change the combat bar at the bottom to a halo 'round the avatar

this is a post to see if people would be willing to have the combat card system currently at the bottom of the screen moved to a transparency halo around the avatar's head. would this lessen the amount of immersion-breaking of staring at the bottom of the screen? idk. but i *think* so.



The Hendoman

 

I'd be curious to see a mockup of what it would look like.

 

Personally no, I'd rather have a clear view of the battlefield, glancing at the bottom of the screen doesn't bother me.

 

@The Hendoman for starters I dont exactly love the UI look myself. I am open to changes for one making it smaller looking. I tried to copy some different looks for other games UI but nothing exactly jumped out at me so I appreciate discussion on this. Also of course your $55 to me is as valuable as $255 or $355 and on and on. I don't believe anyone's great ideas can be bought, just heeded for their greatness. Ummmm well off to get coffee. I will post some pics later, but of course they are not what I wanted just some to generate discussion and provide a visual to break down and tear apart

 

In my opinion? A HUD isn't half as immersion-breaking as trying to work those things into game graphics. My suggestion would be to move the hotbar somewhere more accessible.

EDIT: As someone whose pledge is $55 as well, I find your saltiness a bit irritating.

 

IIRC they tried the halo approach internally. It was too obstructing and it was difficult to keep positioned while not substantially improving play.

 

Because the default hotbar is working great, right?!?!!

If we are really in alpha then maybe they should push things like a halo-style bar or something else for everyone to try and get some proper feedback. We are still testing afterall so let us test some more radical UI changes.

 

Seems to be working fine for me. Seems to work fine for a billion other games, too. There comes a point where the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" statement does ring sorta true. I could say compromise with options, maybe, but having a hovering in-game graphical element that reflects things like multiple cooldowns is a damn sight more complex to program flawlessly than a standard hotbar (and would, I imagine, also require a bit more from the PC playing the game, although it might be a drop in the bucket).

Pre-alpha. We are in pre-alpha. There's a difference between pre-alpha and alpha.

Also not liking the overbearing sense of entitlement in this thread. This post in particular had a really demanding tone. As far as I'm concerned, were I a developer on this project, I'd just be inclined to ignore people's suggestions if they came across as angry and demanding, but y'know, that's just me.

 

Then they go with randomised card combat.

I don't really care what definition of alpha they are using this month because it obviously seems to vary from developer to developer. So lets just say it's still far from finished.

Nothing demanding at all. I am suggesting they try some radical UI changes. I have been here since R1 and the UI still looks pretty much the same. They haven't tried anything new. Pre-alpha would probably be the best time to try some radical UI changes I think.

 

Which, if you actually stopped to think about it, makes any more flashy interface than a hotbar even harder to implement, doesn't it? Hotbars have been used for more than just World of Warcraft battle systems, they're just a universal UI element at this point. MOBAs, MMORPGs, offline RPGs, they're everywhere. Because they work for a lot of things. Not every game needs to Dead Space its UI into the gameplay; SotA has already done plenty to keep the interface from being an overbearing visual element.

The same definition that has been clearly defined on the forum multiple times. It mainly varies from developer to developer based on whether they're blatantly using pre-release material as a pre-order incentive and want to make it sound cool. Pre-alpha here is used in the strictest sense: the game is still having its basic elements defined.

"Suggesting" with pretty demanding words and lots of sarcasm-implying exclamation points.

If the UI hasn't changed, it's probably because it works pretty well as-is. I personally quite like them. I wouldn't say no to this halo idea as an optional thing we could switch to, granted, but in my case it's probably an option I'd turn off.

 

I'm going to ignore the other points as it will just end up being personal but during this phase of development we should be trying different things. The UI isn't pretty well-as-is because the combat system and UI has been a point of contention since combat in this game existed. The same criticisms come up time and time again. The Devs should be trying radical solutions - sure some of them may suck and can be rolled back and then something else can be tried. But they should be tried. Because come Beta and then release such radical changes won't be something you can implement so freely.

 

That's because some people want it to be standard MMO, some people want it to be super revolutionary, and others are just happy to have decent combat in a Lord British game for a change. (Combat in the Ultima games... wasn't that great.)

Let's keep one thing in mind here: what shows up in the pre-alpha release versions is not necessarily indicative of everything that the developers have tried to do with the game. It's simply what they have determined works well enough to let people publicly test and give feedback on. Far more emphasized in development are the non-combat elements, because these are the places where the developers are most determined to flesh Shroud out and give it a unique identity. It's only just in this release that we're even getting our first large monsters. We only just in recent builds even got basic sound effects for combat. This aspect of the game is not progressing quickly at all. Sadly it's the part of the game a lot of players judge MMORPGs by because of the emphasis on combat and combat-related things the genre has going, but... and I know I'm repeating myself here... it's actually a new thing to even have decent combat this time around, so I'm not super critical of it. I'd like to see how it all works when the effects are in-place and everything is more properly balanced, but I see the UI itself as the least of the game's worries.

There's a fundamental issue here, too; as early as the Spoony interviews, Richard Garriott talked about how he wanted the user interface to be unobtrusive (in contrast to other MMOs that have a whole bunch of windows, a tower of hotbars, numbers flying around all over the place, and any number of other things cluttering the screen). Having a halo of action icons and cooldown bars hovering smack in the player's view during combat would be counter-productive to that. What's more, how do you balance that out with a player's desire to zoom out and get a bird's eye view of the party action during a fight? The UI as it is, is static; it doesn't need to adjust itself based on how close or far the camera is from the action. It also doesn't need to worry about combat or spell effects making it hard to see anything. Those are all problems that would get in the way of the "radical solution" that is the combat halo, and basically are just the reasons PC games stick with hotbars in general.

 

Don't really care for the OP's immediate aggression on the subject...but I am curious as to what this would look and feel like. In trying to visualize it though, seems that even with a transparency setting it might obstruct the combat field too much? Not really sure.

Is there another game where we could see an example of this?

 

The battles are not always clear, if you add a halo i think the game will be less playable. Personnaly, i can use the hotbar and watch the fight without problem... like on all others rpg.

Moreover with the "zoom in" and "zoom out", the halo would be hardly appropriate.

Shortcuts on the keyboard can replace the clicks on the hotbar.

 

I'd love to test different layouts, includin halo, half-circle, two quarter-circles (above/below or left/right), separated icons (at the moment they're a continuous strip - why not ten separated icons?), weapon-wheel, etc.

Heck, I'd love to be able to individually place the ten glyphs anywhere onscreen! Eventually with a GUI to edit the layout.

I'd put the semi-locked low power, short-cooldown, short range glyphs in an small arc (not straight line, slightly curved, icons well separated) under the feet of my avatar, random dealt slots right below the arc, utility/long range a bit detached on left and right of her, and heals/recover glyphs on the far bottom right, where I can literally throw the mouse at the screen corner and blindly hit the "save me" Healingh Touch locked spell.

 

they should add a breathalyser to my computer. i get loaded and type some 'salt', so an apology.
I didn't think about the zooming in and out with a halo. maybe being able to move the hotbar and resize it would be a good idea

The Hendoman

 

The hotbar can be moved.

 

yes, but split apart and resized?

 

Consider a halo attached to a player. What happens when the camera moves or zooms out? Does it scale with the player? Can it be viewed from the side or is it always oriented parallel to the screen? How can I click on something behind it? If it is not attached to the player then it is simply a curved hotbar in the middle of the screen obscuring the view.

To paraphrase the Devs on more than one occasion, "If it doesn't work internally, we won't roll it out to players to hear the same thing."