scotsdezmond: That video genuinely made my day - it looks incredible so far.
I particularly like the particle effects on laser hits - subtle feedback to the player that the shot was accurate and stops enemy ships feeling like laser sponges. Also, the mini status indicator under the targeting box showing the ship stats and distance is really nice - less having to glance downwards to the main display on a big screen, very useful :)
Not everyone agrees with you on the "mini status indicator". I have been toning it down the since I uploaded that video so that it is not so big at longer distances.
Even as placeholders, the explosions are pretty great - the only thing I noticed was that ships seemed to stop on exploding - if they carried their momentum, this would sell the effect.
Yes. I will eventually fix that somehow. The exploding parts need to keep the same velocity as the ship had, and it will look more natural.
I will try to make it mimic the original, but now that every hemisphere is divided in smaller lamps, how should it be colored?
Option 1:
- Lamp by lamp, they glow from black to red. Once all of them are red, they begin to glow from red to yellow. Once all are yellow, they glow from yellow to green.
Option 2:
- Lamp by lamp, they glow from black to red, then to yellow, then to green, before moving to the next lamp.
The shield display is really nice. I like the way you've implemented it - if you think of the shields as having a front and rear emitter at 0 and 180 degrees, the display is showing the relative strength output from each. I agree that it's a big improvement over the original.
Thanks!
In terms of the colouring options (and I'm just thinking aloud), have you considered keeping all of the lamps the same colour (black / red / yellow / green) and just changing the colour based on threshold values? E.g. front shield at 10%, the colour is red and only 2 lamps active. As front shield charges to 50%, more lamps are illuminated and the colour changes to yellow (either at a specified threshold, or gradually).
Potentially you could keep the threshold values at the default X-Wing parameters so that existing players can 'transfer' their intuitive gauging of damage levels from the vanilla game (e.g. "I see my front shield is red, so I know that I can only take one or two hits on that side...")
That is a third option I didn't consider, but I think it's going to be the best.
First I implemented option 1 (every single light transitions from black to red, to yellow, then to green before the next lamp starts all over). But it didn't look really useful.
It was like my first implementation, only with extra festive coloring at the currently charging lamps. Not much useful either.
Then I implemented option two. Oh, boy! It took looong time for me to figure out the numbers for that!
Lamps would transition first from black to red one after another until all are red, then from red to yellow, and when all are yellow, from yellow to green.
I spent two evenings only for implementing that and... meh. It looked not so great. Look at the attached image.
Well, it's not like it looks positively ugly. It's just that it becomes confusing. Now you have 4 colors at the same time: black, red, yellow, and green, and you need to mentally figure out how much shield you have left by looking at the amount of one color that is left.
I don't know. It doesn't provide information as quickly as just black versus green.
Besides, I am a little bit color blind and I had real problems to tell apart the yellow and the green when in the middle of combat.
That is why I made it more orangeish than yellow. But it didn't help much.
The positive aspect of this option is that this is the most granular depiction of the shields, and you can see the lamps changing color at a quite noticeable pace, which defeats the bad impression of shield charging looking slower than laser charging.
I don't like it, but I have spent so much time implementing it that I am not ready to delete the code. So I will just disable it and try your proposed option 3. Maybe I let the player choose their preference in the options panel in a later stage of development.
I suppose it's fair to say that the aim is to give the player the most accurate information in the shortest time, so that even the quickest of glances will be enough to understand current status. I wonder if option 2 could lead to confusion, if you glance down and see green (or in your peripheral vision) and mistakenly think the shields are more charged than they actually are? (Or maybe that's part of the challenge? :) )
Nah. I don't think challenge should come from lack of information or bad quality of the information at reach.
Many regard X-Wing as the most challenging game in the series, but it's not because the missions are particularly hard (those in X-Wing versus TIE Fighter are the hardest in the whole series), or because the AI is top notch (the AI in the first game isn't so fancy).
It is because the player has the least and worst information. Unclear objectives, zero radio messages giving instructions during flight, inability to track critical ships, worthless map, lack of message log, almost worthless targeting computer, lack of threat indications, inability to know what a ship is targeting, inability to know the current threats to a ship, etc.
Having a shield charge display that provides a confusing colorful reading of a value (that could be done perfectly with a 0%-100% figure) serves no purpose other than to artificially complicate the user interface.
So I will try to program option 3, consisting on every layer of the shield charging lights transitioning one after another from black to red, untill 33% of the layer is charged, then transitioning from black to yellow (all those that were red already, transition to yellow too) until 66%, and finally the last third of the layer transitions from black to green (and all the previous two thirds transition from yellow to green.
I will upload a screenshot or video when it's done.