HUD and Menu Revamp In the Works? Also Shaders.

[orm]

Alright, so I have been playing arma for a while and I must say, I am freaking addicted. However, I have seen some elements of the HUD that are either very weak or could use work. Here are my suggestions on cleaning up the interface.

The menus, by far, have to be the worst culprit. While they are functional, they can also be hard to read. For the main menu. Some sort of translucent image, even just a simple rectangle, behind words in the menus would greatly increase readability.

Next, the console. It works well, but now it just needs some sort of organization. I don't mind that game messages, server messages, and player messages are all mixed into one area because people aren't very chatty in game anyway. However, if you take a look at the console in a game like UT3, you will see that it has a background to it. Just a simple black background with a coloured outline. It needs to be compressed somewhat. It looks fine on my Windows desktop with a 22" 1680xiforget display, but on my 1366x768 Linux laptop, it clutters the screen a fair bit. Compressing the messages at the top of the screen would do wonders at lower resolutions.

As for the rest of the in-game HUD, Here is a very... very dirty mockup I threw together in inkscape.


Please bear in mind, I am a programmer, not an artist! But I hope you get the general idea. You have all your info in one place and there is considerably less clutter. It tells you more with less. As for the console at the top, it would only appear when text is being input. It would not be there otherwise.

All of these things could also be customized like the cycles are. IE: Different colours and transparency values.

I am willing to help with the HUD. I have a 2D drawing engine made up that, if it was coupled with whatever font engine Arma uses, could make implementing these things easier. I also was talking with people in the IRC and someone was saying that proper shader management was needed. My engine also offers a decent shader manager that I believe could work well for your purposes.

I am looking over the Arma source code, but if there are things the developers wish to point out to me, please, let me know. However, I write all this while I am very pressed for time. I have a multitude of other things to do for my studies, and those currently take priority.

[Concord]

http://wiki.armagetronad.net/index.php? ... t_Tutorial

[orm]

Concord, not to be rude or anything, but that contributes next to nothing to the thread imo. I am talking about further developing the default HUD to be more useful without having to make any changes to it. No matter how simple you make a customizable hud system, there is a very large majority of players who can be easily turned off by a poorly designed interface and also do not want to take the time to learn "complex programmer stuff". And they WILL call it that, even if you were able to make a system that customizes the HUD via a paragraph in plain farking English.

[Concord]

but they will understand three letter acronym's for something as complex as rubber?

it seems to me you want a different default cockpit. Anyway, you may want to take a look at http://tr2norigins.net/.

[Lackadaisical]

Concord why exactly are you pointing potential developers to tr2n

Which version are you using orm? In 0.3 changing the cockpit is 'as easy' as typing something in the console as:

Code: Select all

COCKPIT_FILE spidey/abyss-0.0.1.aacockpit.xml

Where a list of available cockpits is cleverly hidden in the wiki:
http://wiki.armagetronad.net/index.php? ... kpits_list
There are probably some more of people that created a cockpit but didn't update the wiki

As for the menus, I don't really see what the problem is.. it's just white text on a (slightly moving) black+faint grid background? To be honest I haven't used the standard settings for quite a while, but I don't recall ever seeing anything different.

I think the background for console/text messages would be nice.

Also you can change the font size of the console with

Code: Select all

FONT_SIZE_FACTOR

And you can also change the number of lines displayed by the console by some command I don't recall at the moment.
I agree it would be good to change some of the default settings regarding this.

[deleet]

but they will understand three letter acronym's for something as complex as rubber?

it seems to me you want a different default cockpit. Anyway, you may want to take a look at http://tr2norigins.net/.

I'm fairly sure that in the bible it says that, "Thou shall not post links to tr2n."

Sir, you have sinned. Go and repent.

[Concord]

I was just pointing him towards like-minded people. I hope he doesn't tell me it's irrelevant again.

[sinewav]

And you can also change the number of lines displayed by the console by some command I don't recall at the moment.

Code: Select all

CONSOLE_ROWS                 Number of lines of console output without user intervention
CONSOLE_ROWS_MAX             Number of lines of console output when scrolling back

I like the way Arma currently looks. And if there is something I don't like, I just change it. Although, I would like to make some cockpits! But I won't use 0.3 until the sound is fixed, because that's super important to me when I play. Coincidentally, I did rearrange my 0.2.8 HUD last night.

I think most of the issues orm brought up will eventually be worked out in 0.4, amirite? At least, I thought that was the current plan.

But yeah, in this game, progress gets made when people just go ahead and submit code. Lot's of stuff get talked about.

[compguygene]

but they will understand three letter acronym's for something as complex as rubber?

it seems to me you want a different default cockpit. Anyway, you may want to take a look at http://tr2norigins.net/.

I'm fairly sure that in the bible it says that, "Thou shall not post links to tr2n."

