A few sugestions

[Demodor]

I see the GUI is being changed..i have a few ideas...instead of health bar and shields to the target lines, put a virtual semi transparent green model of the ship in a frame in a corner on top like the map's frame and the areas with damage with red. The model is comprised of 2 images, one with a top view of the ship and one looking from the front. Something like this: http://s174.photobucket.com/user/DragonLady4732/media/800px-PegasusDamageDisplay2a.jpg.html or http://www.xiii.dk/ccccd/Crafts/republicAssaultShipSize.jpg

I would like the map (p button) to not be fully visible, only the areas where your faction or alies have explored. You could also buy maps of the systems from the shops in those systems or explore yourself sector by sector. The moment you buy the map, the entire system becomes visible in the map for your faction or allies. Those maps should be pricey too, because the knowledge is power. I don't like it how you make enemies and the next second they know your location.
The faction hub should hide the coordonates and show only those that you have explored. Faction homes (and the icon for the station) should be hidden on the map even if you have bought a map of the system, and made visible only when you have entered in the 5000m zone.
Warp gate lines that belong to your faction should be visible also only for faction members and allies.
Faction members should have waypoints on the map, togglable if you want to be seen or not by your faction members.
Also, scanners should work on stations too and activate an emergency signal when a ship passes by or it's destroyed.

 

[Megacrafter127]

I see the GUI is being changed..i have a few ideas...instead of health bar and shields to the target lines, put a virtual semi transparent green model of the ship in a frame in a corner on top like the map's frame and the areas with damage with red. The model is comprised of 2 images, one with a top view of the ship and one looking from the front. Something like this: http://s174.photobucket.com/user/DragonLady4732/media/800px-PegasusDamageDisplay2a.jpg.html or http://www.xiii.dk/ccccd/Crafts/republicAssaultShipSize.jpg

This idea, while nice, won't really work on the shields, as they currently are just a variable applied to the entire ship. Deal damage to one part of the shields, deal damage to all parts of the shields. I can totally see this for block damage though, or as a hit indicator.

 

[Demodor]

well, what i wrote that was mostly for the hull damage..the shields could be a line near the frame (or inside) or be indicated as percent x%

 

[Criss]

The idea of having an image of the ship is nice. When we get a new health system I have a feeling it will be easier to see the damage done to a ship.

I agree about map. I love the idea of exploring. Since a galaxy is large, we should only discover stars near us. Realistically we can only determine information about stars accurately if they are within a certain range of us. Perhaps the 2 closest stars in each direction are revealed to us when we travel to a system. Then we can take it further by investigating the systems and discover their features. We can make this manual exploration or use a scanner. Buying the information should be an option too but only if someone has explored it prior to your visit.

If the galaxy is populated with NPC's then I think we should handle faction homebases differently. The information will get out there and people will know when a homebase is set up. Perhaps in the core worlds where it is more populated, the only thing you have to do is enter the star system to discover the homebase. The homebases on the edges of the galaxy require you to enter their sector in order to discover it. This way people that set up their homebase on the edge of civilization are harder to discover.

The same thing I said should be applied to warp gates if we are going to hide their locations.

Waypoints is nice.

Scanners are meant to work on stations. They just don't yet. Everything you stated there is already confirmed.

 

[jayman38]

It would be super-easy to implement a square outline around the image of the ship to represent the shield. At 100% shields, white, at 0%, switch from pure black to RED. Fading greyscale from black to white or vice versa as shields drop or regenerate. You really need red to know when the shields are completely down.

 

[kupu]

How would you propose we show damage to 1 hull block via this method on a 1 million block ship in a 256x256 pixel area? (which bare in mind is 4 times large than the current mini map). The disparity between ship sizes would be so huge these 'virtual replica' ships would either be showing half a block over 20 pixels or thousands within a 20x20 area.

I imagine you'd want the ship model to rotate to show all sides? What if the ship was damaged on the underside? You would need to put that model on a awkward animation or a slide show of each 6 views for it to be used in any accurate capacity. But what if the ship has overlapping structures? How would you differentiate between outer hull layers or even a damaged interior? You won't get much information from an orthogonal view point, nor would you be able to see behind structures on a looped orbit animation.
Would the model of the ship have to be redrawn and loaded after each block is damaged or gone?

There are too many pitfalls for this idea to be put in Starmade in my opinion, if our ships were prefab models, it could be possible. But in Starmade it would just be too inaccurate, too small, too varied depending on ship size and shape that it would fall far short of your expectations.

After all the efforts of even trying to get something like you've described in the game, people would still require the old HP bar and a % / statistics to know whats actually going on in combat.

