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Invasion Health Icons
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 12:28 am
by Slimicus
This posting is mostly for Bio, but here's an example of Icon based health indicators (instead of just the bar) that still show a color gradient..
It turns out that we wouldn't even need a texture array since we can reshade the texture (which was already being done..) I modified this version slighlty to shade between green and red since in the original file I had, green was hardcoded to 255.. (i just subtracted the red value from 255)

It wasn't hard at all to do.. I just replaced the default value of HealthBarMaterial, and set YScale = XScale. Then I hard coded the value of HealthScale to 1 (so it wouldn't ever change) and modified the code that determines the green RGB value.
The material I used was a 256 color bmp with the first palette entry set to 255,64,255 (I imported it into the package inside unrealed and it took care of the transparancy)
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 9:28 am
by Tazcrosblade_
ohhh i can see it now the color changes for level 1 and for lvl 2 the flower loses it petals
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 3:24 pm
by DW_Wraith
Interesting method. Its all up to Bio on what he wants to do. He's been putting in overtime of late for all the new tweaks which I am so grateful for.
:cheers:
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 4:41 pm
by Desko
Speaking of Bio, is he the one who made the Summoned Monster's Awareness bars a different color?
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:11 pm
by DW_ACY
Yeah, he did Desko!!! He has been doing some really cool tweaks of late!
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 6:38 pm
by Slimicus
I think he said pets are now their own class? So it would be possible to have different displays entirely for the health bars.. if he decides to use icons for example, different icons..
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 9:15 pm
by Bio
Nice :) One thing I was thinking of was a full circle that loses 'slices' as the monster loses health; I think thats where the array of textures would be necessary.
Maybe once we work it out I can put the ability in for people to choose the style of awareness bar they would want to use. No promises :P
Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 1:15 am
by Slimicus
Well I had posted something about having a single texture and rotating it, but that requires a quadratic mesh and doesn't seem quite so efficient, so nm that.. :)
[hr]
The multiple textures method seems to work fairly well.. there's one small flicker issue I'm having, but other than that, the concept seems sound. (I just had to call Canvas.SetPos between each call since consecutive draws begin where the last draw ended..)

Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 4:16 am
by DW_WailofSuicide
Sanity check: What was wrong with the bars?
It's cool someone is putting in the effort to this, but big flowers or circles that cover up even more of the screen than the bars? Mmmm... Dunno about that.
Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 10:45 am
by Bio
Yeah, a similar thought occurred to me as well Wail :) It started with making the awareness bars for the pets a different color than the bars for the other monsters, which resulted in a whole new interaction class ... and I was just thinking 'hmm I wonder if' ... ya know, that kind of thing.
The graphics I have for them atm (which of course I don't have a SS of yet) are a small (ish) circle that is about 15% transparent with a ring around it that cycles through the colors with the monsters hp in the middle of the ring( for lvl2). The ring loses pieces as the hp decreases, but the transparent circle remains. Will post a SS in a little bit.
I don't know that I will actually implement it (and if I did I would definitely make it so that you could choose the original or the new style) I mostly just wanted to do it.
P.S. Wail, I sent you an email a couple days ago at your Gmail account :)