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Evolving the HUD
Gost0r's Blog #2
#3
Posted 08 September 2016 - 07:37 AM
It looks really good, and you certainly are going to be able to solve the few problems you highlighted. : )
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#5
Posted 08 September 2016 - 08:26 PM
chump, on 08 September 2016 - 08:07 PM, said:
Hi Mum!!!! I'm famous!
lol.
This is not looking to bad for a dead game!
Now one or two thoughts on the hud. call it hyper-criticism, or suggestions, whatever you like. Basically its a quick summary of every single bit i noticed.
Im also going to leave out everything i would want from the UI for now.
- Im not sure if i like this LCD style'ish font for the texts. Personally (i dont really like this style, but hey), and im afraid it may sometimes be hard to read, which is my major concern. This surely is a bigger issue for the feed and chat than for the weapon info.
- I dont like all those underscores in the weapon info. Its pretty irritating imo.
- The info on the current firing mode is nice, but i would change it slightly: change the dots to bullet icons, and for auto stack them up (-_-_-_). Possibly even color?
- The grenade icon colors are pretty close to each other.
- Im not sure if i like the fact that i can now see the health of my teammates (and enemies, unconclusive here) on the scoreboard/teamoverview. I guess its a good thing, but yet it reduces team interaction - even though encouraging meding on own incentive at the same time.
- I'm used to the timers/flag status being top right instead of bottom left :P
And well i guess the major point for me would be a cvar system, and as much customization as i can get. You may know i like my cvars and scripts :P
So thats my 2+ cents for now.
Sorry for my bad spelling - I am still asleep. :)
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#7
Posted 08 September 2016 - 11:17 PM
Thanks for the feedback guys!
Regarding the underscores in the weapon info: that's related to using the instance name instead of the real weapon name. Of course that will not survive until the final release, but as said, this is all wip and possibly subjects of change :P
Regarding the underscores in the weapon info: that's related to using the instance name instead of the real weapon name. Of course that will not survive until the final release, but as said, this is all wip and possibly subjects of change :P
#8
Posted 09 September 2016 - 01:39 PM
Since the HUD is a very crucial part of a game, because it doesn't only influence the feel and look but the gameplay as well, I will give a in depth reply to all the features presented and discussed and to everything I see in the design concept by Nounou.
Pls be aware, that this is my personal opinion and I don't want to criticize anyone, but if I am able to spread some ideas - I am more than happy.
The very first impression is very good! When I look at the screenshots I can tell that it is UrT and it looks nice and modern. But in my eyes, the weaponinfo and cap-timer boxes don't fit into the design. Everything else has one color backgrounds and is rectangular but those boxes are parallelograms and have an inverse inner shadow. Furthermore, all other items are very clean and don't have many things that aren't necessary but the boxes have additional stripes which add nothing to the gameplay and information and are solely for design reasons. Feels like two different design concepts to me.
Now lets talk about the features in detail:
Minimap: I like the black and white theme, but I don't like that it is captured within a little circle. I think urt is such a fast game where you can get from one side of the map to the other in such a short amount of time, that it is very important to know where exactly every player of your team is or died and not only the direction if he / she is to far away. Additionally I don't like the "dots" which mark where your teammates are because you don't have the information which direction they are facing. This can be very important for good teamplay - which is what I want to see in Urt HD.
WeaponInfo: As stated earlier I don't think the design fits to the other components. The information presented seam fair. I don't think the automatic / semi / burst presentation is self explanatory, but since it is not final, I am fine with it. I don't understand how the grenade info works - If I hold a grenade, which weapon will be "selected" and how do I know, which grenade I am using. The icons of the grenades are very similar to each other, but I guess this will change until release to something more self explaining.
Health / Stamina bar: I don't like image of the man, since it is very pixilated and has a odd border. Everything else is exactly as before so it is nice. I like the idea of displaying the current speed within this component!
Timers: I don't think it is wise to separate the timers like you did. Take for example bomb mode: If I want to know how long the current round will last and how much time of the match is left, I have to look in the top right corner and than in the lower left. That is not very intuitive.
Team Info: I like what you did there - as a spectator. I definitely don't like it as a player! The knowledge of the current health of every player on the map changes the game drastically. When a player receives medic, everyone will know. Furthermore it takes away a essential part of in game communication. As a spectator, I like the additional information.
I don't like the K/D/A presentation as 11/1/111 is very hard to read. Why not just make it three different columns?
I don't know if it is planed, but I would love to see the clantag and the playername separated. Maybe give clans the possibility to upload clan logos which will be displayed in the small (not expaned) team overview. Otherwise the small team overview could look like: [TeamGG...,[TeamGG...,[TeamGG...,[TeamGG... because the clantag itself takes all the room.
I don't understand why you want to display the ping with a colored box, but I don't really care :)
Some further questions: How will freeze be displayed? How will ffa and other ffa gametypes be displayed? How will it look like with more players on a server (so that the room isn't enough)? Do you think it is wise, to split the team and opponent information onto two different sides of the screen - I think this will be really annoying if you are playing and want to know how many allies and how many opponents are alive with a quick look.
