Separate bars for HP and progress while under construction please?

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by exterminans, November 12, 2014.

  1. exterminans

    exterminans Post Master General

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    Guess title says it all.

    Point is: When constructing while under fire, it's rather difficult to tell the actual progress since the HP bar is out of sync with the construction progress.

    But it's not only that, let's assume that some mod manages to make the HP during construction non-linear, e.g. 90% of the max HP is only credited once construction is complete.

    Either way it would favorable if the HP would always show the relation of actual HP to maximum possible HP at that point in time. That means, if the building is still under construction, but not under fire, show a full HP bar.
    tatsujb, websterx01 and ace63 like this.
  2. igncom1

    igncom1 Post Master General

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    Doesn't the buildings animation show the progress?
  3. exterminans

    exterminans Post Master General

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    It shows progress, but it's especially for smaller structures not that easy to decipher the precise progress. Well, it's not that easy to decipher in general.

    It doesn't appear to be modable either, health and charge bars are part of a system controlled particle system.
  4. Raevn

    Raevn Moderator Alumni

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    The health bars are actually part of the UI, not particle system. They are HTML and can be modded in their appearance (but not behaviour).
  5. brandonpotter

    brandonpotter Well-Known Member

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    +1 to this. Would be nice to have the bars seperated. I think SupCom did it, and PA should do it as well.
  6. exterminans

    exterminans Post Master General

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    You had me there for a second, but no, they are not part of the UI. I'm not only talking about the HP bars in the popup in the bottom left corner (which by the way CAN be modded in behavior too since they are KO controlled), but the also HP bars projected ingame which are rendered by the "status" particle system.
  7. bgolus

    bgolus Uber Alumni

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    A unit's health bar always shows the actual health of the unit being built. There's no adding extra health after completion. The purple bar of the unit doing the construction (either factory or fabricator) is the build progress.
  8. exterminans

    exterminans Post Master General

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    Yes, that's as it is right now, but why does the unit constructing, and not the unit under construction show the progress?
  9. thetrophysystem

    thetrophysystem Post Master General

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    Also, does not the purple bar of the fabber not show progress? This was requested so long ago, and added it, that was a major win for the game.

    Anyway. The building object could use that purple bar too, then again I never have trouble telling how much health per buildtime the unit has. Maybe, at the most, I would have trouble telling if the unit will kill it before completion if it was a really close call. Then again, I error on the side of safety and abandon it if under heavy fire.
  10. bgolus

    bgolus Uber Alumni

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    I kept the build percentage off of the building being constructed because that's mostly already shown in the health bar / build effects and through the units building it. It's relatively trivial for me to add the extra bar to the unit being built as well, though I'm not sure if it should be the same color as those doing the fabrication.

    It also seems like it'd be annoying for factories since those units aren't ever going to be showing anything but their real build fraction.
    exterminans, squishypon3 and wondible like this.
  11. exterminans

    exterminans Post Master General

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    Are you sure? I always thought that units under construction in a factory are still valid targets so they can loose health, plus if you toggle power on a factory, this also pauses construction - which means that you currently loose the build progress indicator all together.

    It's probably best left to the user whether he wants to have the progress displayed on the fabricating unit, the fabricated unit or on both.

    Maybe also add the option to "inherit" the bars if a structure is a factory or transport, but then again, I'm not sure if this isn't limiting in some way, as this will probably break if parallel construction of multiple units would ever be allowed. Meaning if a unit has multiple slots (like nuke launchers already do), it would have to inherit progress of all embarked / loaded / stored units and show individual bars for each.

    Actually, inheriting the bars doesn't sound like a bad idea in general, since we already do have such special cases like fabbers or units with ammo systems embarked in transports, and it's bound to become rather ... confusing once multi unit transports are in with bars starting to overlap.

    Personally, I would probably go for the for the second option (progress only on target) for myself as I'm not exactly a fan of having the same redundant information displayed on dozens of assisting fabricators, but that's something users have to decide for themselves.

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