The HUD and a more concise interface

[joseph]

We’ve taken the main actions the player can input and focused them on the bottom left, since other skill actions are used with contextual objects/NPCs in game or via items. (hovering over a door to lockpick or use a medical kit from the inventory), we can take that off the main HUD bar. This cleared up a lot of inevitably unused space. The medical overlay and menu buttons fit on the corners, which keeps that space more comfortably open.

This all works quite nicely for a controller input as well, and we’d like to try to support testing that soon for those who like to play on that. There’s certainly a case for a controller being a smart way to play the game with the tile movement on one joystick and aim cursor on the other, while the current mouse mode has two very different actions controlled by just mouse input, 9 directional WASD movement not withstanding if you’re in the cult mechanicus and can swing that.

The only other mainstay elements of the HUD are the minimap (toggled on bottom right), which is very useful for predicting street turns while driving, and the game feed. And there’s a case for removing that completely, which is where we are at now. We’ve experimented with showing the feed in various ways to try to catalogue the ~concurrent actions of a swarm of NPCs all at once, settling most recently to just show the player’s input. With very obvious 2d sprites and new additional animation frames it’s more obvious to see what’s happening if you’re paying attention to your surroundings, and we have amplified feedback for things like knockdowns, critical hits and reloading. Metered turn actions like being suppressed or aimed shots have their obvious in-game UI, and overall there isn’t much a need for a feed.

Aiming rolls were never boolean, you had ranges of failure, and the results are fairly obvious if you hit or not, as in, there’s usually a ton of blood, and if you aren’t doing damage to someone you can tell pretty quick (armor block particle effect aside). So we have something for debugging and checking rolls, its probably not worth making more accessible for the game, and we’ll see if there’s a need for it as we continue.

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