Note that this steals many ideas from the HL2 gui/hud.

current UI comp (marked):

color shades:

3 Main Elements: A) Health - health indicator, bottom left B) Ammo - ammo indicator, bottom right C) Inventory - facilitates efficient switching of gun/accessories/ammo

A) Health

Indicates with numerals 0 -> 100 (100 being full, 0 being dead). Text and numerals also change color with health. Each set of 5 (0-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc.) has its own shade. See the colors file for the 20 shades, but the basic rundown is that 96-100 is a pure green, 46-50 is a pure yellow, and 0-5 is a perfect red. All the others are somewhere inbetween.

B) Ammo

1) Indicates with numerals from 0 -> clip size. 2) Another smaller number will indicate the amount of ammo in reserve. The indicator numeral is initially the pure green, and stays that shade until the clip reaches < 25% capacity, at which time the numerals will change to the pure yellow color. When the clip is empty, the numeral changes red. Since the player will hopefully be going through (and monitoring) ammo much more than health, the sudden color changes will be better for planning times to reload, etc. in the middle of a firefight. 3) Also, there will be a small, simple (lineart) picture of the type of ammo in use (so players can easily distinguish the type of ammo they are currently using) as well as 4) an indication of the weapon's current fire mode (if applicable).

C) Inventory

This will actually cover a bit more than the inventory gui itself, it will delve into some hotkeys too. To get started, I'll list the functions we need:

1. weapon select 2. accessory select 3. ammo toggle 4. fire mode toggle

1) Weapon select

This is fairly simple, just use number keys to switch weapons. Other options would be to use the atilde (spelling? -> ~) key to cycle weapons, as well as a mousewheel. When selecting weapons some boxes with numerals would pop up on top/side (?) with a picture of the current weapon type. Current selection would have a slightly less transparent background and would have a slight glow on the lineart.

2) Accessory select

The easiest way would probably be to use an alternate key (CTRL, SHIFT, or ALT) + the number of the weapon to bring up the inventory of accessories for the current weapon. Then the player needs a way to cycle through them. Arrow keys could be used, or ~ again, and Enter to select. Weapons with multiple hardpoints would simply have all availabe accessories listed with some sort of indicator as to which hardpoint they use (different color?). They would use the same number and picture system as the weapon select, but the accessories would be added beneath in smaller boxes with their own lineart.

3) Ammo toggle

This is as easy as setting a hotkey to cycle through available ammo types.

4) Fire mode toggle

As simple as setting a hotkey to cycle through available fire modes.

Back to DevelopersWhiteBoard