http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hW2vVbJSi2E#t=3552http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hW2vVbJSi2E#t=2549I agree, It's also a good starting point for adjusting how it should look "baseline" i recommend a bar like in the videos with small fractions of hp.
If you were to add a health bar, I'd also ask for this ring-colour feature to be removed; It's hard to tell if you've selected the unit when the unit's health is low because the ring becomes very dark.Agreed. The ring can be used to show selection, only.
I think that health bars would be better off as a *player* option, not a mod option.
I just wanted to note that the HP-Bar doesnt need to be a 2d texture. I think a 3d bar which is not affected by light would look very nice too! In Addition, this would make the bar very changeable and the modder can not only make bars but everything. For example a ring which shows the hp like a clock or a bubble which size is affected by the hp.
So the hp-percentage says which frame of the model is shown!
screen1 (http://i.imgur.com/uyWCnEd.jpg)That looks so much worse than what we have now. Is there any benefit at all to doing this? The only reason I know of is "it's what everybody else does", which is, if anything, a better reason not to do it. (Mega)Glest is one of the few RTS games that don't use health bars. That gives it a little bit of differentiation, so when you see a screenshot you know that it's not Age of ConquerCraft. They also make it easier to tell which unit they belong to, especially when two units overlap (like a person walking through a building). They also show the bounds of a unit, which is a nice bonus because most other games in the genre have a separate outline for that. The rings take care of showing the health, EP, and radius of a unit, instead of having to have two different things to do that job. The rings also aren't dependent on the unit's height, which can be important when it comes to viewing tall buildings at an angle, where a health bar could potentially be out of view because it's up so high.
screen2 (http://i.imgur.com/kDE48Ww.jpg) :D ;D :angel:
The main problem with circles, in my opinion, is that its hard to see the hp of units that stand in the middle / behind other units. So its also hard to manage units like retreating with low hp units to allow them to recover and so onInteresting. I do see what you mean, and I think the cause of that is that the rings are much bigger than the unit, making them overlap. I think the bars are actually much worse at this because it's harder to tell which bar belongs to which unit, especially if you have a tall unit next to a short unit. With rings, there's no ambiguity about whose health is whose.
I think hp above units is way better for this. Its default in most games for a reason x)
Maybe there is a way to show selection and health state with circles ??This confuses me. Don't the rings already show selection and health? :confused:
How about having two circles, an outer one for selection/team color and an inner one for EP/health. Or vice versa.I'm not sure what advantage there is to showing TC in the ring, but if necessary I guess you could just change the color of the ring. There was also a feature added to GAE a while back where you could hold down a key that would show a TC outline of all the units on the screen. It uses the stencil buffer, and Silnarm said it was really easy to do (https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=7386.msg75914), so that seems like a viable solution here.
I think starcraft 2 implemented it in a way where you can identify the unit belonging to the bar pretty well, like here http://i.snag.gy/ySPrE.jpgYikes! Does that look good to you? :look: Things don't have to be completely "in your face" to show you the necessary information, and any claims about graphical quality go out the window when the art is obscured by diagrams. Aesthetically, it's crap. I can't even tell what's going on at a glance because the first thing I see is a whole lot of red and blue quadrangles. In that screenshot, you see the health bars more prominently than the units they're supposed to represent. For a game like Starcraft that prioritizes competition over fun, maybe that's what they're going for, but having MG degrading into a game of "watch the numbers go down" seems like a tremendous step backward.
jpg
UPDATE (more options):
use the whole ring to show the health state in visible color:(click to show/hide)
Use only a spot in the front to show the health state in obvious color:(click to show/hide)
@John: Im not sure about your idea. Its better than the current circles i think, but all circles do have two problems:You can see the majority of the circle, and you don't need to see the entire thing to tell the opacity. Here's an example with some crowded units in various states of health with various amounts of EP at the default camera view. I find them very easy to read.
A) they are on the ground so they are earlier blocked by other units in front of them
B) the unit itself blocks sight on the part of.the circle behind the unit
Feels like you are playing a board gameI would say the opposite. One of the key differences in a game like MegaGlest and a game like checkers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draughts) is the visual aspect. The engagement in checkers come strictly from the mechanics and the competition, because that's all the game has. When you have games on computers, you can add so many more elements of engagement -- not just the interactivity but the aesthetics as well. You can let yourself become immersed in the game as a commander, demigod, mind-controlling AI, whatever. If aesthetics in games didn't matter, there would be no artists working for game studios and each unit would just be an icon. Every strategy/tactics game would look like checkers. Checkers is a fine game, but that misses out on the advantages of computerized games. Putting the health bars in a more prominent position than anything else on the screen, in my opinion, reduces the units to little more than icons or game pieces rather than wizards and robots.
<healthbar>
<height value="1"/>
<thickness value="0.05"/>
<visible value="damaged|selected|always"/>
</healthbar>
You can leave out any of this options.@Ishmaru: the healthbars do not replace the rings! You still need something to indicate the selected state of the units. Healthbars to show the selected state are a very bad idea in my opinion.
<healthbar>
<height value="1"/>
<thickness value="0.05"/>
<visible value="damaged|selected|always"/>
<borderTexture enabled="true" (path="border.png")/>
<backgroundTexture enabled="false" (path="border2.png")/>
</healthbar>
The path is optional. If not given he will use the default textures found in data/core/misc_textures/healthbar.png or healthbarBackground.png