Okay, my responses to the oringinal copy.

HUD bottom needs to become transparent, like a hologram. Also, all objects on the HUD in general need to be transparent for combat situations, you dont want to lose an enemy behind your instrurments.

May I also add that the EV tie in is rather interesting.

*bump because it came up again*

holy smokes... thats a lot of reading... and i didnt read it all and this may be a repeat... soo....

I think we should be able to skin our own huds... i think the venetta team should consider making diffrent color huds at least... i'm tired of blue...

an in the fasion of custom...
this maybe for another post...
ship badges and color...
we shoud be able to select/customize the color scheme of our ships...
and be forced to use a Nation Badge somewhere on the ship.
this would give a better roleplaying feel... all the guilds like INM or VC or SAW could ask that they allways use this/that color scheme... but you would still need an NT/Itani/Seco badge on the hull... (much like a BMW/Toyota symbol on cars, maybe not that tiny but that idea)... or i guess the radar blips could change itani blue, seco red, NT gold, bots Green, Team White...


-MorbidlyWrong[VC]

MW has an idea with the radar fix. It would allow coaltion forces in combat to avoid Friendly Fire incidents such as the infamous Rydell Incident.

Also, a HUD graphics skin change would be entertaining but as of now is no where near the top of the Development list.

I also think perhaps HUDs should be relevant to National Allegiance (and later, perhaps Guild Allegiance) like in EV Nova where the Aurorans viewed red HUDS, the Polaris Bio-HUDs, and Federation Armored HUDS, etc etc

Ship Badges...I dont know about displaying them on a craft. Perhaps as a part of the tags for Faction System, like

*[SDF] Black 1

where the * is the SDF Emblem

i dont think a badge on a ship would do to well. but perhaps something in the charinfo would be nice.

A) Placing a faction emblem on the ship itself would be a killer not only to the Devs for writing a program to place it, and keep it there, but also kill the graphics and speed of the lower end users (56k modems and the like)

B) There's no real point to flying the emblem on the craft itself. I like the idea of having it as part of a tag after the Faction System is introduced but not on the hull of the craft itself.

PS: Im a DSL guy myself, trust me I dont run a 56k

Pyro, I doubt placing a faction decal on a ship would make your framerates crawl. Heck, some of the earliest games allowed the usage of such decals with little or no hit on performance. Take Rainbow Six's Rogue Spear for example. In any case it doesn't even have to be custom. It can simply be one of six decals that could be used to represent what faction you have the best standing with or whatever. I think it's a great idea.

Oh... and I was doing a little google image searching the other day and I bumped into a cool looking HUD design that could be used for inspiration to make Vendetta's better. It preserves valuable space, yet it offers a lot of information. Check it out:

http://www.nexusthegame.com/imgupload/img_large156.jpg

Those letters are tiny, altough if you could "zoom in" into parts of the HUD without too much effort it could be kind of neat.

Pixel fonts, Small-but-recognizable icons, and alpha channels. Any center-view indicators (vector bars?) should be thin or transparent enough to be unobtrusive. And we should have a lot of customizable control over the targeting reticle (user-editable PNG file, perhaps?)

A recurring theme in all those designs is that the HUD elements are so damn big... Take a look at the HUD for Freespace 2: http://www.nukewinter.com/reviews/pc/freespace2/freespace2-large1.jpg (this one doesn't show all elements that can be shown, a couple more fit on the screen nicely). It's small, it's unobstrusive, it contains all the info you need to know.

I'm not saying "shamelessly copy the FS2 HUD", I just posted this screenshot to demonstrate that a HUD doesn't need to occupy a shitload of screen real estate in order to be functional and easily readable. The fonts may be a little hard to read, but remember it's a jpeg which blurs stuff like text; beats me why the hell game reviewers still don't put up their screenshots in .png by default.

I think a long while back the devs said something about intently removing HUD scaling. Meaning on higher screen resolutions you won't gain any advantage in getting that HUD outta the way, I suppose to make it equal for everyone. That probably would've been the quickest way to make the HUD less obtrusive. But I guess you could then argue that since every screen resolution sees the HUD the same way, they could also afford to make some of those elements smaller and readible than what they currently are now. And it looks like a dev or two have wanted to see some of these changes as well, but unfortunately it's not a priority right now.

You need PNGs because they are lossless (JPEGS often look crappy) and support transparency (which some really new JPEGS might).

PNGs don't compress as well as JPEGS, and aren't as widely supported in the windows world. (As a opposed to OSX and Linux worlds)

Actually, you need JNGs. They're much better than pngs. Really!

I'm bumping this thread to (possibly) go along with LeberMac's station interface redesign thread, although most of these links are dead, the ideas are still good!