Hey Everybody, CCP MC Peanut here--new to the forums (and this is my first post). I'm a Technical Artist here in Shanghai and was mostly involved in the HUD upgrade for the Project Legion Prototype you saw at Fanfest. I'm excited you guys noticed the work and are discussing it. The feedback is super awesome too (so awesome I forwarded the post to a lot of other devs). I thought I would jump in and give a little further explanation about what we did and potentially where we can go from here.

The HUD that you see in the Project Legion Prototype showed at Fanfest is now being rendered inside the 3D Scene. This is a significant change. While what you saw in the demo isn't incredibly different to what was there before, I want to emphasize that we have completely changed the underlying system for creating HUDs and have built a pipeline that puts the artist and designers much closer to the implementation. What you saw was the first implementation with the new system. And while the demo doesn't demonstrate it all--everything is working. In a very short time (a few weeks maybe), a few of us rebuilt the HUD, recreated all the logic, and tuned it to a slightly new visual design.

I'd love to go a little more in depth and explain some of the cooler benefits we are finding with this change:

Artist and Designers can iterate like crazy:
Unreal already has a lot of robust tools available to it, so why not take advantage of them. One of the things the artist love the most is being able to play the game with the editor open and update their material parameters in real-time. The 3D HUD is heavily utilizing the Unreal Material system. For example, all the 'bars' stem from the same base material, which has parameters to control the scale of the ticks, space between, color (including switching the color over position), flashing (speed and color). Tuning these parameters in-game is pretty awesome and very easy. Another example, the most obvious one probably, is that since it is 3D, we can change the position and layout very easily--it is as simple as moving it in the 3D package (Maya) and re-importing the geometry.

Logic outside of code
This was an interesting choice, but I believe it was the right one. We are exposing game data to the artist/designer through events in the visual scripting system, called Kismet (if you aren't familiar with Kismet, it is a node based scripting tool provided within Unreal that allows artists and designers to do more 'programmatic' things). With this change, much of the logic is in the hands of the content creators--the programmers are only responsible for providing the information when applicable. This sounds like it could become overwhelming, and we have been careful about not suddenly dumping everything in their laps. I can give one example. When your shield value changes, an event will be fired (a kismet event inside the HUD map file). This event will expose the current and max shield value. Luckily, our bar material has a max and current parameter input, so we just update the values (using a Kismet action) and all is good. While this is something that sounds like it could be completely programmatic, it is so much nicer to give the content creators the flexibility. If we wanted to, we could trigger a distortion animation every time the armor value changed, and as the armor got lower, the distortion could be more significant. This would require zero programmer support.

Lots of technology to utilize
Because we are in 3D we have access to all the rendering technology as other 3D stuff (suits, weapons, environments). We can also utilize the same tools (materials, modeling, an animation) that our 3D artists are familiar with, so the transition for workflow, was not so bad.

Capacity to be Dynamic
I can't make any promises about racial HUDs, but we are definitely in a much better position to be able to do them. It is very easy to create new 'visual' components without needing to rework the data hookup--and they would be lightweight and low cost.

There is more, and I could go on, but perhaps that is better for follow up posts. Our hope is that we have built a system the is flexible enough to give us more options to do the kinds of things you guys are asking for. Regarding these requests, I can definitely weigh in on their possibility within the system, but I am unable to comment on the likelihood (that is someone else's call). Please keep the feedback coming, and feel free to post follow up questions.

thanks!

Lastly, just a random thought, but I think it would be REAAALY cool if our HUD would break/crack when we take some armor damage (% based) and then "repair" when we get armor reps. Fluxes could also cause a little distortion to our HUD.

3. Ability to switch to squad mate's vision. Would help in designating targets.

Thank you for the reply, what HUD features are among your goals for Legion by release? What do you foresee the HUD being like?

This is not something I am able to comment directly on, unfortunately. I am not in a position to make decisions on what we ultimately implement. What I can say is that the new HUD pipeline is dramatically more flexible such that our artists and designers can be more directly involved to implement the things that they want. I can say that the feedback is immensely helpful and you guys have challenged me with lots of questions that have made me re-examine some of our system implementations (which is good).

Wow that is a fantastic point that I hadn't yet thought of. It would be very easy to 'mess' with the compass. We could offset it by a wrong value, or even merge in a 2nd value that is animating. I'll point some designers to your post.

MC Peanut, when I watched the clip of the compass, I noticed that (to me at least) the rotation of the compass feels unnatural and counter intuitive. Having the compass act static and behave as if the user is looking inside a circle would be better in my opinion. What i mean by that is to have the compass rotate the opposite way of which the user turns.n++

Recently I have been more involved with the Starmap work so not a lot is happening related to the HUD. I've had a few conversations with the guys working on the Salvage stuff just so they are aware of the kinds of things we can do--I believe we will be able to do some cool things with the HUD here, but it is important they are aware of the way it works so they can expose the information in the right way for the HUD.

Outside of this I've been supporting CCP Photon as he works on integrating text rendering--this is a big next stuff for the 3D HUD--or 3D UI system. After this our goal is to implement a few 'simple' widgets in 3D, such as a label and text field. Currently we are using a lot of the work done on the Starmap as a guideline for how to 'organize' this. Although the difference is that the Starmap spawns every asset through code, where 3D UI elements will need to be able to be place by the artist. Although there could be a middle ground here, where the artist places sockets in a 'layout' and the UI system still spawns the appropriate actors at said sockets. This is very early thinking right now--still needs a few more conversations and maybe some experiments until we have a clearer picture.

This is pretty cool and is definitely something we would want to look at incorporating if it fits with the design for the Salvage scanning mechanic. I know that this could be implemented as a 2D overlay, but it could also be done with rendering trickery. We could just create invisible meshes that are attached to other actors that should register on the scanner and then, on scan, make them visible(and render on top of everything). Then we don't really have any math to do. Also we could control the transparency based on distance if we wanted to account for a range of your scanner (and that range could vary).

Just because someone mentioned field of view... for the love of god CCP please increase the field of view or at least allow us to select our preference when it comes to field of view.

A simple slider bar ranging from say 70Deg. to like 100/110 Degrees would be awesome. Thanks :)

Lord Peanut!
How's it going?