thanks!

I might not be understanding your question correctly, so feel free to bark back if I answer it wrong. Health and Armor bars could have a bar 'tick' (or do we call these cells?) for each unit of armor/health. This is the basic setup on our material: there is a 'barScale' parameter that will tile/repeat the bar texture (which is always a texture of 1 cell/unit/tick) by whatever the numeric value is. But in the case of Health and Armor, we have pretty large values, so repeating the ticks so much ends up kind of ugly, so we need to set the barStep parameter, which represents the number of numeric units that each texture 'tile' stands for. So if I set the barStep to 2, and the scale is 10, I see 5 cells (when full). Currently on the suits we are dividing their maxAmmo value by a constant scalar value so that they end up having the same number of texture repeats, but we don't have to. In the ammo department we are actually representing them more accurately, but once the ammo count gets high, we start setting the barStep.

Part of me thinks you are asking the health bars of the person you are shooting, though? This could happen--it would have to be part of the targeting info, or the data would at least have to be provided by the same system that grabs the target info data, but we could put it somewhere else.

And the bar colors can be whatever we want--that is just up to the designers.

The feedback continues to be great.. As awesome as you guys find Dev responses, the feedback you are posting is even more stellar (space themed games deserve space themed adjectives).

The shield-armor ideas for the targeting info are absolutely possible. And I much better see your point on the benefit of being able too discern the ratio between Armor and Shield. What do you think is the best way to show the current value of the Armor Shield, but still preserve the ratio relationship? I'm thinking you could either use 4 colors (2 for depleted, 2 for not), or a secondary bar or two underneath--could be thin. Also we could still do it with 2 colors, but layer 2 bars over each other and have the bottom one not update (as the above disappear when depleting)


COMPASS WORKS
I was inspired by you guys. I know we would have done it sooner or later, but after hearing so many people woot the presence of the compass and not seem to upset that it was non functional, I had to. And it wasn't very hard. I ended up doing it in the shader. I was able to figure out the world space camera vector and then used a custom material node (which is just a place to write hlsl) to convert the vector to an angle range. Then divided this by pi left me with a -1 to 1 value, which I used to drive the U coordinate position of the texture. Also I exposed an offset value so I could go into a map, orient myself north, and plug in numbers to the offset until the compass was correct. Now back to the artist to create a texture for the full 360 view.
Hopefully we can show this off very soon in an actual Dev Blog post.

Ridiculously awesome <3