 

[Mr. V]

I think the idea is awesome - but sadly I have to agree with Kupu - there are too many variables in a game where you create your own ship to make a HUD display that would make this concept helpful across the board :/

I do completely love the idea about the map without reservation though - it would promote exploration as well as trade/interaction between players.

 

[Demodor]

How would you propose we show damage to 1 hull block via this method on a 1 million block ship in a 256x256 pixel area? (which bare in mind is 4 times large than the current mini map).

I have an idea for that...you press a button, a big frame opens and you see your ship. You can rotate, zoom in, zoom put, just like the map...the mechanics are already in the game, just needs to be implemented for a ship...you check a small box, and all the blocks become semitransparent with a green color and it shows you with orange the damaged blocks and with red the missing ones...this is a way to repair your ship too, we all know how hard is to put together a big ship after a fight...at the moment, i preffer taking it appart and use the blueprint to spawn it back....but it's not the same...call me a sentimentalist, i would preffer repairing a ship that helped me won a fight than taking it appart and spawn a new one...it's like it's a different ship.

Another suggestion, make the F3 button unavailable for the players, you can track someone with that thing

 

[kupu]

I have an idea for that...you press a button, a big frame opens and you see your ship.

This immediately removes you from combat and renders you incapacitated. You'd be busy checking ship damage on some large screen, having to manually rotate, zoom and scan for damages all the while some guy is laying down even more fire.
What you've described here is not effective for combat situations. It would just turn into a live feed of you getting destroyed. Might as well use Right Shift and zoom out for that one

you check a small box, and all the blocks become semitransparent with a green color and it shows you with orange the damaged blocks and with red the missing ones

Alright, so each block would be shown at a % of an alpha value. How many overlapping blocks / interior spaces overlapping until this is shown as Opaque? Or obscured beyond comprehension? Again, i'll make the point this idea would be great visually if we had prefab ships. That way this virtual display could be made specifically per ship model and show core ship parts as sections "left wing" "Stern" etc. But you're dealing with unlimited ship designs here made from little blocks.

In the end, you would still require hard stats that quantify all those little red and orange squares. A 40% loss of ship hp, shields down to 30% or 33,333/99,999 else you'd just be looking at a pretty picture with no greater understanding of just how close you are to death. I struggle to see a catch-all solution here that can dispose of HP bars and hard stats as your OP states.

 

[Demodor]

dude,

This immediately removes you from combat and renders you incapacitated. You'd be busy checking ship damage on some large screen, having to manually rotate, zoom and scan for damages all the while some guy is laying down even more fire.

Who said you have to spend minutes to see the damage?? In a fight, one quick peek is enough to see where and how much is affected a side. And by the way, the small holes in your hull are neglectable when it comes to fights between titans, like you said...i am talking here about hull breaches, like where a missile damaged your hull and that is a danger for your core..and i didn't said the frame should cover the full screen, i said a big frame.
Why in the world would you think it's a bad idea to see a preview of your ship...the frame could load a blueprint and compare it to your actual ship?? This would be good for previewing blueprints too

 

[kupu]

Who said you have to spend minutes to see the damage?? In a fight, one quick pick is enough to see where and how much is affected a side. And by the way, the small holes in your hull are neglectable when it comes to fights between titans...

Why in the world would you think it's a bad idea to see a preview of your ship...the frame could load a blueprint and compare it to your actual ship?? This would be good for previewing blueprints too

I'm only referring to this in terms of effectiveness in combat, because of this;

I see the GUI is being changed..i have a few ideas...instead of health bar and shields to the target lines, put a virtual semi transparent green model of the ship in a frame in a corner on top...

Firstly, the mechanic you referenced to navigate this window (galactic map) requires WSAD, SHIFT and Mouse control for Panning / Orbit views. To have these functions in your "Virtual Ship" window as you've outlined would require disabling inputs in flightmode (hotbar actions, directional movement etc) to give full control in your proposed window without each keystroke or mouse movement carrying out 2 functions simultaneously. Thus, incapacitating you in combat for the length of time viewing or navigation this new window.

So, the window doesn't have to take the entire screen, it could be 512x512? Any more would fall off the screen or overlap other information on the lower resolutions we support. This still doesn't fix the problem of disparity between ship sizes and it's still a sizeable chunk of screen estate to not show what is happening around you in combat (consider not everyone plays at 1920x1080 resolution, some are on 1280 x 800 laptop screens). Even still, in a window that big, titans would require plenty of zooming and panning to see an accurate depiction of breaches (it would require zooming to even get past 1 block = 1 pixel for large ships).