Sir, you have sinned. Go and repent.

I only post tr2n info about tourneys, and in private and on other forums. It's just good etiquette. If you notice, none of us that are involved in TR2NOrigins post here about it. I only post some of the tourneys, Even though there are tourneys every Saturday.

[orm]

Sorry, I realize I came off as a bit of an a-hole in this thread and in others, so let me apologize for how rude I have been and explain my reasoning better.

While having a customizable hud is a very nice feature, not many potential new players are used to seeing something so cluttered. The average program user is not as patient as the rest of us. They want things laid out to them in plain English. I personally find the HUD to be too cryptic, and was pointing out ways it can be made better so as not to be frustrating to newer players.

If you look at a game like TF2, it's HUD tells so much with almost no text aside from Health and Ammo.

It's a bit like Linux versus Windows. Many users flock to Windows because it doesn't require them to read documentation, it doesn't require them to configure much, and it "just works". Linux on the other hand (yes, even Ubuntu) requires configuration, it requires one to read documentation, requires alot of TLC, and most of all requires patience because it will almost never "just work"; patience the majority of computer users today don't possess.

[Concord]

It's a bit like Linux versus Windows. Many users flock to Windows because it doesn't require them to read documentation, it doesn't require them to configure much, and it "just works". Linux on the other hand (yes, even Ubuntu) requires configuration, it requires one to read documentation, requires alot of TLC, and most of all requires patience because it will almost never "just work"; patience the majority of computer users today don't possess.

and then there's macintosh <3

no, there is a lot of truth here, a lot that most people agree on. I think a major challenge towards making gameplay more accessible is the concept of rubber. From the purist's perspective, the rubber meter shouldn't exist, because rubber should not be manipulated as a game element. Rubber exists purely for protection against lag. However, as I think most would concur, rubber is a huge part of gameplay on almost every server, and is almost never used solely for lag protection. So rubber meters and rubber-consciousness needs to stay. I think that in this new HUD we are designing, we should make it clear that rubber is not something you as the user can administer. That is there is no rubber-button to press. I know this for me personally was an initial source of confusion. Rubber more or else is equivalent to health in your first person shooter. A suggestion I would make would be to move the rubber bar above the cycle, or make it part of the cycle itself. Maybe your lightcycle windshields get tinted progressively more red with more rubber spent. Speed I like as a needle gauge, just as in automobiles, that seem to make sense to me. I don't have much to say on brakes since I don't really pay much attention to them, maybe I should start. Perhaps everything else could go onto a pull up screen, like the score sheet is?

here's a quick mockup

[sinewav]

here's a quick mockup

I've thought about that before too. Whatever it is, it needs to be out of the field of vision, or at least that should be an option. I've also thought about a rubber meter (a very small bar) that sits right above or below the name of you opponent.

Over time, I learned to watch other people's rubber usage along with my own; you can kind of tell when someone is running out. In those cases, sometimes I think, "should I do something a little crazy right now in the hope that their rubber will run out before mine?"

And even the name "rubber" is a little strange at first, until you understand what it is (then it makes perfect sense). Renaming it in the HUD might be helpful to a new player - but what to call it? I haven't a clue...

[Word]

overheating (although it might be technically incorrect)

[Van-hayes]

The wiki has this to say on the matter of on top of the cycle rubber guage:

Code: Select all

Finally all gauges support the viewport attribute. Possible values are “top”, “cycle” and “all”, the latter being the default. “top” means that the widget will be rendered on top of the screen, “all” means it will be rendered for every player in multiplayer mode. Some data sources are only available in “all” mode, but you might not want a separate map for each player, so choose “top” then.

“cycle” is a special viewport, it means that the widget will be rendered over every cycle, just like the label (name). The orign of the coordinate system will be right above the centre of the label in this case. 

That last bit is the relevant part, after trying and retrying to get a label/verticalguage/barguage/anyything to display on top of the cycle like names do now, I went to the top of the wiki page and it said that some things on there are only available in unreleased development Versions. Then it provided a link to what the released version can do, and it is missing the Viewport cycle option.

Wrtlprnft and lucifer pretty much created that page themselves so I am guessing they had a big hand in the making of the customizable HUD, and since both(wrtl more so than Luci) have been inactive lately I am not sure if this is/will be implemented in future releases. Also the actual tutorial page was last updated in 2008 and since then another release of 0.3 has come out, so I'm not sure how up to date the page is either.

Tutorial page now And Tutorial page that shows what the released 0.3 can use for reference.

Maybe someone far more skilled and knowledgeable can make more sense of it.

[Tank Program]

I think someone may have touched on this already, but I view the current default cockpit as something of the order of what you get when you sit in the drivers seat of a car. Sure, there are a lot of dials, needles, lights and things. You can drive the car with only the speedometer, or the fuel gauge, but you really do need all of them to drive the car properly.