Realism HUD Design

[hoak]

[R-PUB]GRB, my remarks about casual and lethal damage are with respect to having a 'Health' HUD display of some manner or other... I agree the game should definitely have hit effects; though I think these should be subdued and more subtle -- as the player is already impaired, much easier to kill once hit, and further imparing him with histrionic sound effects and drama is not necesserily or particularly realistic... These are in theory elite operatives that have already suffered more pain in corporal training, then many kinds of bullet wounds inflict.

Some here that are reacting negatively to the idea of playing the game without a HUD would really benefit from giving it a try where everyone was playing the game with the same experience, limitations and advantages to appreciate how enjoyable it really is...

A little summery:

No HUD Is Very Liberating

There are no distractions except those in the game world (that you should be concentrating on anyway)... It's actually not harder at all -- it's easier as you only have to think about your marksmanship, tactics, and movement with your squad as you would in a real live fire scenario.


No HUD Is Very Immersive

100% of your screen real estate is the game world; with no 2D overlays to break depth cues the game has a lot more apparent depth information that is not disrupted and broken by these eye-brain cue distortions... You'll also notice a lot more subtlty about the game, your squad, position, terrain -- generally real world stuff when you're actually focused on the game world, rather then being bombarded by arcade game metrics...


No HUD Is Realistic

If you want to do some planning, get status information,do some navigating, or rendisvous with a team member; you have to go find some cover, pause a little bit and open your map; just like in the big real world. It's actually much nicer then being bombarded by tons of real-time info, as you actually stop, think, and plan -- and do so in more general and realistic terms that reflect what's really going on at a human scale in the game; not the constant, perfect, god-eye-view of magic telemetry of a space craft HUD...

As far as my remark about my 'professional opinion' it was a sarcastic self-depreciating joke, as I used to Develop mods and games; if anyone took it seriously or felt condescended to -- well, have a ball with it! Or have two, like other boys...

[dawdler]

You really wont let it be, will you?

Anyway, I still agree. Lets just say **** it and do it for the sake of realistic immersion. We need the player/admin chat text, but that's a popup that'll dissapear .

[hoak]

Let what be? People asked questions, I replied... Having worked on several mods and total conversion, and one commercial game I know the limits of time and resources you have to apply are finite; and many Developer teams prefer that discussion of changes follow a practical and helpful approach.

For example: 300 threads for individual 'pet wishes' with half a dozen or less responses to each is not very helpful to a game or mod Developer. One thread that focuses on one particular aspect of game design, that gets a lot of feed-back and really puts that aspect of the game's design under a microscope of audience opinion and participation can help enormously...

Perhaps HUD design isn't a PRM Developer interest or concern -- but they haven't said one way or the other...

Δ

[dawdler]

in the mod hud should be a health bar, but not like in bf2.
Now in the mod when you are with 10% of life you don't know with how amount of life you are and in the real life is ins't like this (a person know when he is almost dying).


The health bar should be like this: the bar shows full health, when players health go to 65% (for example) the bar shows 65%, if a player has 87%, 99%, 90% of life the bar will show 100%. After the player go to 40% of life the bar will shows 40%, when the life goes to 10% the bar show 10%, and then 0%.

The bar should be different to madic class and has more % to show.

Basicly worthless.

As the mod is designed now, you dont need health in a number.

If you get hit, you either die or get wounded (bleed). If you dont die and only get wounded, you'll die anyway without medical attention.

All you need to know is when you need a medic, and incidently that's what bleeding tells you.

[hoak]

The new trailer depicts a lot of very immersive squad maneuver cut scenes from the first person perspective sans an Arcade/Fantasy HUD! But one cut shot still shows the Magical: (choose your favorite monkier) Brown Eye, GayDar, Spin Map monstrosity....

Does this mean that the PRM Team finally went balls-to-the-walls and did it? That we actually finally have a Squad Tactical Shooter that offers the realism and immersivenss of having to get our telemetry realistically rather then magically through a fantasy HUD? Or, are they just teasing?

[hoak]

Bummer, they were just teasing -- so it's a "teaser" and not a "trailer"

On second thought...

[fuzzhead]

hoak, having played OFP for a couple years, I agree with your decision, Zero HUD, complete Information being delievered by real visual cues. This is the best way to play, it really cuts out all the arcade ****, and really cuts down on the 'one man army' style players that fill the servers of vanilla bf2.

However, judging by all the negative responses in this thread, I dont think theyre gonna do it

Which is a damn shame. COD2 has close to no HUD, and it really helps the game alot.

[hoak]

Yup fuzzhead, we obviously agree; and it's like deja-vu for me and reminds me of the Ironsights discussion/argument of nearly a decade ago. I'm the original Author of The Ironsights FAQ, back from before any commercial game offered them and only a few mods were working on it (but had nothing ready) I was the Ironsighs proponent that everyone regarded as a nut for a trivial feature.

