Conquest: Monster health bars and mid-air damage prints

[Wazat]

I've just finished creating a health bar that appears over a monster's head when you shoot it. You can actually watch the health drop as you shoot the enemy, which is very satisfying.
You can also NOT see the health drop down, if your weapon is very ineffective against the enemy's shielding. This is where you need to switch to a different type of weapon real quick.
When you stop shooting the enemy, the health bar will stay visible for a few seconds, then fade out. It also fades out when you kill the enemy.

This is the first step toward giving the player feedback in Conquest on how well he's doing against his enemy. Earlier a few people expressed frustration at how hard it was to know whether or not their weapon was actually damaging the enemy -- now they can watch it happen. I want to thank you guys for bringing this up so I'd do something about it.

There's one more really cool side-effect to this new health bar - poison weapons have become really awesome. Now that the player can actually watch the poison take effect and see how strong it is, he can realize just how worth-while the weapon can be. Poison arrows ROCK now.

EEEEWWWWWWW!!! My screenshots got milk all over them!


The next step will be to make numbers hover in mid-air in front of the monster as you shoot it. The health bar uses only one entity per monster, but this could use up to 4 per monster (assuming you actually do 4 digits of damage). I already know how to make this work, I just have to do it.

A long time ago somebody made a mod that did this. In their mod, if you kept shooting the enemy, the numbers displaying damage would continue to count up the total (instead of spawning new numbers). After you stopped doing damage, the numbers would begin to float up and would eventually disappear, unless you started doing damage again.

This is what I want to do. The code should be simple (I was surprised at how easy the HP bar was), and the effect for the player will be awesome. It'll be cool watching the damage count up as he blasts the enemy with an effective weapon.
It should also provide more hints to the player on the inner workings of the shield system.

Cheers for now. I'll keep you updated.

[leileilol]

even though you've brightened the shots, it's the wrong adjustment - you want to gamma correct them, not brighten. Also psp6+ has shitty brightness/contrast control compared to 5 as i've observed

[SkinnedAlive]

Huzzah!

Looking forward to the next public beta.

[RenegadeC]

Nice! Conquest rocks, played it the other day and throughly enjoyed it. I've always wanted a way to display how much damage you're doing to enemies in TAoV, mind if I use your idea?

[Wazat]

No problem. I'd be happy to give you the code and walk you through installing it. It's pretty modular so it should be easy to port.

[Wazat]

Well, assuming anyone wants to have HP bars and damage printing in their own mod....

A little bird told me this HP bar and damage display installer done by me at the last minute at great expense to my sanity will work properly for all of you, but we all know that birds are dirty liars AND compulsive gamblers, so I didn't feel too bad when I ate it.

[ajay]

This is one of the bloody clever coding efforts that always amazes me, and makes me love quake mods all the more. The slowmo mood was the first.

Top stuff

[scar3crow]

Those shots look cool, aside from the milk

How I "brightened" shots myself was Id take them in photoshop, copy the layer, paste it as a new layer, and set the second layer to Screen mode, it just doubles everything, so everything stays respectively the same, but brighter. Not as milky. Im sure there are better ways however.

And now we come to my favorite part of the show, talking to the mod author:

The health tick ups and the healthbar seem very cool... Now what could be even cooler is a blatant ripoff of Diablo2. Im talking blatant hardcore, and its something Ive longed for for many many years. Or maybe just since I got into Diablo2.

Unique monsters. I want to encounter an ogre thats glowing, and when I indicate him with the aiming reticle, above the healthbar you see Grischnack the Putrid, and perhaps on a newline you see "Extra Strong, Multi-Shot" as he takes 2x the damage and fires 3 grenades simultaneously (1 arcing to the left, another to the right).

I dunno, itd be neat with a name generator, and a trait generator... you could make it like... 1 per level, on Hard 2 per level, and on Nightmare 3 to 5 per level... perhaps increment the raw value by +1 depending on the episode... such as... in e1m1 you wouldnt encounter a unique monster, but in e2m1 you may find Zell the Occursed Traitor, a grunt who is Extra Strong, does not go into pain animations, and uses an SNG.


Mmmmmm Diablo2 rippage. I always wanted this in Quake, but you would need an indicator of roughly what you were up against, and I loved the whole bit of naming the uniques... which is only really suitable in something that possesses health bars.

[RenegadeC]

"Now what could be even cooler is a blatant ripoff of Diablo2. Im talking blatant hardcore, and its something Ive longed for for many many years. Or maybe just since I got into Diablo2."

Ever play Prydon Gate? I'm not calling it a blantant rip off since it's not, just it's similar in aspects.

[Sajt]

Are you using the digits, or they just in the folder for fun?

I didn't see the digits in the screenshots...

[Entar]

The slowmo mood was the first.

Slowmo mood? Is that like when you say "Huh. I think I'll act like a three-toed sloth today..."

[Wazat]

Are you using the digits, or they just in the folder for fun?

I didn't see the digits in the screenshots...

Yes, I am using the digits. Those screenshots only show the HP Bar, and a very old version at that.

I should install this into normal Quake and release a demo of me fighting monsters...

And now we come to my favorite part of the show, talking to the mod author:

The health tick ups and the healthbar seem very cool... Now what could be even cooler is a blatant ripoff of Diablo2. Im talking blatant hardcore, and its something Ive longed for for many many years. Or maybe just since I got into Diablo2.

