperor god-king KAGEHOSHI, with a scroll with five-hundred-fourteen golden seals (Twitter message) asking me to compile a list of important HUD stuff. In the past I have made this thread ( Improving the HUD) full of ways to improve the HUD, but here I shall extract only the most important functional stuff only, as well as some new ones I have come across on the forums. [Map/minimap][Team/squad][Equipment][Weapon][Other] I noticed right now that messages about whether you are scanned, hacking taking place, and others occupy the same place, and only one can be displayed; if an enemy starts hacking a CRU, I will no longer get information about whether or not I have been scanned. It might be good idea to just stack these messages, and even the squad order, RDV, and strike messages to the right where the kill-tracker currently is, and move the kill-tracker thing lower on the screen to make room (inspired by this).
-Upper right corner may be able to display squad orders, if you have been scanned, pending RDV requests, what is being hacked, etc. -Lower right corner will show who kills who. Without doing any radical shift in layout, or getting into immersion stuff like HUD-wobble (which should have never been removed), this is what I believe is important for improving the HUD. Behold the mighty list! marvel at how I typed things! Seriously wish I could have just typed all this directly on twitter with one big direct message, I hate character limits.
Map/Minimap
Also an interchange between fixed minimap and rotating which we have now.
Rest: All that you ask are indicators for various parameters like OB or grenade or message about enemy hack.
We need a shooter but not a wall of text, so basically it should be as compact as possible.
As you are scanned suits interface changes colour, if being repaired the suit takes another colour, shield/armor indicator has for reps a sign already, but for scan it can gain colour for example.
As for the rest, all weaponry could be classified as for AV(anti-vehicle) AI(anti-individual(intelligence for drones in future)), AE(anti-electronic). If a player is set to be able to play AI AV then he will have AIV for example. You want to make icons like other FPS have about roles?
So the list of six players let us say, on the right low corner where ammo capacity is; we'll have something like:
junkytroll452(logi icon)(AI)(vehicle sign of tank if in tank, aircraft triangle if in aircraft, turret if holding any)
below are bars for shield/armor
That must be vary compact to ensure more visual range.
For OB there should be another call out, like on squad lead interface, on his arm a beacon with constant light of some notorious color makes him know ob is ready, no need to count WP, we lose FPS, any one who is dead can easily fast looking count WP while loading even in 3 secs spawn.
Unless we can have something like a bar on arm of the squad lead: a bar of 5 lights, every 500 wp new light flashes, rasing the bar, the last flashing will denote OB and a bar will restart, then it will start again, while the 5th light is still on, when the bar is filled again and the OB is not used the counter next to 5th light changes from 1 to 2, and so on. Here the style of bar can vary considering what faction suit you use. Or just every new OB the voice will say: Orbital strike available, holding two.(in case you dont use OB)
As for calling OB it takes time. If we can't use a button for it, the free button choice for pad would be great, as I hate sitting with triangle, so OB, why not using same as R2+R3 but using R2+R3+arrow, same arrow that is used for menu call out for OB and vehicles, for OB R2+R3+arrow and choose ob sign map opens strike, for vehicles same menu but other arrow, or different icon in same menu and after various types of vehicle appear as in old menu.
Covering this topic basically gives me this, we need to reduce all indicators on screen to minimum lights, flashes, icons and time to access menus. On suit, vehicles, on weapons, they must be present everywhere giving us relevant information, if someone thinks it will be too hard getting into notion what each sign means, but I don't think they will leave it just because it is difficult, newbies must know that game is not run'n'gun. They won't leave because they don't know what each flash means but they probably because they need to create suits and invest sp in it.
The best is yet to come
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