Development Blah: Comments

[Yoshimitsu]

Hey Karx. I just saw your post about the minimalist HUD text color. I mentioned it before because It seemed like the decision to make the equipped weapons yellow has caused text in other parts of the game that used to be red to turn yellow as well. In particular I noticed the word "guidebot" in messages from him used to look like Guidebot:Finding blue key now displays as Guidebot:Finding blue key. I don't necessarily care too much about the change but I would personally prefer it in the original color.

Speaking just for myself I would also prefer red text in the minimalist HUD. I find that for my eyes the yellow and green are too close to the same color to quickly tell apart whereas red and green are opposite colors (depending on which color mixing system you think about, RGB or RYB). For the same reason (quick legibility) I would also darken the grey letters as well to further differentiate them from the green. I find them easier to tell apart than the yellow but still not as clear as the Rebirth scheme. Maybe we want a new thread for the minimalist HUD? I also have a change to the layout that I might propose but only if you're interested in hearing it.

On the subject of that Level 6 crash I've posted a new finding on sourceforge. I hope it helps.

I don't think I mentioned it specifically but your coop fix is a success. Shadowhyena and I were able to play together (and shoot robots at the same time) with no glitches.

One last thing I'd like to mention. While testing the effect of movies and briefings on the L6 bug I discovered that the instructions for the -nomovies switch in the d2x.ini is backwards. It says in the .ini that a value of 2 will play all movies when it should actually say value 0. I've been wondering all this time why movies weren't playing... that's why (and yes you were right about that being the reason why the robots didn't show up in briefings). The switch works fine, just in reverse.

[karx11erx]

I fixed your yellow color (it was too greenish). The red text is much harder to read, did you notice that? You may have problems distinguishing between the yellow and green tones D2X-XL is using if you have weak color vision. However, what do you suggest with dyschromatopsia? I think I will probably introduce 3 color schemes: Yellow+green, red+green, cyan+green (the latter for people with dyschromatopsia).

For D2, the layout / letter sequence of the minimalist HUD follows the player's individual weapon ordering. D2X-XL doesn't strive to be an exact clone of Rebirth, and I believe that it often offers better solutions than Rebirth does. People just tend to want what they are used to already, don't you think?

Your hint regarding the D1 L5 -> L6 transition bug unfortunately didn't help.

[Yoshimitsu]

It's a pity that transition bug is so mysterious. I'm sure it's next to impossible for you to find the bug if you can't reproduce the glitch. Oh well, in the meantime at least I have a workaround. If I set starting equipment in the menu to include the weapons I have in level 5, then when I die from the reactor I will spawn in level 6 with those weapons, so all I will lose is a few points and missiles. That's not too bad.

The red text is much harder to read, did you notice that? You may have problems distinguishing between the yellow and green tones D2X-XL is using if you have weak color vision. However, what do you suggest with dyschromatopsia? I think I will probably introduce 3 color schemes: Yellow+green, red+green, cyan+green (the latter for people with dyschromatopsia).

I'm not surprised that you find the red text harder to read. To my understanding red is one of the harder colors for humans to see while green is the easiest. As to dyschromatopsia, I unfortunately can't offer much input since I have no experience. My color vision is actually excellent. I can often make out slight variations that most people can't see. Wasn't there another user on this forum who was colorblind though? Maybe we could use his input. For the HUD (at least for myself) I think that high contrast is more important than being able to make out the actual letter. The whole point of the minimalist HUD is fast recognition after all.
I'm pretty sure that at one point Lotharbot was talking about how he is more interested in the position of the lettering than the text itself. I actually feel the same way. I like having the weapons arranged on the HUD as weapons 1-5 and 5-10. I have a harder time quickly understanding my inventory if the list matches my personal autoselect order. I guess you're right about us all wanting what we're used to . By the way, I'm really glad that XL is not a rebirth clone. I like all of the improvements you make very much. My favorite HUD method is still your weapon icons.

As always you know I'm just speaking for myself and thanks for listening.

[karx11erx]

Lothar will never really use D2X-XL.

You can try to disable the exit sequence (turning briefings off should do the trick), and see whether the bug doesn't strike if you do.

[Yoshimitsu]

Lothar will use whatever makes him happy just like each of us .

I tried enabling and disabling movies and briefings yesterday (and that did seem to include the escape sequence). It didn't have any effect on the crashing.

I know that Descent 1 had cutscene (movie) escape sequences and also a different one using the ingame assets. Is there a way to choose between them? I haven't seen the ingame version in a long time and I can't recall how to select it.

[karx11erx]

You need to remove the D1 movies from the movies subfolder (rename or move to a different folder). So you are using the rendered D1 exit sequences? I didn't test that.

Btw, since you prefer your weapon icons in vanilla order, I have added an option to enable and disable weapon icon sorting. See the next program version for it.

[Yoshimitsu]

I just tested the other kind of escape sequence (thanks for the tip) and it didn't help . I temporarily renamed the Descent 1 movies to make it use the ingame rendered escape. The escape played but the crash still happened.

