HUD Planning

As I previously mentioned, I am programming the HUD. But first we need to decide exactly how it will appear. Some important questions:
-Components: What exactly will we need to have on this HUD? I can think of Health display, perhaps level and exp bar, ammo display for sure, weapon display. Also a few icons: pause (which will pause game and bring up a few options), an icon to bring up the stat screen, maybe an icon to view that Cytocorp dossier. What do you guys think. Now's the time for ideas.
-Position: How much space will the HUD take, a side and a top? And where exaltly will the components go? We will probably have to put the ammo display on the side, and for the weapon display it will need to be on the top or bottom because of the width. So yeah....

If someone wants to present their plan for the HUD in a rough sketch, go ahead and do so.  

Level and exp bar? preferrably no level but possibly some kind of information about your leveling progress not necessarily a bar, maybe just a little flash to tell you that you got a level. Then, when you enter the stats screen or something you can check your accurate exp. What I thought about the health bar is that it would look like a human outline in combat state(CS logo-alike) then the inside would be filled with red and it would represent the amount of health you have. We can draw the percent inside the human outline.

Also, UNDER ammo display should be the ammo left for your weapon in form: ammo left in your current clip / total ammo left without counting current clip(ammo-clip). This is quite a standard for shooting games.

We can have icons for pausing and all, but we should also have shortcut keys for them so you dont need to hit that small 8x8 icon at top right of screen to change into minigun in the most intense boss fight.

Positions on screen:
health-human maybe bottom left corner, around 1/5 of the view height?
ammo display bottom right
weapon display at the bottom just left to the ammo display.
if we decide to have some kind of exp bar, maybe we can make it so that we have it ported with the healthbar somehow. Maybe a horizonal and narrow line just below the healthbar?

Ok, so will it be transparent, will we make the room bigger or will we leave th room as it is?

Lotsof great ideas there Hege. No leveling bar is proably best. just someway to let the player know they leveled up.

Nah, I think the room is very nice already, though we shouldn't make it too realistic, I mean, the player wouldn't die from only 3-4 bullet impacts.

I haven't checked the file in some time so I have to ask... Are the shooting variables changed into arrays yet? HUD will make even more code to handle with weapon stats and it will be soon essential to have them as arrays when we add different weapons.

Shooting is not yet arrays. I will take care of that. And I will attempt the HUD.

Thanks DEST! I see if I have time to do the stair walking thing tomorrow.

Alright, that would be really nice!

I have an idea for the hud, kind of hard to explain.
Dest, next time we're on at the same time, I'll show u on dimdim or something, somewhere u can draw
-Bret

Ok. Will do.

BTW, Dest, did u screenshot the hud example i made?

Its okay if you didn't, I can redo it and make it neater in a paint file
-Bret

No I didn't. But it's fine. I know exactly how it needs to look anyway. Plus I might need to modify how it looks anyway.

I would like to see your idea too bretboy. Just post it here or in dropbox

Well basically there's sub-levels of each of the levels of alert, if you know what I mean.

Oh okay, but what about the HUD?

Well, he was showing me how to display it on the HUD. You'll see when I make it.

Hey I'm pretty good with drawing HUDs. If you can get me the outline of its shape and tell me what kind of style you want it I can make you a fairly professional looking HUD. I'll post an example of one of my previous ones if I can find one.

Here's one I did for a first person shooter. All I need is an outline of the HUD and I can give it pretty much any look.



Also they don't take me much time. This one took me less than an hour.

Hmm, at least I dont see any photo or attachment...?

I checked your post, it might be better to host it at imageshack or photobucket.

I can't see it either. It looks like he posted it out of Google Mail. And once we finish the HUD we'll let GamerX take over with the graphics. He sounds really eager to help.

If you post it out of your email no one can see it as they want privacy to be kept
-Bret

P.S. I'll be posting the HUD that I designed soon!!!

Oh sorry about that guys. How's this?



Anyway all they gave me was the outline they wanted and I made it into this.

Interesting, But what goes in that little circle thing?

I am not sure if that wooden them would fit in well... Also, what goes into all of those boxes?

Where would the current awesome ammo display go and where will the weapon icon be?

The weapon icon and ammo would be in the top right box. The health and score would be in the bottom left with the health in the higher box. And the circle thing in the bottom right was supposed to be for the radar.

Anyway all they did was draw the outline of how they wanted it to be and I did everything else. I can do that with pretty much anything. I can even use alpha channels with it

hmm... well, I would like some changes to this set-up:

1) Radar can actually be removed we won't need one, I think.
2) Ammo won't fit into that box, some weapons can have 100 rounds per clip while others have <10. Maybe just a some kind of metallic frame and the center would be transparent... It should be placed in the bottom right corner where the frame should be vertical. Also, the icon of the weapon should be a bit bigger, maybe twice in height and width? Ammo will be displayed as numbers too: remaining ammo in clip / total remaining ammo(-current clip)
3) Which one is health? that huge frame is 3 times taller than the bar inside it and it takes maybe too much space, the upper bar there is good, so if you could just remove the bar with the frame and move the bar without the frame into bottomleft corner and make it a bit wider. XP bar would be above/below this and it would be much thinner(maybe 5 times thinner?)

And as I said, can you make it darker and maybe metal-ish? Not to offend your hard work but it looks like it would be directly from a happy carrtoon game with jungle theme =D

You do great work but unfortunately this setup was in my opinion a bit off. Take it as a criticism