Yeah that is what he means, especially now a days in DUST brick tanking is all the rage. You will see caldari's with more armour than my Minmatar has EHP. It would be useful knowing if this is the case, so I can make a more informed descision about the engagement.

Personally I would achieve this by merging Shields and Armour into a single bar for enemies. Light Red for Shields and Dark Red for Armour, so if a gallanteans EHP consists of 20% Shields and 80% it will look something like this.

S S A A A A A A A A

Ah cool I got it (good explanation!). Also we could likely take the max amount and use them as scalars to drive some other value that helps give some visual indicators to their max without spelling it out (although it could be spelled out if we want, but that's for design). We could play with the unit spacing, intensity, or color.

Oh I have an idea of optimizing maps for the ps3
Remove some outer map area, like alot, so there is less memkry being taken by something we will never use lol.

League of Legends does health bars well.

Small amount of health:
http://www.eternitygames.org/media/userfiles/images/Articles/LoL/rumeur/health.jpg

Larger amount of health:
http://forums.euw.leagueoflegends.com/board/attachment.php?attachmentid=114887&d=1361749285

The health bars are the same length but they have a marks every 100hp or something.

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.

Ah cool I got it (good explanation!). Also we could likely take the max amount and use them as scalars to drive some other value that helps give some visual indicators to their max without spelling it out (although it could be spelled out if we want, but that's for design). We could play with the unit spacing, intensity, or color.

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

Good idea but there is a problem. Let's say you have a shield tanked caldari.
How do you show that this suit has most of its EHP in shields? Until you engage the exact distrubtion is unknown.

This is the information we want at moments notice, so we can make informed descisions.
Where is their tank?
Is my weapon strong enough to deal with each tank type?
Is this a good engagement?

Ah cool I got it (good explanation!). Also we could likely take the max amount and use them as scalars to drive some other value that helps give some visual indicators to their max without spelling it out (although it could be spelled out if we want, but that's for design). We could play with the unit spacing, intensity, or color.

Good idea but there is a problem. Let's say you have a shield tanked caldari.
How do you show that this suit has most of its EHP in shields? Until you engage the exact distrubtion is unknown.

This is the information we want at moments notice, so we can make informed descisions.
Where is their tank?
Is my weapon strong enough to deal with each tank type?
Is this a good engagement?

@CCP MC Peanut

Since you're here, I like to point out something that has gotten me a disoriented (literally) when I was playing Dust.

Every time I spawn in at any location whether it's an uplink, objective, default spawn, or CRU, I get completely disoriented upon spawning in to the point that even with the help of the compass I am momentarily unable to get a sense of direction. I'm serious. For some reason my sense of direction goes the way of the dodo bird during that first moment immediately after spawning. Of course, a moment or two later I regain my sense of direction thanks to the compass and then all is right again.

I don't know if this has anything to do with just biology and maybe this is just me experiencing this and no one else.

In any case, this seems like something that can best be addressed with a subtle visual cue built into the spawn points when I'm in the map overview screen. If an uplink is facing a specific direction, I like to know before I pick that spawn. I don't want to spawn in facing a wall while a redberry has his gun to my back. But the issue with the disorientation comes in when spawning in via the objectives and CRUs where I can spawn in at a random point at a random direction. Am I going to spawn in facing the objective or away from the objective? Am I going to spawn behind that barrier or out in the open?

I'm not sure if they purposely orient the player when spawning or not. My guess is they do, but I can't say for sure. Either way they can orient the player and likewise indicate this somehow on the overview map. If we end up moving the icons on the overview map to the 3D system, I'll keep this in mind.

I'm not sure if they purposely orient the player when spawning or not. My guess is they do, but I can't say for sure. Either way they can orient the player and likewise indicate this somehow on the overview map. If we end up moving the icons on the overview map to the 3D system, I'll keep this in mind.

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.

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.

[...] Secondly, you got me wishing the HUD could express everything involved in the current "spreadsheet" at the bottom of the HUD when we are targeting something. It would definitely create more immersion. Perhaps there could be a thin white line that signifies our "weapon efficiency" as well. [...]

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.