Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Metered points in JADE 0.1.1

During breakfast I today picked up issue 208 from the JADE project management tool and implemented. JADE from now on will have a nice meter display for the current state of your hit points and power points that gradually shifts towards red when things get tight.

Here are the screen shots: Grim, my preferred tester, in full strength:


And here is Grim after some scruffles with orcs:


The observant reader also will notice that I fixed one empty line above the HP line that still appears on the first screen shot. I just was too lazy to recreate that shot. Picture #2 thus shows how things will look in the future. I personally love this new visual as you even notice tiny increases in points without consciously having to look to the left. I should have thought of that sooner ;-)

19 comments:

  1. So the HUD is shifting left instead of the ADOM standard of bottom? I liked it on the bottom.

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  2. Monospaced font - great! Now there is nice visual order :)

    One thing - you could put one empty line between the 1st line of text [name of character and text describing action] - because now it is too close to window interface, which does not look clear.

    AND - those HP meters are GREAT, but way too bright - simply darken them, that they do not take away user attention from action part of GUI.

    Sempoo

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  3. Liking the bars! I'm actually against making them dimmer, as something as important as a change in HP count should be noticed immediately. Too many a death have been the result of user concentrating too much on the "action part" of the GUI not noticing how steady their hitpoints have gone down until it is too late.

    Thomas, you planning to give detailed color cues to burden and hunger statuses as well? That would be pretty sweet, and shouldn't be hard to implement in a non-intrusive way (like in ADoM, but with more gradient, I'd guess?).

    To the first commenter: pretty much all computer screens are much wider now than they are tall (which wasn't the case when roguelikes were still an emerging genre), so making use of that extra width makes sense.

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  4. Health bars? A great addition! I wonder if JADE will someday be as easy to play as DCSS.

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  5. Good addition, though it feels a little out of place having flat graphics mixed with an otherwise entirely ASCII interface. If I may make a suggestion, you might want to check out Brogue for some visual ideas. It accomplishes pretty much the same type of bar (reduces in size, shifts in color) with ASCII characters to great effect. In general I think Brogue has the best ASCII art of any roguelike out there and would probably give you a host of great ideas for visual flair. I'd be interested to read what you think of it. : )

    https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

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  6. @92a4746a-a7a1-11e0-9527-000bcdcb471e: What Moozooh said about horizontal space. It's almost obligatory to do the status display either to the left or right.

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  7. @Sempoo: I didn't get the point about the lines. Please try again - this sounds really important :-)

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  8. @Roguewombat: I have looked at the screenshots of BRogue but I have to admit that I am not overly enthusiastic. I do not yet have an opinion about the special characters but I do not like the heavy use of background colors and inverted text... IMHO the interface appears very crowded and cluttered. I'd probably have to play the game to get a better idea though ;-)

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  9. I like the layout and the positioning of the HUD (makes the map less rectangular), but I'm not keen on the HP/PP bars. They are redundant and take up valuable interface space.
    Why not just color-code HP to make the wounded status visible at a glance? As for PP, chances are you want to know the exact point value at all times anyway.

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  10. I hadn't considered the widescreen format point... I despise widescreen and have held onto my luddite 4:3 monitor for 8 years now, and hope it will last me until i can find a 1920xsomethingenormous 4:3 aspect ratio new monitor. In the context of widescreen as standard, I absolutely can agree that sides make more sense.

    Having glanced at the BRogue HUD, the one thing I really liked was that (known? all?) status effects on visible npcs were clearly denoted. There is probably a cleaner, or at least less-spacious way to accomplish the same thing.

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  11. Thomas, I meant the line of text, where PC name and communicates appear - just pull it one line down, so it does not 'touch' the upper edge of widnow GUI.

    One more thing - hash symbols in cave walls are a bit too agressive visually - maybe there should be custom-designed hash symbol with calmer appearance, OR just gray color instead of blasting white.

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  12. I'm one of the mindless fools that thinks they're going to like it no matter what. Keep up the awesome work Mr. Biskup

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  13. After this sudden rush of TB most probably we won't hear a thing for a few months, similiar situations took place every year.

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  14. @hugeowl: I'm betting against ya! JADE 0.1.1 will happen at the weekend (maybe even before... depends on how much time I find for testing).

    As mentioned in the initial post: JADE has reached the state of grace in which I finally can focus on content and fun stuff instead of infrastructure... which is _very_ cool for me.

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  15. I like this muchly. But I don't like having to use my mouse!! NO MOUSE!! and the extra windows are no bueno. ;) other than that...this is going to be the most epic game ever.

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  16. Hey Thomas,
    Id really like to see a playable game, but I know it is extremely difficult to write such open ended game. From what I remember, a few years ago You also mentioned in one of Your blog posts that You have reached a "sweet spot" where You can just focus on adding content, what did happen then?
    I meant that there were several situations where You got highly motivated wrote 5 or 6 posts in a short period and then went quiet for half a year or even longer.
    Its also quite surprising what type of bugs people found - droping an item doesnt reduce weight of carried items? How could You have missed it while playtesting?

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  17. Hallo Thomas Biskup,

    I think I can understand Sempoo's problem.
    The text "Welcome to the world of Arcardia..." is really close to the line for the GUI. A little bit of "space" between the text and the line would be from my point of view a bit more pleasant.

    I am happy to see this development! Weiter so! ;)

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  18. I like the idea of the life bar. Just lost my first jade character to not really paying attention to my hp...

    Keep up the good work Thomas :)

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  19. @Hugeowl: I didn't playtest enough. That's why it's called 0.1.0 and not 0.6.0 (like the first ADOM release). Version numbers mean something to me, you know ;-)

    And the new philosophy is "release early, release often". I'll probably try to release even more often in the future as I in theory could make a release every time a new feature is added (which is too much as each release for a while will break save file compatibility).

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