Thanks for the sorting option. It's not so important to me for the weapon icons but in the minimalist HUD it should help a lot. The link to version .112 doesn't seen to be working at the moment but when it's up I'll be very curious to try those different HUD colors too.

[karx11erx]

Just uploading. Make sure to enable expert mode in misc. options to see all hud options.

[Yoshimitsu]

Hah! I enabled expert mode back when you first introduced it and I never turned it off! I am very happy with all of those lovely options you added for the HUD. I decided on Vertical, Red, Narrow, and High with the vanilla ordering (sounds like an ice cream cone). Now there's just one last detail to mention before I'm completely out of feedback. As you have it now when I disable "sort icons by weapon order" my list of icons reads like this:

Primary
Laser
Vulcan
Spreadfire
Plasma
Fusion
Superlaser
Gauss
Helix
Phoenix
Omega

Secondary
Concussion
Homing
Proximity Bomb
Smart
Mega
Flash
Guided
Smart Mine
Mercury
Earthshaker

There are a couple of odd things here.

When you get laser level 5, the laser icon disappears from the list and a new superlaser icon shows up between fusion and gauss. This doesn't happen in the minimalist HUD list where the L stays at the top and just increases to 5 then 6.

For some reason, because the bombs are somewhere in the icons list other than at the bottom, the change bomb key switches between mercury and earthshaker Icons rather than between bomb icons. Meanwhile in the minimalist HUD the bombs are perpetually at the bottom, separated from the missiles by a tiny space. I think that having the bombs always at the bottom is good anyway since they really shouldn't have been secondary weapons in the first place (a problem in Descent's original design).

Even aside from these two wierdnesses though, I think I would prefer the weapons grouped by number like so:

Primary
Laser
Superlaser (Having the lasers in this order could make the laser icon disappearing seem natural Like the HUD does)
Vulcan
Gauss
Spreadfire
Helix
Plasma
Phoenix
Fusion
Omega

Secondary
Concussion
Flash
Homing
Guided
Smart
Mercury
Mega
Earthshaker
Proximity Bomb (hopefully having the bombs at the end will make the select bomb key work with the icons again)
Smart Mine

I bet you're getting a bit fed up with tweaking the HUD behavior by now but I think this will be my last bit of input before I call it perfect.

[Yoshimitsu]

Again I don't have any idea if this will help nail down the D1 L5/L6 bug but I tried dropping all of my weapons except for laser level 1 before blowing up the L5 reactor and escaping. Unfortunately It did no good and the game crashed as per usual. I tried this because, as I said before, letting the reactor blow me up rather than escaping let the game advance to L6 just fine. It made me want to check if carrying over the inventory of my ship was somehow responsible.

During the process I encountered another glitch. The game refused let me drop the vulcan cannon so I wasn't actually able to fully test my idea. I'm going to explore this problem a bit more and I'll report back what I find. Wish me luck.

Edit:

I figured out why I couldn't drop the vulcan. In the last test game I began vulcan was set as starting equipment. It turns out that you can't drop any weapon that Descent thinks is starting equipment. I don't necessarily think this needs to be changed I just thought I should post the information.

Armed with this knowledge I tried dumping my weapons again (this time including vulcan) before escaping L5. It stil crashes.

[karx11erx]

You cannot drop pre-equipped weapons because you will spawn with these onboard every time you die, so you could theoretically spam the level with those, which would be particularly unwelcome in multiplayer games.

[Yoshimitsu]

I see. that makes perfect sense.

[IMarvinTPA]

In my head, I see the current weapon in Green, available weapons in Blue (or maybe Yellow), and useless weapons in Red (No Energy/ammo). In the stuff I'm usually involved in, Red is really bad status, Green is good status, blue is ok status, and yellow is not good status. (Maybe if the current weapon is useless, it should be yellow.)

[karx11erx]

Well, friendly yellow for me means good status. I chose yellow over green because it stands out best on most backgrounds.

I agree on red. Red for me means bad status, so that's exactly the color I would not use for equipped weapons, but rather for unavailable ones (not onboard or empty).

[Yoshimitsu]

It's very interesting for me to see each of your points of view here, especially since I'm coming from a totally different standpoint. To me the most important aspect is high contrast in the colors between the 3 possible states (Selected, Available, Unavailable).

I like the way you have made the unavailable weapons grey because it makes them a bit more invisible against most of the ingame scenery thus de-emphasizing them as options in combat.

As for selected/available, I think that complimentary colors are good because they provide maximum contrast so the color schemes possible are Red/Green, Yellow/Purple, and Blue/Orange. Obviously I settled on Red/Green because both of those colors are common in Descent displays such as the weapon name and ammo count in the cockpit view (which I use most often).

Now that I think about in more detail though and I've seen each of your ideas, I wonder if you both might be right. It could be even better for the selected weapon to be green and available weapons red. I still think that unavailable is good being grey. BTW do the vulcan and gauss turn grey when you run out of ammo? I haven't tested it yet to see for myself.