So I think: first impression: very good looking, and I can imaging that the feeling of the score opening animation is very nice - but it seams that this design decision really hurts the gameplay - which is not a decision for a simple, fast and clean shooter like urt.
Feed & Chat: Tbh I dont understand what you did there at all. I dont understand what the colored dots in front of the feed mean, I dont understand why the hitregion is green and the percentage is cyan, I dont understand why there are colored dots in front of the playernames in chat, and I dont understand why there is no weapon info in the feed. Seams like these are the least polished components - I am very interested in future improvements :)
Font: I think it is very nice from a designers point of view. It fits to the setting and adds a technical look. BUT the readability and the foreign language support (å,ä,à ,... and languages using other letters are not supported) is very very bad! This is a clear step backwards from the perspective of usability and international communication. I hope you will use a better font in the final release.
Pls be aware, that this is my personal opinion and I don't want to criticize anyone, but if I am able to spread some ideas - I am more than happy.
The very first impression is very good! When I look at the screenshots I can tell that it is UrT and it looks nice and modern. But in my eyes, the weaponinfo and cap-timer boxes don't fit into the design. Everything else has one color backgrounds and is rectangular but those boxes are parallelograms and have an inverse inner shadow. Furthermore, all other items are very clean and don't have many things that aren't necessary but the boxes have additional stripes which add nothing to the gameplay and information and are solely for design reasons. Feels like two different design concepts to me.
Now lets talk about the features in detail:
Minimap: I like the black and white theme, but I don't like that it is captured within a little circle. I think urt is such a fast game where you can get from one side of the map to the other in such a short amount of time, that it is very important to know where exactly every player of your team is or died and not only the direction if he / she is to far away. Additionally I don't like the "dots" which mark where your teammates are because you don't have the information which direction they are facing. This can be very important for good teamplay - which is what I want to see in Urt HD.
WeaponInfo: As stated earlier I don't think the design fits to the other components. The information presented seam fair. I don't think the automatic / semi / burst presentation is self explanatory, but since it is not final, I am fine with it. I don't understand how the grenade info works - If I hold a grenade, which weapon will be "selected" and how do I know, which grenade I am using. The icons of the grenades are very similar to each other, but I guess this will change until release to something more self explaining.
Health / Stamina bar: I don't like image of the man, since it is very pixilated and has a odd border. Everything else is exactly as before so it is nice. I like the idea of displaying the current speed within this component!
Timers: I don't think it is wise to separate the timers like you did. Take for example bomb mode: If I want to know how long the current round will last and how much time of the match is left, I have to look in the top right corner and than in the lower left. That is not very intuitive.
Team Info: I like what you did there - as a spectator. I definitely don't like it as a player! The knowledge of the current health of every player on the map changes the game drastically. When a player receives medic, everyone will know. Furthermore it takes away a essential part of in game communication. As a spectator, I like the additional information.
I don't like the K/D/A presentation as 11/1/111 is very hard to read. Why not just make it three different columns?
I don't know if it is planed, but I would love to see the clantag and the playername separated. Maybe give clans the possibility to upload clan logos which will be displayed in the small (not expaned) team overview. Otherwise the small team overview could look like: [TeamGG...,[TeamGG...,[TeamGG...,[TeamGG... because the clantag itself takes all the room.
I don't understand why you want to display the ping with a colored box, but I don't really care :)
Some further questions: How will freeze be displayed? How will ffa and other ffa gametypes be displayed? How will it look like with more players on a server (so that the room isn't enough)? Do you think it is wise, to split the team and opponent information onto two different sides of the screen - I think this will be really annoying if you are playing and want to know how many allies and how many opponents are alive with a quick look.
So I think: first impression: very good looking, and I can imaging that the feeling of the score opening animation is very nice - but it seams that this design decision really hurts the gameplay - which is not a decision for a simple, fast and clean shooter like urt.
Feed & Chat: Tbh I dont understand what you did there at all. I dont understand what the colored dots in front of the feed mean, I dont understand why the hitregion is green and the percentage is cyan, I dont understand why there are colored dots in front of the playernames in chat, and I dont understand why there is no weapon info in the feed. Seams like these are the least polished components - I am very interested in future improvements :)
Font: I think it is very nice from a designers point of view. It fits to the setting and adds a technical look. BUT the readability and the foreign language support (å,ä,à ,... and languages using other letters are not supported) is very very bad! This is a clear step backwards from the perspective of usability and international communication. I hope you will use a better font in the final release.
This post has been edited by ringel: 09 September 2016 - 01:40 PM
#9
Posted 09 September 2016 - 03:53 PM
Gost0r, on 08 September 2016 - 12:30 AM, said:
Evolving the HUD
CONCEPT
All good things start with a decent design phase. Our design thread contains dozens of posts which centralize around 4 design concepts. In the end we decided to stick with this basic concept done by Nounou:attention: Keep in mind that this is just a concept and nothing is final.
