Visual damage/armour upgrades

777

<div class="IPBDescription">Change the Hud according to the lvl of attack and defense upgrades</div>Hey,

My sugestion is merely a visual improvement, and it would be a 2 phased implementation:

1st Phase: Hud changes based on the damage/armour upgrades you have. Eg: lvl 2 melee attack would put more teeth in your skullk hud, looking more ferocious.

2nd Phase: Model changes: the actual model would change acording to the weapon/armour upgrades.

I know its not one of those priority improvements, but i think it would still be really nice and not that hard to implement.

What do you think?

Sewlek

it's a good idea, and something to consider. The hud should not be filled with tons of icons / numbers, but upgrades should still be visible. But instead of changing whole models (which will be really time consuming) you could change some effects or overlay textures.

For example: Marine HUD armor upgrade: display the armor in blocks. 1 Block means 0 upgrades, 4 blocks means 3 armor upgrades (now the armor display has always the same length)

Marine Damage Upgrade: simply change the muzzle flash / effect.

Aliens: overlay some textures on the hud models, or something less time consuming to create: armor upgrades cover the health ball with a texture similar to the visual armor you see on the alien models, damage upgrades alters the energy / ability ball (adds some "claws")

Nasdero

sounds nice! i love those things you "feel" tougher if you can see your upgrades and it makes it easier to get in the game if you can see them and not only oh now the little armor number is 90.

an idea would be:

Aliens:

Armor:
Make the skin of them a bit darker every upgrade or add 2-3 bone plates (modeled) with an upgrade

Attack:
skulk more teeth
gorge glowing belly in green? or bigger spit balls/biles?
lerk bigger spikes / darker clouds ?
fade longer "swords" ;-) or more blood on them

Marines:

Armor:
as well some more plates or make the plates a bit bigger chunky.
if only texture upgrade is possible than i would suggest some color change to make it clear, maybe more shiny ^^

damage:
muzzfle flashes sounds nice but maybe some brighter or bigger tracers for the gunfire, the best
but aswell most workintese would be changing the moddel slightly to look more aggresice maybe a sharkface to the flamer or so
or adios written on the shotgun ^^ ala aliens motion picture ^^

would look awesome ^^

<img src="http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u307/Matsucorp/M56%20Smart%20gun/DSC00877.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" /> love this gun

<img src="http://flamesoffeenix.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/flamethrower.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />

Sewlek

changes to models sound cool, but you have to keep in mind that it requires a lot of time. That's for sure something, if it would be done, that comes in the polishing phase of the game. Simple changes of a few textures (HUD) and color changes are something else and done pretty fast

Kalabalana

Deja vu!

hahaha, all jokes aside, yeah I've already suggested this asking for changes to v_models for upgrades, and for them to be listed on the scoresheet.


Glad to see people are starting to slowly see things my way. ;P

l3lessed

I personally would like to see slight model changes. Something like Starcraft 2 so it is very easy to know what threat you're facing and adapt accordingly. I agree this is a polishing thing, but I think it is an important aspect of game play that needs to be added.

BarerRudeROC

+1
I love when games do subtle things like this.

Sewlek

I cannot disagree on that. It would be awesome, but I made my point before :) We will no see it anytime soon, I'm pretty sure

Nasdero

so when everyone is liking this idea, what about 2 solutions?


Option 1:
Any of the devs tells us what he thinks about it and how possible it is to get something like this into the 1.0

Option 2:
The community does this and hands it over to the devs but i dont know how capable we are in terms of modelling and texturing (well i can max maya stuff but i mean for this game) with the ingame models? maybe the devs can help on this one to show the people how to modify a model so they get it done (can maybe even choose from a lot of applications) and they dont even need to do much work for this! i would love to play around adding weapons 1,2,3 addons to the LMG and SG or model a extra armor for a skulk


So i Push this and hope cory or someone is reading this !!

Steinhauer

I still think changing models/texture/weapon effects to reflect team upgrades gives too much information to the opposing team. It's already somewhat of an upgrade race to begin with, now one team is going to research an upgrade as soon as they see the other team wielding it and drop whatever they were already doing. Let the marines find out aliens have upgraded their melee by underestimating them and getting eaten in two skulk bites. It adds tension and surprise to the game. An unobservant marine won't even notice the difference and not report the information to his commander, which prolongs the alien advantage and makes the upgrade level more relevant. This is just a hypothetical one-sided situation though, it could go either way.

HUD upgrades I can get behind, whether they're discreet or not. I don't mind big, informative HUDs as long as I can see the game, it adds feel to the game. But Schimmel's HUD idea is also cool because it gives a slight change to the visual style of the HUD, which gives more of a different feel to the game, hopefully one that makes you feel more powerful or more protected (based on melee/weapons or armor).

I don't mind slightly different models (or for aliens, maybe model sets) to choose from, as long as the overall visual style remains the same and the models aren't tied to a gameplay element that is presently more mysterious.