Bionite: Origins needs Support!

[Nielk1]

It seems like you are going for the simulator look, but in so doing you are doing a lot of crowding with purposeless UI elements. If you removed all the frames and buttons and toggles and the green screens and just had the UI projected directly onto the screen like your standard HUD it would probably work better.

[blue banana]

I still don't understand what happened to the old HUD. It looked amazing.

[LtFEED]

It seems like you are going for the simulator look, but in so doing you are doing a lot of crowding with purposeless UI elements. If you removed all the frames and buttons and toggles and the green screens and just had the UI projected directly onto the screen like your standard HUD it would probably work better.

we are kinda going for the flight sim look. we want to recreate the environment of a hover tank as much as possible without over crowding the screen. All of those widgets contribute to gameplay. THe Hull Damage Indicator and the annunciator panel work with these. I agree that the balance between overcrowding and over limiting the screen view is a difficult balance.

I still don't understand what happened to the old HUD. It looked amazing.

I did like the old HUD also. We are working on adding the dash views next. WIth all the elements we need on the HUD we rand into a problem where too much of the screen was coverd. I am goikng to integrate elements from the old HUD into the new dash designs. ALso were working on the IMI status widgets, which will be themed based on the Elite Style widgets.

[jack775544]

Just to add my 2 cents, personally I prefer a super minimalist interface with only the necessary HUD elements and maybe a translucent hologram style background for the HUD elements to be placed on. Doing something puts more focus for the player on the gameplay and less on periphery elements such as a cockpit design.
And in the future when we have hover tanks, I would be pretty disappointed if we didn't have holographic displays or at the very least have some sort of device that can 'fake' holograms, similar to the real world Google Glass, or Microsoft Hololens.

[Shadow Knight]

Aesthetics aside, even with the labels pointing to what everything is I have a very hard time telling at a glance what everything is meant to be. With HUD design (and interfaces in general) the golden rule is Keep It Simple Stupid. With something as critical as an in-game HUD you want people to instantly be able to tell at a first glance what's going on and that interface fails spectacularly at being easy to read.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree with the interface at the moment, but to nitpick the current design a bit:

- I had no idea on first glance what "CAP" stood for, or "INV". Personally I'd just have "Ore x/y"
- Upgraded extractor count and regular extractor count should be directly next to each other.
- Why do you need to know all the time how many scavs, extractors, transporters you have anyway?
- Graphical representation of silos is alright, I'm not a fan of it but it's not criminally painful.

- Velocity is always symbolised as V, but really it has no place there.
- Fuel is not obvious and it's way too small on the screen
- Why does shield have its own tiny vertical bar rather than being in the same place as the health? It should be obvious that it's protecting the health.
- Engine temperature has no colours to it, temperature always goes to yellow and red as it gets high on meters.
- Health is too small, it's by far the most important thing on that interface
- Ammo looks identical to health in every way
- Even with the labels I can't decipher the bottom quarter of the interface.

You really, really need to plan this sort of thing out in advance and show it to a bunch of people. The hud is something you want to NAIL and you don't do that without having it planned out. Get a bunch of people down on an interactive whiteboard or something and draw until you get something everyone agrees on.
Back when I was doing a game with a couple friends (which fell through due to lack of interest) our interface started as a bunch of lines and words:

It's not the best labelled, but it suited its purpose for internal use. Once you get something that looks acceptable in scribbles, that's when you can stick it in-game and do fancy artwork and so on.

Try again.

[Ded10c]

Shadow Knight has pretty much nailed everything I could have said.

Also bear in mind, if you are set on the flight-sim-type gauges design, that such gauges, when not relative, should always indicate their unit (and that such units should always be in metric regardless of the national standard). Everything should have the correct physical unit and symbol.

[LtFEED]

AWESOME suggestions! The HUD will always be a WIP. Were going to add another HUD for the Rebel team that is based on the Elite Style widgets. We have been super buzy getting the final debug finished:


https://youtu.be/ZOiKd2ZKwgc

[LtFEED]

weekly dev update number 8:

https://youtu.be/L9FwIx20eZc

[danrhodenizer]

It's going to be a race now (maybe) to get this game finished before Rebellion get the Battlezone 98 remaster finished, unless you do something better/differently than their game. At least they 'just' started development and are in the very early stages. But this publicity for Battlezone again could also help a lot too. It will be interesting.

These guys on here have provided some great suggestions throughout Bionite's lifespan and if followed, I think you will have something great. The HUD is something that definitely needs to be addressed. I don't know if you still have my old designs for it, I lost them on my old computer. But something holographic that could be projected through the players helmet, with minimal cockpit controls/view, imo, has always been the best way to do the HUD. That way when you're outside of your hovertank, you still have all the necessary HUD pieces in place. Anyways I hope everything is going okay John, I admire your commitment to Bionite :- )

[LtFEED]

if you look at the titles that Rebellion has released, none of them are very good, Sniper Elite looks ok, but for an xbox game, its no Halo.

If you look at the quality of games Rebellion has released, then the chances of them making a decent version of BZ is very low. Games like BZ take years to develop (took six months for me to debug Bionite and im not done yet).

The reason the original BZ titles were so good was because of the blood, sweat and tears that were spent by the developers to make that game. If anyone thinks for one second that Rebellion is going to allocate the resources to make a decent BZ sequel, they are seriously delluded.

Based on what i have seen, the devs at Rebellion will spend maybe six months making the game, 6 months debugging it and the results will be horrible. MARK MY WORDS.

These guys are working the free hype created be this community to sell there other games! sry but its the truth.
That VR version of BZ is the easiest 'version' of BZ that could ever be made and still be able to call it a BZ brand.
Based on the product life cycle of games, Rebellion games will loose tons of money, so they wont spend it to make the next BZ a decnt game.

[General BlackDragon]

And you don't know who's leading the remake.

[LtFEED]

And you don't know who's leading the remake.

can you explain this further? I thought Rebellion was going to it? are you referring to who will be the brand manager/ lead dev?

[General BlackDragon]

Yeah.

[LtFEED]

ahhh ok

the only chance they have to make it a decent game would be to get the original dev team working on the game again.............

seems prety clear that aint gonna happen, Reb would need at least 2.5M$ in working capital to hire those dudes, and i dont see them spending that amount of money. from what i understand, in the late 90's Pandemic spent about 1M$ to make BZ98. In todays money thats a least $2M if not more.

does anyone honestly think that Rebellion is going to spend that kind of money to dev the next BZ????

ummmm...if they do..... they will be in the same boat as the guys at Crytek.

[General BlackDragon]

Well, as long as they listen to the community, it should be decent.