CURRENT ITERATION
I will explain each element, how it functions and what the icons represent. But before I go ahead, please take note of the following:
Custom settings are not yet available, but we're looking forward to having different settings such as displaying weapon icons instead of the name. You won't find me going into a discussion of Minimap vs Radar, neither will I reflect that element as it's currently not worked on and therefore we might have a seperate blog on it. Please note as well that up to this point I haven't been able to implement the Bigtext feature yet, but it is planned to be part of the HUD. Furthermore, we’ve got plans to have a decent and easy accessable stats sheet, but we haven't worked on it yet, so I'll cover all the stats HUD once we've got a basic ingame version working.
Weaponinfo
EXPLANATION: The weapon info box contains the following information: how many grenades do I currently own, the different types are divided by colour. Additionally we got a bullet and clip counter as well as a weapon mode display (..... = automatic, . . . = semi, .. .. = burst). Then we have the weapon display which contains three weapons at a time. When you scroll down and you currently possess more than 3 weapons, then the pointer will move to the middle and stay there until you have reached the pre-last weapon. And if you scroll down once again - you guessed it - the pointer reaches the bottom end.
DISCUSSION: The weapon info box is in my opinion the most complete component. I'm really happy with the behaviour of the weapon box as you cycle through different weapons - it adds a nice feeling to it. There are slight changes to make on how weaponmode is displayed, but that's just minor stuff.
Health/Stamina bar
EXPLANATION: The health and stamina bar behaves exactly like it always has, so there is not much to explain.
DISCUSSION: There has been discussion of actually merging the speedometer into the bar as a white outline, combined with some optional speed info, but in the end we put the discussion on hold as we came to no final decision whether we should implement it or not. But as it's not a super important feature, we might be able to delay it.
Timer and Info
EXPLANATION: On the top side of the screen we've got the current FPS, ping as well as the remaining gametime displayed. while in the bottom left corner the Hotpotato and Waverespawn box is located. Not much left to explain either as it's just displaying information to the user.
DISCUSSION: As none of the elements is final yet, I'm still trying to find ways on how to improve the information. Right now i find it very distracting to have the Wave- and the Hotpotato timer on the opposite corner of the screen than the other timer. Another aspect is the possible lack of a netgraph. The question is if the display of the ping and FPS is enough to notice if you're having problems with the connection. Of course a netgraph like nounou has illustrated in the concept is beautiful, but the netgraph is supposed to give you information on when you're having problems, so maybe just a text with your in/out packetloss would seal it, but then again it comes down to visual aspiration... duh, let's see what will be the best later on when we come to its implementation.
Scoreboard
EXPLANATION: The scoreboard is very much connected to the team overlay. The teamoverlay contains in its default view the playername, the team score, the armband color as well as the players health. You're able to see the players health of your own teammates as 25% steps (for example if i have 46 health left, i have 2 bars on the scoreboard).
Now, once you pressed the scoreboard button (default: TAB), the teamoverlay lerps out to the middle and becomes the scoreboard. Here we've got the score, the Kills/Deaths/Assists ratio as well as the ping. The other players won't be able to see your real ping, but the indication of your ping range, symbolized with different colours (for example if your have a ping below 50: green). The rest is rather obvious: the list fills in the player names and sorts them by Score>Kills>Deaths>Assists, the spectator bar lists the current spectators.
DISCUSSION: The scoreboard is the most interesting part of the whole HUD in my opinion. And yet it contains some major conflicts in it. The general visual perception of it is horrible, it looks like a random terrible MSpaint made scoreboard. It simply doesn't fit into the Urban Terror theme and neither to my ambitions.
On the other hand I really love the unfolding mechanic that currently exists. It gives it a nice flow and a sort of unique behaviour.
Considering the items of the scoreboard, we're lacking some vital information. We need an indication of what half we are in as well as the score of the previous half. Status icons are planned to be placed behind the armband info (Subsitution, Flag/Bomb carrier), but yet to be implemented.
Feed & Chat
EXPLANATION: The feed contains all sorts of messages, may it be the hits, actual kills, killer's health as well as connection information. The chat is now on the bottom left and currently works very simple: type /all TEXT to send TEXT to everybody, /team to teammates or no command and it will automatically use the team chat. Both commands are being pre-entered with the corresponding key (t: allchat, y: teamchat).
DISCUSSION: Unreal Engine 4 makes it rather hard to implement the right flow for delivering messages from the game core to the UI surface. It doesn't contain features such as the CVAR-system which idtech based engines are famous for, as well as a decent console which can easily used by the public. Of course it comes with a developer console, but that one is not very handy if you want to weave it together with the game UI. We can later explore these aspects even deeper with either making the chat console more powerful (more commands to recognize than only two), or we have to use what's available and work our way around the developer console.
link to original Blogs #50
Nice resolution, I hope the chromatic aberration is an effect that we will be able to turn off?
#10
Posted 09 September 2016 - 04:06 PM
The chromatic aberration effect(called scene fringe in UE4) is only visible on the old screenshots from Nounou's concept, it's disabled in the current version of turnpike (and afaik all other maps). But yes, post processing effects like that are certainly going to be adjustable.
Have a happy day! :)
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