Clearly ironsights are not trivial; in using the acutual aiming machinery of the weapons you play with realism of weapon handling and marksmanship skills are a much closer analog and approximation of the real thing. Your weapon and sight picture are also the primary element of interaction in realism games and Ironsights make that much more interactive. I grant all ironsights systems currently implemented in games offer crude and simplistic approximations of what's possible and even what I was suggesting as a design implementation over nine years ago; but none the less they are clearly popular with nearly everyone understand the logic of implementing them in realism game and regards them as an valuable improvement.

The point is that there was a lot of kicking, screaming, and even hostility and hysteria -- summarily enormous resistance to Ironsights, as there is with any element that dramatically changes game-play. But it's dramatic changes in game-play that offer depth, immersiveness and clear improvements that offer the strongest means for attracting and sustaining an audience.

HUD Design, and the Zero HUD approach for realism games is even less trivial; there is tactical ground combat sim research, hard science and fact to back up the veracity and value of the approach. That Fantasy, Horror, and Sci-Fi games have seen the value of removing HUD overlays and have beat "realism" games and mods to the punch -- should I would think open some eyes. That even action/arcade game Designers are finally seeing the light and reducing the size and profile of the HUD elements they feel they have to include should add insult to injury.

Mods used to be at the cutting edge of design and risk taking -- it was one of their primary means of attracting and sustaining an audience. Mods were the first to offer Ironsights, Projectile-Code Weapons, Ballistic Code, and many other "firsts" and features that were considered risky or trivial -- nearly all of which clearly effected one of the most important things in FPS gaming: GAME PLAY...

With more and more games and mods becoming little more then new paint jobs of the same thing with trivial adjustments and features added, and critical features and elements of game design ignored -- is it any wonder the average half-life of a mod can be counted in days, audience size counted on your fingers and toes, and the number of dead and unplayed mods now has to be expressed as an exponent?

[hoak]

Most of this has already been discussed and addressed in the thread or title topic post; but it is a long thread, and you make good points so here goes:

Different levels of grunts/visual change/physical restrictions depending on how injured you are.

Exit Ballistics, the science of critical, lethal and casual effects of being injured by bullets is a very individual and non-specific; ie. in the real world there is no consistent respone to similar projectile wound, and rarely are projectile wounds the same. The differences can in fact be dramatic but summarily combatants are either able to fight and move, or casually wounded and immobile, or dead. There is no real world consistent model of combat effectivenss that a bar graph of health is even remotely analogous to.

Summarily there is no need for silly and histrionic imparment features, many are hit by large caliber rounds and don't even feel it for hours, others are critically incapacatated by the same wound... The damage model in Bf2 is simplistic and doesn't warrant artificial imparment as after being hit you are that much closer to being a casualty and are already at a substantially realistic disadvantage that is to scale with the rest of what the game is able to offer.

Summarily: no display or effects needed; what so ever for correct scale realism exit ballistic casual or lethal injury...

The ability to look at your magazines or something of that sort.

While Bf2 has the portal technology, it would probably be impossible to mod such a feature in; but a vastly more realistic analog then is currently implemented can be easily achieved.

The only time you know exactly how many rounds of ammo are in your magazine are when you take it out and look, or if you've been counting (as most experienced Men-Of-War do).

All that has to be done is include the mag and bullet count on the main map display rather then in the HUD; this makes the machinery and exercise of doing a munitions inventory totally to scale with the real effort, distraction and time it takes to do it in the real world.

No mini-map, just your normal map. I agree hoak's map ideas.

Yup! It has absolutely no place in a tactical realism game that offers all the telemetry on the main map. The profound effects on increasing realisme are exhaustively discussed elsewhere in the thread.

This is probably one of, if not the most important changes to the HUD for a substantial improvement realism, that would dramatically improve game-play and can be very easily achieved -- in fact there are several ways to accomplish it and one can even yield improved frame rate on some systmes.

With the fire mode indicator, I have no idea. In real life its as easy as the touch of the fire mode indicator with your thumb. You practically do know this at all times.

The only time you should see fire mode displayed is when you change it; this feature functionality is already in Bf2...

Stamina bar replaced with breathing/grunting, which gets heavier the less stamin you have.

Absolutely! Already in the game, there's no need for magical absolute stamina telemetry as real human stamina (especially in combat) is never absolute; ie. you never know you're 72.5% exhausted.

Many realism games have a stamina system but no graphic HUD stamina representation, and only one simple breathing phase, and it works just fine!

Score only shows when you hold down the Tab button.

Absolutely! In the real world progress and intelligence regarding the achievement of an objective is fuzzy in the best of circumstances, and never something you know instantly, in absolutes, in real-time.

I forget who it was earlier in the thread who suggested it; but the suggestion was to just put all the weapon and munitions counters in the big map view, so you had to toggle it, and ditch the HUD in entire. This would be very easy to achieve; it just moving some script and assets and perhaps recompiling some Flash -- no new art assets need be created, and the outcome would be an astounding improvement.