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@adrenaline, I've been running some tests for the visibility of the warrior models while they're all beating the snot out of each other. Its a concern, and I got to wondering what the motivation was for bungie to hide all health and team information by default. Presumably because it was a visual mess with 100+ units on the screen, but I think we can do better these days.

Currently, we're placing the health bars on top of the friendly units, and adopting a health bar system similar to DOTA2. This means that you'll see the health of your army as they're brawling (without the need to band select them), but not enemy health. I think showing friendly and enemy health gets overwhelming, but maybe we can do some things where enemy health bars are shrunken/minimized to something visually different but still informative - like a single dot, with health color, unless you mouse over or select the enemy unit.

With regards to the use of team color and emblems for identification, this is one motivation for adopting a more stylized art design. It's also less work for a smaller team like ours, but it's also much more readable.

Emblems on shields, yes I had similar thoughts. Probably a bit further down the line though. Customization will play a really important role in Deadhold.

There's been some really interesting discussion on the GoS forums about the role of randomness in games, and the benefits/detractors for casual vs competitive. I've been thinking of some solutions there too. I gotta say I love these discussions, they're all thought provoking, and really help me crystallize my thoughts.

I think we'll have to get an irc channel up soon so we can get more dialogue going.

Got my vote. Will gladly pimp this to my Youtube crowd as soon as you have something pimpable. Keep it up!

I think a toggle for all health bars being shown is the best solution. You could also tint all the enemy units, maybe going from orange to black, instead of green to red.

How about you just do what Myth does and only show visible enemy health 1 unit at a time,
and only when the mouse cursor highlights that enemy unit?

seeing the health of enemy units kind of spoils the mystery of who would win a fight.

I'm 100% serious about this.

This definitely needs to be tested. So far my thinking is this:

1) I'm not sure I really want to be surprised in battle, I have access to that info anyway, but its annoying to get it. My initial instinct is to expose that in a friendlier "at a glance" way.
2) We want to try other health indicators, such as wounds/blackeyes/bruises, blood, scratches and possibly through animations (ie. heavy breathing). This in combination with the current way Myth does it, might be enough.
3) I'd like to avoid cluttering the screen. The more UI indicators, the less immersion. But, so far health indicators above PLAYER units in deadhold actually helps players to determine how a melee brawl is going "at a glance", without the need to band select one's own units constantly.

Like I said, I think we'll just need to try out various permutations through gameplay.

-fisj

Completely agree about wanting to keep the screen from getting cluttered. The massive health bars in Myth3 - while great for one on one or small micro-managed battles - really filled the screen with too much visual clutter when you had 10-20+ units battling on screen at the same time.

At the very least, if there are going to be health bars maybe don't set a particular setup in stone - whatever the default is, letting players turn off health bars for friendlies and enemies (independantly) would be ideal. Also - I like the idea of visual cues other than health bars, but if they are the sole indicator of health it might be a problem for players with smaller screens or who aren't zoomed into micro level.

On a different topic, I am glad you haven't fallen under the spell of the faction of Myth players who want to turn Myth into a game of checkers by removing all chance and randomness from Myth. The randomness is a huge part of what made Myth fun. As the rational players have pointed out, you get the benefit of randomness just as often as you get burned by it so there's no reason to remove dud bottles and missed arrows and the like.

"We want to try other health indicators, such as wounds/blackeyes/bruises, blood, scratches and possibly through animations (ie. heavy breathing). This in combination with the current way Myth does it, might be enough"

Really like that idea.

I like the idea of other indicators to show health of units, that would be really useful when zoomed in and micromanaging. I was just thinking it would be good to have the option of some more visible indicator for people who might not be zoomed in or who are viewing on a handheld/tablet device. Even with super high resolution, if you are viewing a battle of 30-40 units on a 10" screen it might be difficult to see the bruises/breathing without zooming in and panning around a scene to view each unit.

Perhaps an Icon displayed over a corner of the unit, that mirrors the color of the health bar. Maybe at accurate, but useful to see a bunch of units rough health in a short moment.

FYI, I registered a Deadhold IRC channel on GameSurge:

1) https://gamesurge.net/chat/ (Or do your regular IRC thing if you're familiar with it)
2) Enter your nickname
3) Type "/join ‪#‎deadhold‬"

This channel is intended to be an informal place to discuss Deadhold, RTT/RTS games, game development, and obviously Myth. I'll be lounging and afking a fair bit (believe it or not I'm reasonably busy), but the intention is to offer a place for people with similar interests in Deadhold, Myth and Bungie to chat about stuff.

Hope to see some people drop by!

-fisj

Totally need to get an old school Hotline server going.

Question for the developers,

What kind of preset system are you planning on implementing?

What kind of presets would you like? I took a look at some of the changes in 1.8. Right now its pretty wide open. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this.

-fisj

Must have the mission critical Rabble return.

We can always port Myth to Deadhold