The glow effect on the font makes it blend in with bright parts of the background like the sky or HDR enhanced snow.
I finally came up with a (hopefully) effective solution, thanks to f1r3w4rr10r's suggestion: Not only do the blurred black boxes make the HUD easier to see in all kinds of environments, they are also consistent with those found in my main menu and loading screen concepts.
Personally i think that's just about the best of both worlds right there. As for the content of the HUD I've always felt that the minimap is designed as "just part of the HUD" a little too much. It would be way better served standing out a lot more, being more detached from the other, less important HUD information. I don't know how exactly that would be achieved, but maybe something like anchoring the minimap to the side instead of just having it free floating like the rest of the HUD? Although having the minimap in color contrasting with the rest of the HUD in black and white probably brings it to prominence quite a lot already.
Time to go full scale: I have also slightly revised the main menu and loading screen: http://i.minus.com/ibjqCfS6fH4Nte.png http://i.minus.com/iz18hXhPkxv8U.png As for the minimap, I'll look for a way to have it display all the necessary information while not straying to far from the digital styling.
That HUD looks awesome. My only concern is that the minimap might be a bit harder to make out in grayscale, but if all the important things (buildings, vehicles, ref points, and flags) are in color then it should be fine. I would use this HUD.
These look really nice, I can tell you put a lot of hard-work and effort into these. Not many people here have the knowledge to contribute but it's the simple things like this can keep this us on a straight forward path. I like the hud but I don't recommend the chat box have any fading text and I think the player names need to be colored so we know who is communicating.
Oh God. Oh dear God. You're not going to like this, but I absolutely can't stand that stuff. Edge blur and glows burn my eyes out and give me the worst headaches. It feels like I'm not wearing my glasses and I can't put any of the stuff into focus.
looks perfect now but i still think the minimap needs to be bigger its already a mess when there is a lot of players and now its even smaller
Hmm...there's probably too much blur...I'm going to try out some drastic changes to make the HUD easier on the eyes. And yes, I will make the minimap bigger. The current one is no more than a placeholder.
you are supposed to focus on whats inbetween the hud, not its corners :D also i though its unimportant what you guys think since each of us could have a different one in theory?
Two things I don't like with the current version: Remove the legend from the mini map and put specific symbols on the map. Having to first look at the map and then look for the symbol in a legend just takes additional time and will cramp up the hud quite a lot once there are some more entries. The second is to remove the strong fade on the chat, or at least reverse it, so that the most recent message is always visible. Since we can pretty much agree on the visual side by now, I'd like to see some designs for the missing elements of the UI from you. (Voice chat icons, team and class selection, vehicle customization, research) I'd especially like to somehow get rid of the research UI in it's current state. A good idea would probably be a laid out tree, where each node is visible from the start and you can scroll in your view port. Concerning candles' issues with the visual style of it all: I could imagine an alternative of stylized UI symbols of certain color, surrounded by a black outline. A good example for this kind of HUD would be X³: Reunion and it's successors.
the top one IS the most recent message. its inverted in hl2 ... its not sigh i hate how they removed cockpits from x3. also what was a discoverer? argon m5? either paranid or teladi (x2 vs x3?) have way faster scouts. and how in the world did you manage to keep track and not name each ship individually? thats masochist :eek:
Read again, it's not. But that is what I first thought too. And in doing so, you have instantly proven my point. ;P Yes, I hated that too. But there are mods for bringing them back. Yes, the Discoverer is the Argon M5 Scout. And I didn't manage to keep track of it, since those are not my screenshots.
it is, i just started empires to prove it to myself since i wasnt so sure after i typed it ignore, im stupid
Darn it, I wasn't in my right mind when I made the chat window. I was supposed to fade out the least recent messages. By the way, I have relocated some UI elements and made some of them a bit bigger. I have also reduced the blur and make the text sharper and brighter: (was too lazy to colorize the minimap and remake the chat window. tehe) Also, I'm in the process of creating concepts for other elements of the GUI. As for the Research window, I plan to have the tree laid out so that all phases and items of the Research process is visible from the start.
is it possible to make the gui flat and project it on a curved surface instead of skewing the gui elements individually? i just noticed because the alignments are off ... if not you could use it as texture in a 3d suite and render it out again. it could even preserve alpha ...
I could merge all the layers into one and warp them at the same time, but I was afraid I would lose some of the layer effects. Nevertheless, I have to figure out how we would achieve the "curve" effect when making the actual HUD and GUI in HTML first (and play A LOT of Empires). That would help a lot in creating concepts.
if you can render to a texture you can apply it to a mesh with an unlit/fullbright shader - but only god (and candles) knows how complicated that would be ...
theres nothing you could do about that - its what the game would do, if its even possible. youd just layout the gui flat in photoshop and html and then game projects it onto a surface, thats what i meant ... also forget about that 3d suite thing, a gui is dynamic, it wouldnt help - you could only do that for static background images leaving the issue of non-3d text and bars ...
