[Design]Use of numbers in the HUD?

[DoomRater]

As much as I hate the concept of not knowing exactly how much of a resource is being moved around, Botania is one of those Minecraft Mods that foregoes numbers everywhere it can, including exact mana numbers. You'd think hiding the numbers from mana movement and storage would make it nigh unplayable, but as long as the documentation isn't wrong about approximately how much, it seems to work just fine.

What if I applied this concept to health, armor, ammo, etc? Indicators would only be shown as bars, not exact numbers. I see a few games already doing this, nearly every regenerating health game doesn't bother to show you how much health you have, instead giving you a visual when you've taken enough damage to warrant cover. But even then numbers are still usually shown instead of or in addition to bars. Fallout 4, when you're in the suit, shows one of those radial gauges instead of giving a precise number. Could this design succeed even in Doom mods? I might just find out.

[Matt]

One of the things I really, really loved about the original Opera Half-Life mod was that it was basically the first FPS I'd ever played where you didn't get any quantitative health indicator other than a persistent screenflash to indicate the character was in pain. I drove myself near madness looking for the recipe in America but they could never quite get the spices right.

Hideous Destructor never shows a number for how much you've got in the mag except in 2 weapons where the weapon itself is implied to have a little digital display on it for that purpose. For some things I deliberately use a tiny bar (the most extreme example having ~5 pixels representing a count of over 2000) so that it'd be impossible to read with precision even if you knew what to look for.

I did, however, draw the line at removing numbers for spare, unloaded ammo. It was just too much spaghetti and bloat to SBARINFO in a visual display of each item, and a bar was silly since anyone IRL would have been able to just check their pockets and count to get a hard number.

It never sat well with me that armour and health would be actual numbers. Before I learned to mod and had to see how the proverbial sausages were made, I always thought Doom's percentages were intended to look like an approximation rather than an actual count.

[DoomRater]

My first plan to address this for weapons is to make them run off a pool of ammo that is harder to physically count like total metal or have it based on energy like mana or eternal fire which don't make much sense to have physical amounts of.

One hero has a large health pool which is drained to recover the health pool that actually matters as far as life and death is concerned, but the character will not be able to die in one hit, ever. Also, recovering health drains from offensive power (I might toy with that concept as it may destroy the role the character is intended to have.) The actual gauge of how close he is to death is only shown vaguely until you hit his limit, at which point there's another visible indicator until that point recovers.

I also have an idea for a character that would make health less relevant and make their state of mind far more relevant. Insanity results in death, rather than physical injury (though it can push a person to the limit) and insanity goes one of two ways: turning into a maniac slasher or frozen in PTSD land. The idea of the character is to balance their kills by swapping between weapons and being careful not to rile themselves up too much.

[Matt]

Neat!

I'm tempted to suggest something about using descriptions instead of numbers, but once you learn what the descriptions mean they basically amount to different words for numbers.

For organic things like this I sometimes wonder if a deliberately noisy bar would be workable - I imagine something just a normal bar indicator, except that the amount randomly fluctuates and you kinda guess within a range (whether or not the underlying numbers do this as well). It could also be thematically appropriate if, the deeper into chaos you sink, the more randomly and wildly the thing fluctuates...

[Caligari87]

I think some amount of fuzzy logic is required to make something like that work. For example, if you're using a bar, each time the bar updates you generate a random bell-curve offset value, and scale it to zero offset at the ends. So 1% or 99% is accurate, but real!50% could be off by as much as 15%. Similar with using descriptions; if you have a weight descriptor for every 10% of a magazine's capacity (something like "feels really light" to "it's very heavy"), then have the "reported amount" vary by 1 standard deviation, randomly offset only when the magazine weight changes. That way, you have three possible, very close descriptors for any given amount of ammo, but they only change when you fire the gun.

Alternatively, just reduce the precision of your bar or description. Project Reality does this, as shown by the manual (page 15)



Not shown: It take about three seconds to have the little bar actually appear, so it simulates the player performing a mag check. This, to me, is an optimal solution and feels very authentic. Difficult to tie down to actual numbers, but players can quickly learn to interpret roughly how many shots relate to ~1/3 of mag weight, much like they would in real life.

[DoomRater]

I planned to go to the less accurate "three or four different levels" to represent a wide range of numbers in between, myself. This is also effectively how Botania lets you gauge remaining mana in a mana pool, but since those are stupidly huge values it's hard to see the changes or differences and a different tool was needed to poll the pools to see if there was a gain or loss. Thankfully that won't be needed for a health gauge... and the ammo gauge will be precise enough where gain/loss indicators won't be needed either, though they could be done quite easily I think.

[Caligari87]

I think another good design consideration would be to make your fuzzy levels roughly correspond to the usage pattern of the number. For Project Reality, I might use a two full magazines in a firefight, or only two rounds, but on average that 1/3 bar represents about 10 rounds which is about what I'd expect to use killing a single soldier at medium range (including misses), ergo I can expect a single bar will allow me to engage a single enemy under common/optimal circumstances.

Similar idea with health or mana; quantize the amount into roughly how much mana the player could expect to use in an average spell, or how much health they might lose to an average enemy. Obviously this has its limits if use/loss amounts are relatively small in comparison to the total, or if the usage amounts are highly variable.

[Matt]

Does anyone know of a way to do this without having the weapon DECORATE separately update an inventory count with every use or reload?

[Caligari87]

I personally would do all the math in ACS by looking at the normally-used inventory, and pass the values to an appropriate HudMessage or give dummy inventory counters to be interpreted by SBARINFO. Leave the abstraction out of DECORATE entirely... Unless I'm completely misinterpreting what you're asking for.

[Matt]

That was what I had in mind at first, but as far as I can tell it's no simpler than doing it all in DECORATE and has the disadvantage of adding a layer of "oops, I added a new weapon, now these other files need to be updated again".

On the other hand, if you wanted to make sure this HUD stuff was modular and severable from the rest of the system, then yes doing it in ACS makes a lot more sense.

If only we could pass formulae and countinv() to drawbar...