So I don’t know if anyone else is getting this but the light blue on dark blue for the health bars is really disorienting. If you have trouble distinguishing those colors it can be really difficult to tell how much hp your teammates have. Would it be possible to change the color to make it more obvious what their health is so some of us don’t have to strain to see if we need to throw packs?
HP Bar color change
tokamak
(tokamak)
#3
Bars are a pretty space-inefficient indicator in this context. The indicator is mostly important for the medic, that’s why I think a separate set of indicators (perhaps colour coded silhouettes around the players) would be better.
As for the other team-mates a more subtle indicator would suffice. You only need to know whether or not your team-mates are badly wounded or not so you know whether you can count on them or have to protect them.
DeTh
(DeTh)
#4
Well there needs to be a percentage or progress bar so you know how many packs to throw.
tokamak
(tokamak)
#5
How much do these packs heal? I really don’t think it takes enough packs to justify a higher fidelity than: ‘bad-okay-good’. More information isn’t always preferential.
DarkangelUK
(DarkangelUK)
#7
No offence dude but how often do you play? If you played as much as you posted on here then you’d know this, and probably would be able to give better educated input.
tokamak
(tokamak)
#8
Never paid attention to it. But from your post I can take it it’s indeed substantial enough to make such elaborate health indicators redundant, otherwise you would’ve refuted the claim straight out.
DarkangelUK
(DarkangelUK)
#9
No, that’s you just making uneducated guesses again and looking like an ass. How about you pay attention instead of posting your usual nonsense. How many packs do you think it takes to get someone to full HP from low?
tokamak
(tokamak)
#10
Not enough to warrant highly detailed health bars. I’m not going to play ball here.
DarkangelUK
(DarkangelUK)
#11
You don’t seem to be playing Bomb here either, that’s the problem… you’re chiming in on stuff at guess level… as usual.
Breo
(Breo)
#12
Okay guys back on topic 
Actually we need detailed health bars because you want to decide in a split second what your chances are in a fight a bar only isn’t really accurate.
Besides that the healthbar isn’t intuative, because new players are asking how they can see their health.
murka
(murka)
#13
Well the current hp bars are certainly too thin(1pixel high?) and are nearly impossible to see. Especially the bar on EV.
For the player itself a regular bar with some color changing when hp gets too low plus numeric indicator would be good. Who doesn’t want to talk about the 1hp left after a good 1v1? With a simple bar that’s not going to happen.
A color change for low hp is a must because when usually concentrated on action, it’s nearly impossible to look at any hud element, let alone one that is tiny, blends with background and is in a corner of the screen.
Same goes for teammate hp bars. The hud is overcluttered and spotting a 1pixel high hp bar isn’t going to happen under a second. Tho the class icon will go yellow if the teammate is low on health/needs revive so that’s neat.
tokamak
(tokamak)
#14
[QUOTE=Breo;418152]Okay guys back on topic
Actually we need detailed health bars because you want to decide in a split second what your chances are in a fight a bar only isn’t really accurate.
Besides that the healthbar isn’t intuative, because new players are asking how they can see their health.[/QUOTE]
Highly detailed and intuitive are different things though. Right now the health bars are very detailed but not there’s no clarity at all.
I agree that it’s all about split second decisions, but for those decisions you don’t need to know the exact percentage of each member. You only need to know if he’s roughed up or not. That’s why I say that the team indicators should be simplified, perhaps a colour gradient would suffice.
INF3RN0
(INF3RN0)
#15
HP bars are incredibly difficult to see in light blue to begin with. I think that this would easily be solvable by allowing a lot of custom options with the hud, such as color change. I like the fact that low hp players become yellow, but more variation would be nice- and please make downed players flash for medics ^^.
zenstar
(zenstar)
#16
Bars are quicker to read than numbers, but colours are even faster to pick up on.
Numbers can be mixed up (88 or 68?) and take more processing than simply seeing how full a bar is.
Having the bar change colour at a few different points (<20, <50, <100 ??) would make it far easier to read.
Of course you don’t have to have either numbers OR a bar. you can display numbers over the bar, and have an option to display the numbers or not.
Some time should be taken to look at some MMO interfaces,e specially the ones that allow customization (like WoW) and see what people do for the different roles. Tanks, healers and DPS all have differing layout based on what info is most important to them and have various mods and whatnot to make things easy to read in a situation where you need to be paying attention to the boss + any other adds that may be wondering nearby + 24 other people’s threat levels / health bars. It might not be the same genre but a lot of the interface design / affordability will translate across.
tokamak
(tokamak)
#18
Yeah a separate interface for the medic would be great.
Another thing to toy with is to make the covert ops the only class able to see the opponent’s health. That would make him unique in better able at finishing off the weak in the pack.
Thundermuffin
(Thundermuffin)
#19
[QUOTE=zenstar;418360]Bars are quicker to read than numbers, but colours are even faster to pick up on.
Numbers can be mixed up (88 or 68?) and take more processing than simply seeing how full a bar is.
Having the bar change colour at a few different points (<20, <50, <100 ??) would make it far easier to read.
Of course you don’t have to have either numbers OR a bar. you can display numbers over the bar, and have an option to display the numbers or not.[/QUOTE]
This is a really great point, and I think all three of those (colors, numbers, and a bar of sorts) should be used. PVHUD from TF2 really eliminates confusion (at least for me) and is streamlined to the point even the scoreboard (which is where most HUDs really suck) barely gives excess information. Every time I play DB I find myself wishing that information was presented like this, as SD could still create the look they want but give it in this style.
The HUD makes it so that the actual numbers are very large (but not to the point of obstructing your view), but you really rely on the color of the indicator and the text’s shadow to know where your health (or ammo) is at. It’s a really great system that truly improved how I played; no longer did I have to look in a corner to get this information, but I also didn’t have to have all of this stuff blocking the middle of my screen like some HUDs do. It made it so that small glances (or just using peripheral vision) would let me know all my info in just a second and I could get exact, detailed info in just a couple seconds more.
tokamak
(tokamak)
#20
What TF2 did really right was to have the medic key hotkeyed to E. Then the indicator of your medic quest was sensitive to how low on healthy you were. You could yell for a medic on full health and you got a white sign on your head (probably indicating that you were about to do something dangerous so he could jump in and help) low on health however, the sign turns reds and automatically made you a priority for any medic nearby.