ascottk on 8/7/2005 at 02:13
Here's an idea but I don't know if it'll fly. Instead of health shield indicators why not distort vision when your health gets to a certain point? Or alter Garrett's movements so he stumbles a little? The more he's injured the more you get a reddish tint in your view or when Garrett falls or gets hit you get a slight flash. I wish I could experiment but I won't be around a T3Ed installation for a couple of weeks.
ZylonBane on 8/7/2005 at 02:39
Quote Posted by ascottk
Here's an idea but I don't know if it'll fly. Instead of health shield indicators why not distort vision when your health gets to a certain point?
Because it would be goddamn annoying. Any more questions?
ascottk on 8/7/2005 at 02:53
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Because it would be goddamn annoying. Any more questions?
Yeah, why so harsh? Girlfriend dumped you & all you have is your right hand?
Anyway the annoying-ness of this would force the player to be more thiefy. I certainly wouldn't want to get that low on health. That's why I avoided alcoholic beverages in Deus Ex even if it gave more health.
Crispy on 8/7/2005 at 03:29
But the alcoholic effect in (the original) Deus Ex was so fun! I remember the first time I used one of those tiny drug phial things... WOAH! Was staggering around for about 10 minutes. Hilarious. :cheeky:
It sounds like a cool gimmick, but I don't know whether it would have that much value gameplay-wise.
In any case, if you want to try it out, check out the stim-related and health-related scripting conditions under Objects. Attach a script with one of those conditions and a visual distortion action to Garrett and mess around with settings. Should work fine.
Renzatic on 8/7/2005 at 03:45
Zylonbane, angry though he is, does have a point.
If you're gonna do something like that it'll have to be noticable, but subtle enough so that it doesn't get in the way of gameplay.
Komag on 8/7/2005 at 04:33
Maybe you could paint the skin with more tears and blood and stuff, and just look down to see how your body's doing.
But then when you get healed, would your outfit stitch up too?
Or we could replace the health shields with a series of Garrett faces in varying degrees of health, like the Doom face :D :) :( :p :eww:
Fingernail on 8/7/2005 at 07:53
Quote Posted by ascottk
Yeah, why so harsh? Girlfriend dumped you & all you have is your right hand?
BURN
Games do this a lot now, from D3's blur when you get melee attacked to the blur of confusion when you get shot in Battlefield 2, for instance.
ZylonBane on 8/7/2005 at 15:00
Quote Posted by ascottk
Yeah, why so harsh?
Because I'm describing exactly how annoying such an effect would be in-game.
I've got nothing against screen effects to indicate that the player is taking damage. These have been around pretty much forever, and are highly useful. But screen effects to indicate health are a bad idea for two big reasons-- first, they're horribly imprecise, and second, they make it harder to play.
Introducing player impairment with damage seem like an intuitively obvious idea, but in practice it forces "downward spiral" syndrome. E.G.-- you get damaged, which degrades your movement speed, which causes you to take even more damage, which slows you down even more, and you get killed because your ability to play effectively has been eroded away. Same thing with vision effects. If I'm down to one point of health, the LAST thing I need is a blurry, shaky screen that barely lets me see what I'm doing. May as well just eat a sword at that point and get things over with.
OrbWeaver on 8/7/2005 at 15:08
The problem is that the health bar system is inherently unrealistic - in real life you would be effectively incapacitated long before your "health bar" reached anywhere near the bottom.
Attempts to patch this problem by adding blur or imprecision into the gameplay controls would not make the game more immersive, just annoying. If ultra-realism is the goal it would better simply to arrange for the player to die after a single bow or sword shot.
Ziemanskye on 8/7/2005 at 15:34
For my two cents:
Sod realism. Gameplay is more important.
I remember a little Halflife mod which put a bloodhaze over your vision if you were shot in the upper body (was supposed to be for low damage headshots, but the collision was a little off), which just meant you couldn't see who was shooting you so well, and you died.
Somewhere around here there's a thread about a "deus ex/system shock inspired game" that the dude wants to have a realistic ballistics and damage system, but can you conceive how annoying it would be to die in pretty much every fire fight you got into because you went into shock, or because you suffocated on blood in your lungs? His idea is way more extreme than your suggestion, but the only way that your kind of health representation tends to have any hope in hell of working out is if you have constant regen, which brings a rather different set of 'unrealism' arguments to the table.