With your opacity % per block, you could know next to nothing of a tunnel like hole through the length of your ship without some manipulation from the zoom / pan functions, eating into time better spent shooting your enemy.

Again, despite ALL of the above and my previous concerns... you would still need to quantify the information on display into an easily readable format ie; numbers and %'s or bars. Exactly what you are trying to replace.
Simply put, having an array of green / yellow / orange / red squares in the shape of a ship does not accurately tell you your remaining HP (which is needed in coming mechanics) Shield values, Armour values etc. If a player is to make informed choices in combat with a ship they spend potentially weeks or months making, don't they deserve these figures to be accurate, easily read and accessible instantly?

Remember, you've proposed this as a replacement system for bars and stats in the HUD. The idea fails to accurately depict that same information as efficiently. What you get is a visually immersive novelty that paints a picture in broad strokes.

Who said you have to spend minutes to see the damage?? In a fight, one quick pick is enough to see where and how much is affected a side.

Zoom out whilst in a camera block, press right Shift and pan around. That should be enough then? You could do that and still see damaged blocks on your ship including textures for system blocks that are breached, the enemy and HUD elements depicting current vital stats.

 

[jayman38]

This immediately removes you from combat and renders you incapacitated. You'd be busy checking ship damage on some large screen, having to manually rotate, zoom and scan for damages all the while some guy is laying down even more fire.
What you've described here is not effective for combat situations. It would just turn into a live feed of you getting destroyed. Might as well use Right Shift and zoom out for that one

For a multi-crew ship, checking for damage and where it is would be a good thing for engineering crew to handle, while the pilot continues in active combat.

I know the game is currently focused on one player per ship, with any other players just along for the ride, but this might be something to think about for future crew options. Maybe in future fleet changes as a pilot's ability to send commands to other players and NPCs changes. I think this would add a lot of value to the concept of large, multi-player ships.

Alright, so each block would be shown at a % of an alpha value. How many overlapping blocks / interior spaces overlapping until this is shown as Opaque? Or obscured beyond comprehension? Again, i'll make the point this idea would be great visually if we had prefab ships. That way this virtual display could be made specifically per ship model and show core ship parts as sections "left wing" "Stern" etc. But you're dealing with unlimited ship designs here made from little blocks.

I would suggest keeping blocks opaque, like in build mode, and force the engineer to "navigate" around the view to find where the damage is. Again, this is something for the engineering crew or outside of combat. (They would literally be navigating around the view, but since it would be considered a virtual view, that player's location in the game universe would not change, so the astronaut could be seen, shot, killed, or otherwise affected while the controlling player is viewing and navigating in the damage view. Maybe tint the screen in damage view to notify the player that they should exit damage view immediately to handle the situation.)

I also suggest that build mode and this virtual damage mode might show the damage percentage or raw damage number on any damaged blocks in view. Seeing damage numbers floating on their respective blocks in 3D, the damage value still visible through layers of other blocks might help locate damaged blocks under the surface. With a sufficiently damaged section, you'd end up looking at an undecipherable alphabet soup floating in your view, but that would effectively illustrate how much damage you are seeing. (Maybe include a block-type filter in damage view to reduce visual noise?) You could find the real location of the hidden damaged block by navigating around the view and mentally triangulating where the floating damage value "sits".

Maybe have the damage value fade from white to transparent, depending on how distant the damaged block is, with sufficiently distant damaged blocks not showing a floating damage number. Problems: Again, we run into the obscured-beyond-comprehension thing, but again, it illustrates just how much damage you are dealing with. Also, you wouldn't see distant block damage, but I think that's reasonable for a virtual damage view.

Edit: It sounds like Right-Shift can already handle most of my suggestions here.

 

[CyberTao]

Edit: It sounds like Right-Shift can already handle most of my suggestions here.

If you are using multiple crew, and not using transparency, how is it any different than placing down a build block? I've been in limited battles, but even while fighting as the pilot I would tap Space and switch to build mode and check the status of my ship while my weapons were reloading, or while we were out of range of each other. A full 3D model of my ship with realistically displayed damage! You could even move inside your ship to see the tunnels, as solid blocks are entirely transparent, since only exposed surfaces will render textures. Would work better on larger ships if build mode camera could move a little faster, but you can cheat-engine that iirc.

Whats more, players are already using logic systems to create a damage control setup, with various lights linked to different areas of their ship. Ship gets damaged in that area? Light goes out. Good for detecting large missile impacts, but tunnels would be a pain to detect.