Throwing out a few ideas here that are user interface related.

1. Modules that affect display visualization, such as sonar, x-ray, infrared. Could even have new module slots on the helmet with scouts having the most and heavies/assaults having the least. Possibility of separate types of visual dampeners on low slots. Destructible lights and dark corridors could open up new and interesting strategic possibilities. I can see this one taking quite a bit of work to get right though.

2. Equipment that temporarily disables HUD. (Flux grenades maybe?)

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

I like the idea of having the hability of using multiple display configurations, was thinking about it as well.

Something like the Predator movies :)

You could indeed have helmet specific slots to plug in personalized filters. They might take up CPU and thus affect what you can equip into your gear.

There could be thermal displays,l normal view, electromagnetic, etc.

These different modes could be disrupted, maybe thru grenades or active modules on the suits or even deployables or dropship modules making the drop ship act like a ECM dropship (or even ECCM).


This would indeed add more flavour to customization.

It would be pretty slick. The main issue as far as I can tell from a design point is there would have to be a use for those separate displays, and this would necessitate having a variety of situations such as darkness/night(use infrared), or excessive fog/dust/brightness(use sonar), or you want to see through walls to find the enemy(use x-ray), etc.

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.

It would be pretty slick. The main issue as far as I can tell from a design point is there would have to be a use for those separate displays, and this would necessitate having a variety of situations such as darkness/night(use infrared), or excessive fog/dust/brightness(use sonar), or you want to see through walls to find the enemy(use x-ray), etc.

I think instead of these kind of things being customizable, we just have them react to the enviroment.

So say your on a Thermonically Active Planet, there is soot and particulates everywhere, your DOF is limited to say 20m, your suits systems reacts and you get a pulsed grid overlay, that outlines buildings/terrain and enemies that would normally be in your FOV .

Say your on a Desolate Jilted Planet, so there is no star close enough to provide light, you are in pitch black, your suit systems react by giving you a IR night vision, however this can be as much a blessing as it is a curse since, flare effects such as Mass Drivers, Muzzel Flashes, Turret fire can potentially blind you.

Say you are on a Close Proximity Exo-planet, the sun is so bright it will burn your eyes, your suit reacts by turning down the brightness on your helmet feed, however walking in and out of buildings require time for the brigtness to readjust

Then add a few little touches to make it more immersive
Ice on the edges of your visor
Overly defined pixels after a flux, or blinding grenade
Cracks during armour damage
Having the HUD physically load in the first time you spawn
Having the HUD react to clone failure (some flashing red text center screen)
that kinda thing.

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.

DaYuM!

Good stuff Peanut!!

Can I please have some duct tape in my minmatar HUD?!

Hey CCP MC Peanut, I have a few questions about vehicles, and especially dropships.
Is there a possibility of,
A. Getting a pitch/roll meter when in a dropship?
B. Dropships in general but especially assault dropships need to point at a much lower angle when *scooped*. The current zoom feature does very little good, sense you are forced to pitch down to shoot anything low than you in that view mode, and because pitching forward causes you to move forward, you get a pretty small window of opportunity.
D. A speedometer across the board for vehicles would be really nice.

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.

Would it be possible to cheat?
Instead of being absolute black, make it dark enough the human eye can't discern shapes or colours, then invert the brightness like a negative image, then make interactable objects, like infantry, vehicles and equipment emit/fluoresce a darkness/black light, even to a lesser degree instalations could do the same.

Im not sure how well this would work, but it be alot simpler than adding in whole new , material textures.

Would it be possible to cheat?
Instead of being absolute black, make it dark enough the human eye can't discern shapes or colours, then invert the brightness like a negative image, then make interactable objects, like infantry, vehicles and equipment emit/fluoresce a darkness/black light, even to a lesser degree instalations could do the same.

Im not sure how well this would work, but it be alot simpler than adding in whole new , material textures.

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)
___________________________________________________________________________________________

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).
___________________________________________________________________________________________

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

A. Getting a pitch/roll meter when in a dropship?
Absolutely possible. To do this we would expose the pitch and roll values to kismet. There are a few ways to represent this visually, and probably it make less sense to use the bar material, but we could have some sort of gauge with a dial or us a rolley ball thingy (I'm sure there is a more scientific name). This probably means we would need to represent it with a 3D Skeletal Mesh and dynamically position it based on numerical inputs. Driving Mesh animations with dynamic values (as opposed to material) is not something we've fully scoped out yet, but I think we could do it using animation trees and blending between end point 'poses'. In the case of a dial the poses would be a single keyframe animation for the max and the min values (and the blend an 0 to 1 value that finds the exact value).

