Artists sandbox

[onero S]

Not sure if this is the thread for this, but how hard would it be to bump up the first person camera height a bit? I like how immersive first person can be, but it's a little bit unnerving to have my camera at mid sternum height with respect to everyone else. I feel a bit like I'm playing a leprechaun.

[Izeo]

Not sure if this is the thread for this, but how hard would it be to bump up the first person camera height a bit? I like how immersive first person can be, but it's a little bit unnerving to have my camera at mid sternum height with respect to everyone else. I feel a bit like I'm playing a leprechaun.

That'd be great. It wouldn't have to be at exactly eye height, but more closer to it would be awesome. You are playing with your friend, and you feel your character is shorter than him. And simultaneously from his perspective, he feels his character is shorter than you.

This could have side effects though, it would mean you can shoot over somewhat higher short walls since in FPS games your bullets come out of your "eyes". I am not sure what repercussions this change might have but I have always been wishing for this change.

[onero S]

That'd be great. It wouldn't have to be at exactly eye height, but more closer to it would be awesome. You are playing with your friend, and you feel your character is shorter than him. And simultaneously from his perspective, he feels his character is shorter than you.

This could have side effects though, it would mean you can shoot over somewhat higher short walls since in FPS games your bullets come out of your "eyes". I am not sure what repercussions this change might have but I have always been wishing for this change.

Remember, third person puts the camera much higher than first person. Any advantage gained in first person by raising camera height would still be less than the advantage gained by third person. I think virtually everyone uses third person to PvP anyway, but I really do like being in first person sometimes when exploring for immersion's sake.

[Izeo]

Oops, good point.

[Trivaldi]

I believe "nipple cam" is a code issue rather than something on the asset team's plate. It is an issue we're aware of though.

[Jodo]

I saw the term "nipple cam". What's going on and how can I help?

[Nixon]

After such a long time working on more casual mobile games.. I had to try drawing some cyberpunk/neocrack again

http://i.imgur.com/aYREZ0I.png

Maybe i'll do a 3D scene & Unity web build at some point for walking around and simple interactions.. Biig maybe though..

[Exioce]

After such a long time working on more casual mobile games.. I had to try drawing some cyberpunk/neocrack again

http://i.imgur.com/aYREZ0I.png

Maybe i'll do a 3D scene & Unity web build at some point for walking around and simple interactions.. Biig maybe though..

I LOVE the art style of this! The problem with realism is that the guys with the huge budgets make things ever more realistic. IMHO, Neocron would greatly benefit from the adoption of a more 'cartoony' TF2 graphical style.

[Xortag]

Working on new help windows that are supposed to go live with the tutorial / new player experience changes.


Full size

[Odimara Orca]

Oh my God this looks so good!

[OFT]

Those look great!

[Celt]

Hi Xortag, appreciate all the work you're doing.

About the UI in general, and the hitbox specifically:

The NC2 UI change was a disastrous mistake. The point of a UI is to provide the necessary information without getting in the way of the content (i.e. game world). The NC1 UI provided the exact same amount of information as the NC2 UI while taking up less space. Further, almost the entirety of the UI was to some degree transparent rendering the effective viewing field of the screen including UI to be somewhere between 95% - 100%.

The NC2 UI on the other hand, had many spurious details and artwork designed to (I assume) make the UI appear in some way futuristic. This extraneous details and the lack of transparency resulted in a busy UI and the entire top left, bottom left and right side of the screen lost entirely. It served to make the game world seem bracketed, and removed to a degree the immersion in the world.

The hitbox in specific, makes the cardinal sin of presenting the information of the target (potentially) over a secondary target. Health/information of a character should never be potentially presented over another character due to design choice of setting healthbar, level and name prominently to the left side of the target. Further, if you decide to not fully bracket the character (e.g. in red), don't bracket the bottom right just to provide some sort of symmetry to the top left. Going with the diagonal motif means you will have to replicate the diagonal motif throughout the UI elements, unless the desire is to present a UI that constantly jars by having several different themes running through it.



Look at this. I've already mentioned the too large and busy UI, but the font on the hitbox is poor. Its legibility is awful and particularly on the team member box, suffers from too light a font on a fully translucent background. The clan name also expands past the hitbox.


Compare it to this. The focus is on the world, on what you see. Information is presented in a manner so as to not draw you away from the game world. The font is easy to read, and having upper+lower case eases readability significantly. Team members have a semi translucent background on their icon, also improving readability.

From a UI perspective, the NC2 UI was only a step back. Style is subjective, and one can argue that it was stylistically superior (I would disagree), but style should be balanced against usability and the ability to display information.

