Hitpoint visualisation

Hey, i hope they will make an HitPoint visualisation like there is in "League of Legends" and "Dota2" since its really nice to see without clicking a unit how much HP arount it have.



The small gaps splits 200 HP (in this sample) and the big gap 1000 HP, so you can see fast how much max HP that unit around have, specially for big units this could be helpfull.

will there be such feature? anyone knows?
Also in the live stream video there the enemy and the own unit HP got the same color (green), that was not so cool, the color of the HP lines should be the playercolor (maybe as option).
^^

I really liked those divided hitbars in LoL, that sounds like it could work well. Although I also fear that for most units the HP can basically be summed up as "too low to care", judging by how fast things were exploding in the livestream.

But on larger units this would be excellent.

I certainly like that. But I worry it might get visually messy with the amount of units in the game.

But how do you do that on a tank? OR rather, how do you do it differently/better than it's been done before, in SupCom Units would start to smoke or have little fires all over as they got critical.

But that brings up a better question really. Why do we need this? We have countless factories spewing out units continuously, do we really care enough about our armies to have the need to pick out visually certain units that are low in HP? The Exception is the Commander Obviously, but I don't know if something different needs to happen beyond it halving a health bar and the smoke/fire type setup from prior games.

Mike

Eh, its imo mostly useful to tell how much max hp an unit has without having to read its exact number.

A large tank with lots of the small splits has obviously more hp then the heavy artillery with only a few.

Since hp often doesn't directly collerate with unit size or model, it could be handy to have as a quick info about hp itself.


For example, smaller units with less then 1000 hp just have the normal health bar, a heavy tank with 5000 hp would have 5 small boxes (or whatever you call those, no clue) and a heavy artillery with 2000 hp would have 2 boxes. Select both and you immediatly see which one has more hp and can tell at a glance that one has more then twice as much as the other.

Actually, I think this is fantastic idea.

If you think it's too "messy", then I would make the suggestion to make this a feature that can be toggled.

I want every single last piece of info I can get.
While you may find that irrelevant data, if it can be toggled, then both of us can have what we want.
Best of both worlds?


I had suggested this in a different thread.
If Unit at Max HP, then HP bar = off.
That way, a fresh army won't be cluttered up with HP bars, but they will only start to show up when you army has taken some damage and starts getting whittled away.

A bar like this to describe a group's health would be pretty cool too.

Group a set of units, each unit's health gets attached to a group icon - you immediately get a feel for how your group is doing.

Actually I derped and didn't realize we were talking about Heath bars as opposed to something visually presented on the model.

Now Realizing exactly what's what, I'd like to see this attempted in game to see how it works. It might not be needed in the same fashion that it is in in LOL of Dota, as units won't be changing health or lvling up in PA.

Mike

Imo it should, or at least try to, perhaps not in every case but in general.
Bigger units = stronger units = more hp, I think this should be a general design rule, from here it would be pretty easy to read the "strength" of an army at a glimpse.
After all bigger guns = stronger guns = bigger unit to hoist the gun, makes sense if you think about it, and if you follow this as a rule, no one will ever be confused as to "is my unit stronger than his?", well if it's bigger, then yes it is

Of course this is generally speaking, I understand that unit types have a lot to say in terms of "strength".

This is precisely why you need it, though. A large artillery platform might still have less HP than a smaller heavy tank. The amount of armor plating on a unit still matters a lot.

this. it's worth testing although the traditional hp bar definitely isn't broken.

I'd like to see this implemented, though ideally with the smaller HP sections divided by diagonal lines (not at a crazy angle, just a few tens of degrees off of vertical) so that when/if healthbars get close together in a big group it's clear whether a line is the end of the whole bar or just a part of it.

We used similarly segmented health bars for SMNC. I'm a fan of them in principle, but in practice I suspect they would do more harm than good for the size and number of health bars likely to be needed.

Other RTS games have used segmented health bars as well, but I don't know of any that try to do it with the number of units we're expecting to have.

You probably only have to do them for units that exceed a certain hp threshold. Very large units like battleships, buildings, the commander etc. where knowing approximately how much hp it has compared to other stuff and how much remaining is important.

I wouldn't expect it for the run of the mill kbot that gets destroyed in the thousands.

In a dota-style game, hitpoint ticks make sense because you are focused on the health of a small number of units and being able to tell at a glance what the enemy HP is has critical value for the success of the players. However, in a TA style RTS, you won't be concentrating on numerical values for unit hitpoints, because the scope is so large that a few hitpoints either way won't make a difference for most units. This is true even of classic TA, where you couldn't even see the actual hitpoint values of a unit, only the visual indication of the bar.

And really, the TA method was the best method. We are using computers, so why not let the computer manage all those numbers for us? We don't care about exact values, we care about the unit status. Is the unit in perfect health? Is it damaged? Is it low on health? That's all we really need to know. In fact, I would posit that the game could be played just as effectively if the unit health were completely hidden and all we could see was an indicator showing nothing for full health, green for 75-99% health, yellow for 25-74% health, and red for 1-24% health. All the player really needs is a general idea of how far they can push their units before they need to be cautious or even retreat.

To take it further, additional information that the player would need to know is how hardy the unit is, and how much damage they can expect to take from an attacking enemy. The first can even be incorporated into the color indicator I mentioned. A Peewee would perhaps have green be 90-99%, yellow for 60-89%, and red for 1-59%, while a Krogoth would probably be green from 30-99%, yellow from 10-29%, and red for 1-9%.

The whole point is that when it comes to overall strategy, players don't need to know about every little scratch and bruise their unit has. They only need to know how effectively they can expect their unit to perform and when the time is to pull that unit away from the conflict.

I am so confident in this concept that I will happily mod my own UI to only show the indicators I mentioned previously and use it exclusively in multiplayer, just to prove my point.

(Heck, I might consider modding out nearly all instances of numbers appearing on my screen, including economy. We'll just have to see.)

I like that a whole lot, sylvesterink! I'd definitely try such a thing out, to see how it works.

Also, 'merge' healthbars? That is; when I have a few hundred units selected, watching from strategic view, I'd like to be able to see the status of the army.

What about those of us who are either fully or partially colorblind?

This, it's not a useful feature for a game where you have hundreds of units at any one time. It's useful in those games because you only have a single unit to worry about.

At worst case, replace the health indicator color with a letter. (G, Y, R, corresponding to the color perhaps.) As for the no-number interface . . . I'm sure I could come up with some solutions.

Total Annihilation does some weird things when it comes to UI.

Health bars do not show up beneath a unit. They display in the "selection" bar at the bottom of the HUD. It really feels nice to not see green bars all over the place... especially during a battle.

How many of you would be happy with the healthbars under units being done away with in favour of the "TA-Style" and having them embedded in the HUD?