B. Dropship pointing
I don't have a lot of familiarity with the inner workings of vehicles. Maybe another dev can jump in? But I'd wager this is something that is tune-able.

C. What. no C?

D. Speedometer
We could do a dial or digital speedometer (or a bar). This would require getting a speed value change in kismet. This would be something that may have a performance issue because velocity could change very often. If it was a problem we could set the events to minimum delay time between successive fires (this is built into Unreal), but we would have to make sure it is not jerky--probably not, but it may be something that forces our hand to choose a Digital display over a Dial.

Hey CCP MC Peanut, I have a few questions about vehicles, and especially dropships.
Is there a possibility of,
A. Getting a pitch/roll meter when in a dropship?
B. Dropships in general but especially assault dropships need to point at a much lower angle when *scooped*. The current zoom feature does very little good, sense you are forced to pitch down to shoot anything low than you in that view mode, and because pitching forward causes you to move forward, you get a pretty small window of opportunity.
D. A speedometer across the board for vehicles would be really nice.

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)

Oh, right. I must have missed C. Here you go,

C. Can we get a reticle like the one on the small missile launcher for the small rail gun and blaster?

We do need to find a way to pass dynamic text to Kismet...based on your feedback, it sounds like text is less preferred over icons and graphics

Rumour has it he was meant to be McPeanut, but do to his insane turntabling and beat-spitting skills he became MC Peanut.

Let's just say it was serendipitous that I hit the spacebar too much.

Throwing out a few ideas here that are user interface related.

1. Modules that affect display visualization, such as sonar, x-ray, infrared. Could even have new module slots on the helmet with scouts having the most and heavies/assaults having the least. Possibility of separate types of visual dampeners on low slots. Destructible lights and dark corridors could open up new and interesting strategic possibilities. I can see this one taking quite a bit of work to get right though.

2. Equipment that temporarily disables HUD. (Flux grenades maybe?)

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

I noticed the sonar part of your feedback and I thought about it a bit. Has anyone seen a sonar/doppler visual mode in any other games? I think we could achieve a sonar visual effect by comparing the vertex normal to the camera normal (dot product) and then factoring in the reflectivity of the surface (which is the specular power--although not all surfaces would have this). The result is that smooth surfaces in the direction you are facing would have a different visual effect (while the rest likely transparent). Although who is to say that your sonar wave projects in a single line--but we could consider a falloff range perhaps. It would be more interesting to account for the doppler effect, which would be worth prototyping. If you colored each pixel based on depth (distance from camera) and had access to a previous frame there could be a way to derive a visualization of things moving (at least moving relative to your position). I can at least bug CCP Photon about this and see what he thinks (of the technical possibility).

I noticed the sonar part of your feedback and I thought about it a bit. Has anyone seen a sonar/doppler visual mode in any other games? I think we could achieve a sonar visual effect by comparing the vertex normal to the camera normal (dot product) and then factoring in the reflectivity of the surface (which is the specular power--although not all surfaces would have this). The result is that smooth surfaces in the direction you are facing would have a different visual effect (while the rest likely transparent). Although who is to say that your sonar wave projects in a single line--but we could consider a falloff range perhaps. It would be more interesting to account for the doppler effect, which would be worth prototyping. If you colored each pixel based on depth (distance from camera) and had access to a previous frame there could be a way to derive a visualization of things moving (at least moving relative to your position). I can at least bug CCP Photon about this and see what he thinks (of the technical possibility).

I noticed the sonar part of your feedback and I thought about it a bit. Has anyone seen a sonar/doppler visual mode in any other games? I think we could achieve a sonar visual effect by comparing the vertex normal to the camera normal (dot product) and then factoring in the reflectivity of the surface (which is the specular power--although not all surfaces would have this). The result is that smooth surfaces in the direction you are facing would have a different visual effect (while the rest likely transparent). Although who is to say that your sonar wave projects in a single line--but we could consider a falloff range perhaps. It would be more interesting to account for the doppler effect, which would be worth prototyping. If you colored each pixel based on depth (distance from camera) and had access to a previous frame there could be a way to derive a visualization of things moving (at least moving relative to your position). I can at least bug CCP Photon about this and see what he thinks (of the technical possibility).