I like it when people talk to me about my mod. It's my favorite part of the show, too.

I noticed this in both Diablo games and in Prydon Gate. Randomly generating special attributes for monsters and naming them accordingly would be cool in Conquest.

Unfortunately, unless I'm willing to go through a whole lot of hell to get it working, I'd really want the ability to print text in mid-air with just the code, like a centerprint that hovers in mid air instead of following the player. If I could get a DP feature like that I could do a whole lot of nifty features I've been wanting to do forever.
Unfortunately, from what I hear from Lord Havoc, that feature is already planned (FrikaC wanted it for Prydon Gate), but won't be available until Client-Side QC gets working and implemented.

However... Right now I'm planning to have monsters randomly have special attributes, different weapons, shields, etc. These attributes will become more powerful as the player progresses through the game. For example, in e1m1 he'll be fighting grunts with light standard shields and some weak lasers, nailguns, etc. By the time he reaches e1m2, grunts will have gained limit shielding and stronger standard shields, and they will occasionally have powerful weapons such as hyperblasters, grenades, and the e-rifle. Some will become mini-bosses in matters of shielding and HP, and offensive power. By this time the player should be prepared for a fight, but he'll really be in for it if he isn't.

Special attributes like moving quickly, rapid fire, extra power, status effects attached to the damage, regeneration (which would show up quite well with the health bar), etc would be cool. Special names for monsters appearing over their heads would be awesome if it were easier to do.

Unique monsters. I want to encounter an ogre thats glowing, and when I indicate him with the aiming reticle, above the healthbar you see Grischnack the Putrid, and perhaps on a newline you see "Extra Strong, Multi-Shot" as he takes 2x the damage and fires 3 grenades simultaneously (1 arcing to the left, another to the right).

Yea, I can imagine that. I could actually have a sprite that says "Extra Strong" and another that says "Multishot" and just post those in a tower above the monster's HP bar. However, the names part would be harder to get working.

My biggest beef with the sprite method is, to make changes, I have to load up photoshop and go through a bunch of work; If it were run by the QC code, I could just make the changes and recompile and be done.

I dunno, itd be neat with a name generator, and a trait generator... you could make it like... 1 per level, on Hard 2 per level, and on Nightmare 3 to 5 per level... perhaps increment the raw value by +1 depending on the episode... such as... in e1m1 you wouldnt encounter a unique monster, but in e2m1 you may find Zell the Occursed Traitor, a grunt who is Extra Strong, does not go into pain animations, and uses an SNG.

Yea, I want the monsters to be harder as you progress through the episodes. Perhaps even as you progress through the levels...

Mmmmmm Diablo2 rippage. I always wanted this in Quake, but you would need an indicator of roughly what you were up against, and I loved the whole bit of naming the uniques... which is only really suitable in something that possesses health bars.

I plan to have lots of new monsters, like the Horror and the various types of knights and deathknights. However, further adding variety by randomly assigning attributes to monsters and naming them would really be awesome. I appreciate the idea!

[Wazat]

This is one of the bloody clever coding efforts that always amazes me, and makes me love quake mods all the more. The slowmo mood was the first.

Top stuff

Thanks, ajay!

BTW, I wonder if FrikaC would be interested in this? Knowing him he's already got something like this working, but it would bring me near-everlasting joy to know I'd helped him out with something I'd created. ^_^

[FrikaC]

I was thinking, Conquest seems a bit odd with Quake monsters of various realms all touting these fancy shields and potentially new weapons. It doesn't seem to follow any kind of theme. The new stuff is obviously high-tech looking and the hud style enhancements (I consider healthbars hud-y) even tend toward a high tech feel. Perhaps you should consider cloaking it in a kind of Borg/Evil Robot sheath as an overall theme. You can keep the standard Quake levels, but have them invaded by cyborgs? I'm sure there's a few mods out there that you could cannibalize for robot models, and if you're going DP-specific I know more than a few Q2 and Q3 ppms and such you could use. Anyway, a thought - it may end up feeling too Quake 2ish, that's a danger one has to avoid.

[Wazat]

You hit it right on the nose, FrikaC. Fiends, Hell-Knights, Horrors and Shamblers really shouldn't have hi-tech shielding. I'd love to do an all-robotics theme, as long as I could get a wide variety of enemies with lots of different behaviors and attacks, requiring the player to use strategy and know what he's dealing with, rather than just running in, guns-a-blazing. Something like 12 different unique models ought to be good, give or take.

I might keep a few of the monsterish enemies, but they won't have shields. Instead, they'll have a few special abilities such as poisoning the player, regeneration, resistance magic, etc; however, most will be physically weaker than robotic targets.

I know Ren's Codename Envenom had a robot, and I could pass off the grunt and enforcer as legitimate holders of technology (and even make a cyborg enforcer). I wonder where else I could grab decent models...

I'm not worried about q2 and q3 support, since I'm mainly focusing on Darkplaces anyway (and a lot of other engines support these model formats too). I'll have to dig through q2's enemy listings to see what I can pull up.

I do want to avoid becoming too q2-ish. I enjoyed the Q2 single player, but there was something about the theme, graphics and sounds that left so much desired...