Build 144

[rob]

Build 144! We've had a gross of builds! Today's changes:

* Set Thunderbolt battlemode toggle cooldown to 10 seconds
* Restore teleport cooldown after escape-to-origin
* Simplify health bars

I overdid last week's Thunderbolt change, so I'm bringing it halfway back this week. Thanks for the the feedback! Here's me celebrating at Kennywood on Sunday:



Turning off teleport cooldown after escaping to origin was completely inadvertent. I hope everyone had a fun couple of weeks abusing Z. I appreciate the requests to leave it as is, but the cooldown was put in for a good reason and I think the game is healthier this way.

The old health bars gave a lot of info about both current and max hitpoints in absolute terms; they were modeled on the health bars from LoL and DotA. In those games it's very important to have a display of both hitpoint fraction and max hitpoints, because max hitpoints changes constantly throughout the game based on level and installed equipment. The enemies in our game don't have fluctuating max hitpoints; once you've met and fought an enemy, you know its hitpoint total forever. So I simplified the healthbars' appearance, and now they just show hitpoint fraction. The size of each bar is now purely aesthetic: it's proportional to the radius of the enemy and has nothing to do with hitpoint total anymore.

Tim and I both continue to work hard on tools and anti-cheat in preparation for a wider release. Please forgive the lack of user-visible updates while we do this. And thanks very much for helping us test.

Rob & Tim
Jetbolt Games

[Zed]

First impression of the new health bars: Much cleaner look overall, but practically invisible on smaller enemies:
Maybe upscale the bar a bit if the enemy's radius is below a certain treshold?

I'd love to give some in-depth feedback on the new dungeon(s), but I'm finding it hard to free time and gather up motivation for some gridding. Bummer.

P.S.

May 27, 2015 14:08:17 GMT -5 rob said:

I hope everyone had a fun couple of weeks abusing Z. :)

Oh dear.

[lemnisweet]

This new health bar is way to small. The old one was a bit small as well. Also I think that bars on the health bar are much better then just a solid bar.

[zub]

New hp bars are really difficult to see. Still images can't really portray the issue, because they are constantly in motion while playing.

The issues:
* dull colors - It seems to me that generally the game uses dull colors for background and bright colors for foreground. Hp bars colors seems dull, which makes them blend with the background and not really noticeable compared to structure they are on. Please make them bright, so they shine out both of the background and the foreground object they are related to.
* size - Hp bar on small object are really tiny. While it may not be an issue on pesky minion, I don't want to need to concentrate hard to decipher actual hp from tiny hp bar, when I am attacking some small, yet powerful enemy or I want to know how other players are doing. It's not just about size of the object, but also a zoom level.
* no "markers" - I guess part of the reason why new hp bars are difficult to see for me is lack of anything to lock my eye on. While you probably don't want to go back to thick frame around the bar, I think there should be something drawn on left and right ends of the bar. I also miss some kind of division of the bar, I never really knew how much hp each bar represents, but it was nice to know I took 1/4 on enemy hps down.

EDIT:
Missile station 3k hp

Opression center 3.5 hp


I think it makes more sense to base hp bar size on total hp. For me it's actually difficult to evaluate power of things in this game, especially player tanks, because there're so many possible bonuses but no numerical total power. The look a see hp bar was a nice thing to start building the knowledge base (I can deal this much damage to this type of hp bar before I need to leave, etc.), because power of our tanks fluctuates so much.

[hypevosa]

Damnit, Rob. My wife has wanted to go to Kennywood for a year, and you go and make it worse posting a picture D: Now I'll have to find a weekend.

[Crunch]

I just wanted to poke my nose in the discussion about the new health bars. I've provided a color comparison between the old bars (left) and the new bars (right). 

I don't really have an opinion about the number of ticks or special bar sizes (I agree that the smallest bars may be too small atm), as I rarely pay much attention to anything other than HP percentage. But I'd like to say a few things about visibility. 

Bar visibility is relatively low, when compared to the old bar system:
• The old bars used contrast in both value (dark/light) and color (hue/saturation). Because of this, players could easily make sense of HP info, regardless of enemy/tile color, monitor quality, or colorblindness. 
• Conversely, the new system relies almost entirely on the cones of your eye to discern what information is being presented. Notice the values in the image above are very close in the B/W frame, also notice how the new bars can more easily get lost in the action. G12 is a very bright, multi-colored game and the cones/rods of your eye can fatigue. Providing strong contrast in both color and value is essential for making things readable. 
• The old bars had a border. Maybe I just like borders, or maybe they really do make the health bars more visible. Either way, I'd recommend going back in that direction. 

Help our poor, poor eyes, Rob...

[rob]

The old bars were also drawn at full opacity, while the new ones are drawn at alpha=.6. I feel that this is 90% of the difference you are seeing. In addition, the old bars didn't scale 1-to-1 with your camera zoom setting. As you pulled back from the closest zoom, the bars stayed the same size on on screen for a bit before shrinking away, thus getting larger in relation to the object they were attached to.

The reason I replaced the bars was that they were TOO visible, and jarringly didn't match any of the aesthetics of the rest of the game. They made screen shots look terrible and they dominated the visuals at certain zoom levels. On the Nova, you couldn't tell which bar corresponded to the central power unit and which was for the cannon just below it, because they were the same size and shape. They were fully opaque and visually busy, and therefore obscured what was happening in the real world.

These have a stripe of black in them:



...but they are opaque and super bright and so I'm not happy with them.

[rob]

I put in a reduced-opacity version of the above. We'll see how it does.

[zub]

Those colors look great, if you don't like them as default, can we have multiple opacity options?



This is me fighting nova (and evil health bars). Time is money so I want to tackle it in lightning mode and hit as many towers as possible. To do so, I have to get really close to the dangerous core which can kill me instantly if I get hit by its balls. So i want to observe the scene carefully to know what's coming at me. That includes looking at health bars to be aware of 2 things, what's the condition of the center and which one of the four other towers is dying the quickest. Healh bar of the core tower is really tiny, so it requires dedicated concentration to read the value. I have to literally stare at the bar and ignore everything else. On the other hand health bars of the four other towers are really big monolithic bars with no division and no borders, whick kind of make them blend with background. So yet again, no quick look and see, but dedicated stare to find beginning, then find end, then find the value, then remind myself of the beginning and the end again and come with some numerical estimate. Those novas sure put health bars to test.

So can we go back to normalized sizes based on total health with division on the bigger ones to prevent this kind of eye gymnastics? Pretty please.