[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Neil Brown]

--- Phillip Lenhardt <philen at monkey.org> wrote:

> Have you looked at how the ps2 game "Oni" handles displaying damage?
> To summarize: it uses colored flashes.

Thanks for the reminder - I just went and fired up the Oni demo to
take a look.  To sum up, Oni uses a colored 2D sunburst-type effect
radiating outward from the hit location to depict hits, blocks, and
general amount of damage. The sunbursts are Green-Yellow-Red for
increasing amount of damage, and blue when you block an attack.

While this makes for a nice, easy to understand representation, I'm
not sure that it scales well enough to be used in a MMORPG.  Damage
changes pretty radically over the life of your character, and you need
something that scales well and can also be interpreted by the other
players in the game.  I think you could attempt it one of two ways (
I'll just pull numbers out of a hat for this example ):

  1) Damage color is constant : 1-20 is green, 21-60 is yellow, 61-150
  is red ( just to pull numbers out of the air ).  This would mean
  that you could always tell what range of damage someone was doing,
  but chances are you would spend most of your character's career
  doing damage in just one range except for the places where your
  average damage hovered around one of the transition points. From a
  spectator's point of view, everyone sees the same color ranges and
  can immediately know roughly how much damage is being done, which
  has its benefits.

  2) Damage color is relative to character: The color you see is
  divided evenly across your character's range of possible damage.
  You score a wimpy hit, it's green.  You pulverize someone, it's red.
  This is nice because as your level increases, the colors will still
  be changing and meaningful.  From a spectator standpoint, however,
  you can't really show him the color that the other player sees
  because their damage ranges might be significantly different.  You
  could show 'translated' colors, ie taking the damage number and
  converting it into the context of the spectator's damage range, so
  someone who is many levels higher than myself might always appear to
  hit for "red" damage to me, even though to him the damage could
  appear to be all over his range.  I don't know if you could come up
  with enough easily-distinguishable colors to make this effective
  though.  You might end up with the same border problems that you
  have with consider-type commands - "The orc cons red, but HOW red?"

What I'm striving for, in the end, is to keep the player's eyes on the
graphics rather than on the text window ( Maybe it's just me, but when
playing EQ, I find myself scrutinizing the text window during a fight
rather than looking at the graphics ).  I don't want players to have
to take their eyes off the action to read the "You smashed for xx
damage" message.  I'd like to present it to them somehow on the
graphics display, not necessarily without using numbers - just not
using a long text message.

If we go the non-numerical approach, then the colors/symbols/whatever
must have enough granularity to allow people to make decisions about
how they're actually doing in a fight.  Going back to the EQ example,
after you play a character for awhile, you start to get a feel, based
on roughly how much damage an opponent does per-hit, whether or not
you stand a chance at surviving a particular fight.  Without having
the actual numbers there, it becomes quite difficult to tell if I'm
doing poorly or if I'm doing REALLY poorly.  I don't want to have to
look at my health bar every time I get hit for "red damage" to try to
figure out if I'm going to need a new helmet and a bunch of plastic
surgery or if I'm going to need a six-foot hole and a tombstone.

With that in mind, I'm thinking some sort of numerical damage
representation during combat will make it into the game.  With that
comes a numerical representation of hit points since they will simply
be calculated anyways if we don't include them.  Which is not to say
that there won't be supporting graphics to go along with them, just
that the numbers themselves will most likely be present in one form or
another.

-o-
Neil
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