Visual Suggestion (With Bonus Gif) For Item Pick Ups On Hud

[TGDM]

first off is the modified screenshot with my hud thing thrown in

 

transcript of text box:

 

"Arrow pointing to modified area of screenshot

 

Keep the ammo full message on the bottom center of the screen, but add in floating messages for when you pick up loot. Credits ALWAYS display at the top of the list and are accumulative for the last 5 seconds. Each item fades off of the list after 5s. List is semi-transparent like HUD Max pick ups displayed at any time: 6."

 

Essentially the idea is to take advantage of the large resolution many players have without obstructing their field of vision. In my mockup the display is set to about 75% opacity so you can clearly see the background.

 

Variations of what I showed can be adapted fairly easily -- Text only, text with a blue hud border (like where it shows the DREAD 30 on the bottom right), icon + quantity only... etc. The point is to make it so that you can easily tell WHEN and WHERE you picked up a particular item so you can inform your allies when you grabbed an Orokin Cell or Neurode or what have you. The space allocated for these displays will be beneat the mod pickup display (will have to nudge that up a bit on the y axis like in the screenshot). Most importantly, to NEVER stack the displays on resource pick ups. You need to be able to visually correlate the WHERE and WHEN and the easiest way for the user to do that is by giving each pickup a new display line (up to 5+1 reserved for credits). Even in big defense missions it is pretty rare

 

BONUS GIF:

 

Just a quick and crude animation (no fancy effects or super smooth transitions to keep file size down). This is just to show the intended effect I had in mind.

 

 

Also here's a link to the original post I made on Reddit (and the feedback there, though mockup is now different): http://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/1kz9q3/ingame_hud_suggestion_for_loot_pickups_visual/

 

p.s. this is a great game and I'm (most likely) converting from F2P to Founder's T2 sometime next week (even though I have a few reserves against some gameplay/economy design choices). i feel like i'm obligated to support your project after enjoying it so thoroughly.

 

Edit1: Images now imbedded into post, hidden by Spoiler tags.

Edited September 20, 2013 by TGDM

[Archistopheles]

All of the Yes's I can give.

 

Edited August 25, 2013 by Archistopheles

[Meenmu]

All of the Yes's I can give.

 

What this guy said.

[Maou]

pretty good idea. we should have this xD make it easy for us to know what we looted

[Miose]

yup

[DiBBz]

pretty great UI suggestions coming in , wish i had time to put the time into one but sadly thats a long ways away

 

but im sure there are on a mission to make a improved UI and more readable and understandable

[TGDM]

All of the Yes's I can give.

 

how do i do the fancy pants image insertion

[NanoDecerto]

Yes, this is amazing, sir.

[VKhaun]

All of the Yes's I can give.

 

[OblivionNecroninja]

YES YES ALL OF MY YES!

DE, do this. Or something close. 

[TGDM]

monday (weekday) bump for the office guy people things

[EinRyu]

Brilliant.

[Hateborne]

Yes, please!

 

 

-Hate

[Namacyst]

Well...

 

[TGDM]

upgraded to hunter also bumping again

[kevbob]

not knowing what resources i've just picked up is a constant source of irritation.  when someone in-game highlights an important resource, i am always grateful.  when someone asks at the beginning of the mission "highlight morphics, please!" or somesuch, i always want to.  then, in the middle of the mission, i find it impossible to pay attention to what's going on (and helping the team) AND to pay attention to what i'm picking up with the current notification system (and thus help the team by marking important, and not marking nanos).

 

so, a change to the UI such as this would be welcome indeed.

[TheCasual]

This is great! Hopefully it would eliminate spamming me with my hp, energy, or ammo is full as well. 

[TGDM]

the ammo/energy full spam is okay so long as it's not invasive / all over the screen

 

it has its value for new players learning and understanding that energy and ammo can be capped and that not all ammo is useful, but it could probably stand having a toggle off option for the "FULL" displays.

[LotLP]

Oh god DE please make this happen.

[MonsterPig]

Yes PLEASE!

[timesickGallivanter]

You don't need to know what you picked up in the middle of a mission nearly as much as you need to be able to see what's going on. I'd like to keep my screen from being covered up like that, and having this info innocuously displayed in the bottle middle works just fine.

[R_E_B_E_L]

Finally, i will be able to mark stuff for others because now i can see what i picked up!

[_Tiamat_]

Naaah...They should focus on more important things instead, like changing the style of buttons, and making a new login screen.

/sarcasm

You don't need to know what you picked up in the middle of a mission nearly as much as you need to be able to see what's going on. I'd like to keep my screen from being covered up like that, and having this info innocuously displayed in the bottle middle works just fine.

Working ways to let us see what's going on would be faster "corpse" disappearance and optimized net-code. Afterwards, on UI side, that would be a better radar (which is already good enough) and a received-shot-direction-of-origin indication (which we already have). Warframe is an "almost first person" shooter with no gameplay-relevance of manual target spotting, reliable audio spotting methods, and reliable automated visual spotting methods. Consequentially, most of not knowing what's going on in warframe has nothing to do with screen space.

Some of us DO need (dodgy word you've chosen...) to know what we picked up in the middle of a mission. For example, knowing that I've picked up a wanted rare resource during a solo mission will impact my decision on using up a revive. For another example a team that is farming a particular resource may want to mark a resource drop if it contains the farmed resource, and the current clumsy messaging is making it unnecessary problematic to find out what the heck was inside that yellow box you just ran over. I've personally informed my friends of a drop they wouldn't want to miss (but have in fact missed) and have been informed of such over the private voice chat enough times to consider that information useful.

[TGDM]

Updated the original post to include the images directly in the post, hidden by spoiler tags. Glad to see this thread got some more traction.

 

 

You don't need to know what you picked up in the middle of a mission nearly as much as you need to be able to see what's going on. I'd like to keep my screen from being covered up like that, and having this info innocuously displayed in the bottle middle works just fine.

 

As I said in the post, unless you have a very tiny resolution, this will NEVER affect your field of vision, especially with it's semi-transparent design. Basically it's just going to double the vertical space taken up by the current Mod pickup alert (again, shown in the example). And, unlike the mod pickup, you can actually still see what is behind it.

 

In the image, on that Xini map, you would not be able to see what is on that elevated platform behind the Mod card. Both in my example and on live. With my mockup, you can still see what is going around the crate chokepoint.

 

So if you really think this is cluttered and limits what you can see, please articulate a bit better what you mean by that so that I might be able to provide a better version that would accomodate you. That or they could just have the option to disable loot notification and everyone else who seems to be in support of this feature could have it while those who do not like it could just disable it.

Edited September 20, 2013 by TGDM