I would argue that as currently stands, your hitbox is a step back aside from stylistcally. It displays the same amount of information yet takes up significantly more screenspace, while setting a style that is at odds with the rest of the UI (as stands).

The primary purpose of a UI is information display. Style must be a secondary goal after this.

[Xortag]

So that was quite a lot of text and it would require a lot more in depth explaination to make it more clear. I try to get it somewhat compact.

We both are in line that information is the most important part and design has always stand behind if you dont find a way to to make both work. Yet we have the NC UI, a thing you dont wan't to deal with anymore
We dont have anything in stone yet, but we know it needs to be addressed. There are many solutions like Awesomium, Scaleform. CoherentUI and so on. We already dealt with a few and made some tests but haven't made up any specific yet. Aside from this i have plans for a complete re-design in terms of style and functionality and do tests like you see in this thread form time to time.

Some key points a re-worked UI should have:

- Fully customizable, for example via XML or HTML/CSS (dependant of the final solution)
- Highly scalable to fit modern screen sizes and resolutions
- Very adaptive and opt-in/out based via pre-made options

The question is therefor, what is the important part of information a player need? It's close to impossible to answer this question. Every player will answer something else, for some there can't be enough information, for some we just need to remove the whole UI, but there will be a intersection for specific parts. So you have to bring it down what you think (as a developer and player) is necessary to maintain functionality and gameflow. Since NC was already a bit customizable and should be a lot more with a new UI, i keep that in mind when designing certain elements.

So what can we do about that? We can give the player as many opt-in/out options via a settings window, so even if you can't design a whole new custom UI, you can adjust what is important for you and how it should look. With that in mind, i'm a fan of "simple-X" options, for example "[x] Use minmal combat hud". Making a big part of the UI scalable and without fixed positions will also help with the standard UI, so if the developer tought it's a good idea to put the chat on the left side, feel free to move it on the right side.

With that beeing said, for the target markers, and specially for target information in a FPS system that have the same depth as a common click-based mmorpg, what can we improve among the original one?

The first answer was, make it more adaptive in case what you have targeted. So bring more distinctive colors to it based on the situation. The second question was (and thats where the screenshot lacks power) how to make it more clear what you have targeted? For now, the UI is rendered on top of everything, so your readability and overview depends on the scene you are in (your screenshots show it very well). The arrow shape with a bit more padding was meant to give it a more pointing character and help in situations with a lot of stacking (e.g. many players close to each other) because it will be displayed above, not between.

As i said nothing is in stone but for the new target markers we already had some thinking. And we can of course discuss how we can improve them further, thats why i show that early stages.

There are still some questions i would like to hear your opinions:
- Shall we tint the the whole marker in blue for group mates, just the player name or show it with a dedicated icon?
- What can be improved about stacked elements and the two-dimensional space they represent, e.g. team member indicators. How far should they be displayed?
- Is the Faction or Clan name a thing that always should be opt-in, or just in combat?
- Idea: If you target something with a AOE based item (spell, weapon), should we display a semi transparent hitbox over every target that will be affected?

That was rather long and still just scratched a lot, but feel free to write what is important for you or describe a "situation" where the current new and old versions can be improved.

Edit: Fonts are always a problem because of licensing and charsets and style.

[Celt]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'because it will be displayed above, not between.'. The current hitbox/target box is displayed above not between, the difference with your render seems to be that it's entirely offset. This would result in target information being directly over an un-targeted character!

The rest of your aspirations/goals sound excellent, however they also sound like an incredible amount of work for a small team to gain a relatively modest improvement in usability and information display. Perhaps the first goal might be to create a relatively easily customizable RPOS, and inviting community members to start editing/submitting graphical ideas and work before you embark on actually creating assets? Simple(ish) 2d artwork seems like the easiest thing to ask for community collaboration on!

I wonder if Michael Corvin would be willing to let his RPOS' be used as launcher options for NC? It would be a nice counter to the current RPOS - and I would argue any of them would be better served as the primary RPOS for new users.

[JasonX2000]

There are still some questions i would like to hear your opinions:
- Is the Faction or Clan name a thing that always should be opt-in, or just in combat?
- Idea: If you target something with a AOE based item (spell, weapon), should we display a semi transparent hitbox over every target that will be affected?

The first point. Let it be always opt-in. Not just in combat. Cause some Clan`s need it to advertise the profession of the character.
Mostly done through the clan-rank of the character. E.g. clanrank "Research & Development" -> Resser & Conster or Smuggler -> Barter. Not everyone whants his character to call "Conster Monster" just that everyone can see he is a conster.

The second point. Half transparent AoE hitbox would be nice.

Best regards
Jason