I'd greatly appreciate some GUI C&C

[Ozzie]

The only thing I actually wonder is why a broken heart is a symbol for health....

Besides that, I only think that it looks very very nice. 

[stuh505]

I think the medpac is supposed to symbolize life actually, so the broken heart must be something else (don't ask me).

[Al_Ninio]

Broken Heart: Damage to the player. There is a relationship between Health and Damage (Damage lowers your Max Health level)

Actually reading posts is such an advantage.

[TerranRich]

I guess it really pays to explain everything in your initial post.

Yes, the Broken Heart resembles Damage, which adversely affects your maximum health. This means that, if your Damage is at 50% (which is pretty bad shape), then your Health cannot reaach any more than 50%. So taking medicine, or whatever, will only work to a point. Visiting the hospital is necessary for repairing Damage (or Injury).

I will try finding icons for Respect and Confidence, though that may be hard. I might use something like a handshake for Respect and...I don't know...maybe a skydiver for Confidence? Give me some ideas, guys!

And I kept the static attrbutes as icons because I want to optimize space as much as possible, everywhere, including hidden GUIs. I think they are self-explanatory enough. Besides, this game will come with an electronic manual, detailing things about the GUI, and I will most likely have mouse-over pop-ups for the icons...perhaps they can be triggered by a normal click on each of the icons?

Oh, and about the 50/100 thing...at the beginning of the game, Respect can only reach 50 points. From Episode 2 on, Max Respect reaches 100. But I guess I could just find another way of implying it and change it to percentages. I'll edit it, post it, and see what you guys think.

Oh, and as for the clocks...some people prefer digital, others prefer analog. The digital is for exact time readings (to know when you have to go in to work, in the game, e.g.) and the analog is to show your mood as well. I'll put an example in the test image for you guys to understand better.

[stuh505]

I'm not sure about your health system.

Often there will be an attribute like constitution which is used in an algorithm to determine your maximum health.  Then taking damage or healing potions can slide your current health around within the range of 0-max health.

By traditional usage of the word "health" in games, it means max health-damage....so you would never need to have a slider for health AND damage, just one or the other.  This value is usually in the form of a percent because you don't really need to know the value, just the relative value.

Since you are showing BOTH, I must assume that they are actually showing different things...and that perhaps "health" refers to maximum health, and damage refers to the inverse of the regularly named current "health".

However, you have indicated that "health" is a percent...which is reverse from normal, and misleading if it's a maximum number.  Perhaps the percent means the percent of maxhealth that you have out of the maximum possible maxhealth within game limits.

If so...that seems to be a poor way of representing maximum health, and might be better understood by showing a static number.  eg, your maximum health is 150...and then they can see it increase to 200 or whatever, as their character becomes "tougher".

If you use a visual display of health, then there is no need for any of these confusing numbers.

You can simply have a health bar whose length is related to your maximum health, so as your bar gets bigger, you know that you are a tougher character.  Then the bar can fill up like a thermometer to show your current health.  You could go one step further and make it so that you have a "target" health value, which represents the health value your current health is going to go to.  This way, damaging and healing effects do not make immediate changes to your health bar, but change the target health, and then you see the bar gradually move to either level over any period of time.

[TerranRich]

I guess I should re-work my health system. I was going to have damage affect health such that every hour or so, if the player was damaged, a certain amount of health would be lost automatically. But I guess I could just leave Health alone (no Damage) and have health go down in fights, etc. It sounds like a great idea to have the max health go up, and get rid of the % sign. Perhaps nitially 100 is the max. Then, certain factors could help bring the health even higher. Perhaps there's a drug that can boost it up to 150 (a very expensive drug), but upon going back down below 100, it can't normally reach above 100 without more of that drug. I don't know, just a thought. But I want to keep the Health system simple. I thought I could manage Damage vs. Health working against each other.

See, I was thinking about what things could adversely affect Health. If you were injured in a fight, you'd need to visit a Hospital (hence the Damage). But if you lost health due to lack of sleep, for example, visiting a Hospital wouldn't help...normal sleep would be the answer. But then again, I didn't want the player to sleep off a broken arm.

Any way I could make it work taking the above paragraph into consideration?

Also, Darth, what font did you use for your stat numbers?

[Ashen]

NOTE: First paragraph made pointless, by TerranRich posting:
Reading TerranRich's post, I think Damage refers to a temporary cap on your health - you still have the same absolute maximum, but you can't reach it until you get rid of the Damage. An example might be, if you get into an accident, break a leg and get some cuts and bruises. You'd be able to heal the little things easily enough just with time, you won't be at your best until the leg is properly set (increase your health, but not reach 100%).


If I've got that right, it might be better to have Damage as a negative value, representing the handicap to your score, i.e. a -25% Damage means you can only reach 75% health, until you get yourself seen to (if you haven't already done this - it's hard to tell since you used 50% in your example.)

It might also be an idea to show this graphicaly on the health bar as well - grey out the appropriate percentage, perhaps.

EDIT: I also like the idea of the analogue clock being a sort of 'body clock' to monitor tiredness, hunger, etc. I think, provided you explain it all a bit more fully in the manual, it's a nice, workable GUI. Made sense to me, anyway.

[big brother]

If you ever played Jagged Alliance, they had a really good system for your health. By each character portrait (along the side of the screen), there were three bars, one for breath (energy, which affects your action points), one for action points, and a red bar for health.

Some mercenaries had more health to start out with, thus a taller bar (something like one pixel for every four points of health). As soon as he/she got hit, the red bar would shrink to reflect the amount of the damage. That part of the red bar would be replaced by yellow. Any character who had yellow would bleed every turn, gradually losing more hit points.

As the character received medical attention (which took time depending upon where he/she was damaged, how critical the wound was, and how good the medic was), the yellow part of the bar would get replaced by orange.

