More cool stuff

Actually you pretty much hit the nail on the head with what we were doing with the Bar setup and other HUD functionality (although it is pretty Bar-stuff heavy). Rather than creating actor classes, though, we've put everything in a hierarchical material setup. It is 'fairly' object oriented, in that I can define parameters (barValue, barScale, barColor) on the parent material that can be overridden on the child materials. It is by no means as robust as driving this with classes, though--so your suggestion still makes me consider the alternative. Another benefit to keeping things in materials is that we can do upgrades and changes on the content side. I can edit the shader to have distortion, expose the parameter, and set it (on the root material) in kismet. Pretty nifty.

I do think if we try to implement a standardized 3d icon system, that this is the way to go (as we will have more complexity with states and such)

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.

guys has no one played LoL i mean this is a solved problem....

http://www.team-dignitas.org/uploads/tinymce/images/black_shield_mrog.jpg

just saying each tick is 100
and the shield is just a different color appended to the end, so you can see %shield and %armor (in our case) and get a good idea of TOTAL hp, but at the same time isn't giving exact numbers, as it is just exact 100

SCIENCE TIME!

Infra-red would work in fog*, dust, and brightness^.

Sonar would not work in a dust storm, it would work in the dark though.

"X-Ray Vision". We already have the active scanner; that red chevron is all we need.


* Light-medium fog.

^ Assuming the use of thermal optics rather than image intensifiers.

Excellent points and outstanding dialogue. Again, the decision on doing this is not mine to make, but the artist in me would find these very fun to figure out and work on. Of course, that in itself isn't reason enough to do them. Designers would have to carefully consider the balance and affects to a player's gameplay.

But possibly speaking, absolutely. I can think of a couple ways to accomplish these 'view modes'. One would be to replace all objects in the scene with another material type--xray, infra, ultra, etc. But a shader alone could be complicated to be accurate. For example, infravision should show heat, but we don't track this information on a per pixel level. We *could* create a different texture map to represent the surface heat of objects, but that seems like it could be expensive. Also we *could* tag vertex colors with a value to represent this, but this would be a fair workload to go back and tag everything. There may be an easier, but less accurate way, which would be to just guess based on some material information, such as the specular power (tells you how much light is bounced off rather than absorbed), emissive value, and the light intensity affecting it. This would probably get you something pretty accurate for things that don't generate their own heat and only absorb from the environment. But yea, having diagnosed this I'd say it could turn into a fair amount of work, and that was just infra-vision.

Cracks and pixels overlay could happen, and we can be flexible how they happen. If we want we could put a 'visor' model in the scene and put the cracks on it, so we can control the depth that the happen at. Maybe some HUD elements are holographic projections and others are part of a screen--this would give us that control. Also we can separate the effect based on armor or shield damage. The challenge will be balancing the variation in effects and dealing with overlapping effects. I imagine there will be some limitation that requires us to group effects and only be able to display one from each group at a time.

I don't know if someone has already mentioned this before, but I wanted to adress a MAJOR design issue with the HUD that I feel not many players really mention or even care about.

One of the coolest things about the Dust 514 HUD is TacNet. I absolutely love how much of the gameplay is scanning, hiding from scans, and e-war in general. One of my favorite things is the detailed information given when you look at another player.

However, its placement and complexity makes it very hard to use mid-battle, expecially on HD screens where the information is smaller, and a larger precentage away from a player's reticle.

For example, try looking up at the top of my post and focusing your eyes there while trying to read the text down here. It's impossible. Now try focusing your eyes here and try reading the above line. Much easier isn't is?

But we don't want to see a blob of text over our reticle...that doesn't help anything. Instead, symbols and colors are the best ways for a person to associate meaning. This is on the same page with the shields/armor thing that was mentioned earlier.

There are two things that should be taken from the current tacnet readout at the bottom of the screen and shown as info next to/on top of the health bar:

-Weapon Efficiency (how effective your weapon is against the current shields/armor of the opponent as represented by a green positive percentage or a red negative percentage).
-Meta Level compared to yours (a circle, triangle, or X should be listed to represent whether the opponent has a lower, similar, or higher meta level...this is currently how items are marked in Dust 514)
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Second thing

As a Logistics player, tacnet hates me.

We are restricted to a 40m view distance for all of our triage abilities. For example, the revive icon only displays when I am within that 40m circle around the player. My suggestion for the ability to see player health bars when you use a repair tool (yes, I actually came up with an idea that made it into the game lol), is also limited to a 40 meter range.

Obviously this is a game design issue, but my real problem is that I can't see where the heavies are (and which of them need reps/revives). This could be solved with some sort of icon similar to the revive icon for when a player is at a certain percentage of their armor (say 50% or lower) that would show me the direction of a player in need of logistics support. Ammo icons when players are less than 20% of supply would be great too. Again I know, game design issue so....

Currently in Dust you can look at the minimap and see chevrons instead of dots. These represent the new suits that were introduced into the game, but they help a TON when running with Gallente heavies as the heavies then show up on radar as a easy to distinguish chevron instead of a dot.

If every role (assault, logistics, sentinel, scout) had a different symbol both on on tacnet and the radar, this would improve gameplay even further. (However as a balancing issue I would recommend that you only allow friendlies to be able to see this info, and the enemy to only see red dots/chevrons of the same type).
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Okay last thing, and it's really simple.

I should be able to see a squad member's name above their head no matter if they are 5 meters or 500 meters away from me.

Oh, and please watch this video if you would like to see some examples of a few of these points as how they might be presented in-game (footage is from a game called Resistance 2).
This game does a great job of making sure that you know exactly which players are where, who needs what, all without cluttering up the game screen even when there are 8 players all in one location.

http://youtu.be/Ta5PR1-UstM?t=5m6s
I skipped it to 5:06, that's where the actual gameplay begins

Please tell me CCP Photon exists only to create new visuals.

Actually on topic while new display modes would be awesome quite a few people would have problems with them as they would be much hard to compile into a 3D model in our heads. I can look at a posistion on the map and know the terrain there as I've been there before and put together all the images together, I can't even imagine trying to do this with a location that displays in wireframe or radar, IR and thermal is hard enough.