Once patched up, the character would no longer bleed, but if he/she got hit again, the damage took its toll on the red part of the bar.

A character could only truly heal if they were put on medical leave between missions. Medics kept your mercenaries from bleeding to death, but they couldn't magically restore health.

As a result, this system added realism to the game without creating a lot of complexity.

[InCreator]

Yes, the health system in JA and JA2 was the best I've ever seen.
Orange bar (the amount of total health that was damaged and simply patched up by medic) was "heal-able" too, by longer rest at the base or under doctors treatment (which equals as merc in "hospital" and not fighting during treatment).

You sould definetly try this.

[TerranRich]

It sounds like a great idea, but I'm still thinking about how to implement it in AGS. Now, I haven't played many RPGs so I'm a little rusty on what Action Points do (I guess I never really paid much attention to them). I guess I could have a Health bar and an Energy bar. I'm just not sure on whether a lower Energy would affect Health, or if a lower Health would affect Energy.

I'm most concerned about how the stats relate to each other. I still like my original Damage vs. Health idea, and the negative values for Damage make a lot of sense. And yeah, Ashen, you're right, if you had, say, -20% Damage, you could never go above 80% Health. Also, the more damage you have, the more your Health decreases on its own, automatically.

The only way to fix Damage would be to visit a Hospital and use up time and money to do so. Other than that, I'm really out of ideas. If I could see some visual explanation of the Jagged Alliance GUIs and stat systems, I might better understand it and be able to implement it into an AGS game. I'll Google around for it and see what I can find.

Thanks!

[big brother]

Ok, forget the health and AP bars, I just mentioned them for background.

What I really wanted to focus on was the SINGLE health bar. This bar could have as many as three colors on it (red for health, yellow for damage, and orange for "patched-up damage") at a time. I think my last post explains it pretty well, so read it again.

Or better yet, download JA from Home of the Underdogs.

[edmundito]

What you need to think about is what is the most important thing the player needs to look at at all times.

But also, there's so many questions I have? You call this the gui, but it's more like the statusbar part of the GUI, how is it going to be controlled and such?

Besides, shouldn't you be making the game right now and then worry about the GUI later?

[TerranRich]

I have two states of mind: the technical state and the creative state. Lately my creative state has been tired, so my technical state is focusing on the GUI status line. My creative side will focus on the story once again at a later date...soon. I already have most of the story down (about 1/3).

Ah, so JA's abandonware...good, I'll give it a look and test it out a little. And I was giving it some thought at work... I could have Energy and Health. Energy would go down with such things as working (gets your tired and fatigued), going to the gym, and even learning at school (it's a combination of Mental Energy and Physical Energy, so to speak. Energy can be raised by energy drinks, coffee, espresso, etc. Once Energy is depleted, Health starts being affected too. Besides Energy draining Health, Health (a red bar) can also be affected directly by being sick or injured. When the player becomes Injured, the Health bar turned yellow. A quick fix from a First Aid Kit would turn it orange. Only a visit to the hospital would bring it back to red again, but this uses up a lot of time and money. Coming down with a disease (STD or flu) would turn it lime green. When Injured or Sick, Health goes down every so often automatically until healed or cured.

Sound good? Any other suggestions? I'd like to hear your thoughts before I work on this GUI any more to reflect these new ideas.

[Haddas]

Yes. Are there lots of Japanese virgins who want to have sex with you in this game?

[TerranRich]

No...this is an URBAN RPG...they are Latina virgins.

[TerranRich]

Here is my latest attempt:



For some reason my Xylot.com domain is down, so I had to use ImageShack to host this image.

There are new icons to explain:
Lightning Bolt = Energy
Medical Symbol = Health
Brown Bottle = Blood Alcohol Level
Bottle w/ Bolt = Temporary Alcoholic Confidence (adds to your confidence level while drunk, enabling you to do stupd things you wouldn't ordinariily do)
Dollar Symbol = Money, of course
Hands Shaking (although it doesn't look like it at first) = Respect
Skydiver (is this clearly visible?) = Confidence

The shaking hands and the skydiver were the best symbols I could think of for Respect and Confidence, respectively. Are they visible enough? Are they apparent to their meaning?

And I'm still debating whether or not to get rid of the 50/50 and 50/100. They serve a purpose: your Maximum Respect level goes from 50 to 100 later on in the game. Confidence, I can see, so I might change that in the end.

[Haddas]

Are you cheating? 99999999 cash seems a little too hardcore for anyone. I think the panesl should have SOME kind of dark transparrent colour.

[Darth Mandarb]

Ahhh transparent goodi-ness!

I like this a lot!

The skydiver I got right away, it just looked like a skydiver to me.  The shaking hands I got, but it took me a second to focus in on what it was.

I say, with this new design, stick with the 50/50 50/100.  It fits in as-is now and doesn't get in the way.

I might suggest removing the bevel effect on the status box in the lower left corner.  I'm not a huge fan of soft bevels like that and it doesn't merge well with the status bar on the top (w/ no bevel) but that's only a minor thing.

Good improvements!

[TerranRich]

I think the panesl should have SOME kind of dark transparrent colour.

But...they do...

Darth: Thanks! I'm happy with this latest version of my Status GUI, and I also agree with the fact that the bevel doesn't belong on the bottom pop-up GUI.

One more thing I gotta ask all of you, although this might be off-topic and belong in another forum: now that the GUI is semi-transparent, I can't do what I was originally going to do with the health and energy bars and have them behind the GUI, sliding back and forth to match the level. ANy ideas on how I can resize the energy/health bars or at least give it that appearance while keeping the semi-transparent GUI?

[strazer]

With AGS v2.7, you could use a button with graphic clipping enabled and adjust its width.