Currently when the HUD health display goes red your median life expectancy is .2 seconds or less.

If you change the condition to something sensible like no armor || health less than half it would serve it's function of discretely alerting the player of their condition while there is still time left to act.

Yes, you get a feel of how much damage you can take before you snuff it, but this subtle feeling fails in noisy environments when shotgun and pain sounds get preempted and fail to play.

Seconded. I actually like this idea. Make it real simple though: Alien HUD displays your life in red when your HP drops below 60%.

Here's how your remaining life expectancy breaks down using the 60% rule. It seems to work pretty well unless you have Carapace, in which case the threshold could maybe drop a bit for higher lifeforms.

Is this total hp(as in counting armor points as hp), Cxwf?

Right. I should have stated that explicitly, its just how I always think of alien HP as being health + armor. Armor is correctly counted as 2 points each there, but I didn't bother to calculate if its different with Hive 3 armor.

like the idea

likewise

Oh, I thought this thread would actually address the disgustingly invisible display of your HUD while in brightly lit places/wih alien flashlight on. Ever been a fade, go into marine start on ns_hera with the flashlight on and have to find out your HP the hard way? (I wonder what my HP is... oh nm, its ZERO NOW).
Maybe someone could start a thread abou that, or maybe the devs could just fix it since I remember this problem being around ever since alien flashlight was put in.

*tests*

I have no idea what your talking about. Alien HP doesnt get much harder to see in a bright room, and alien flashlight doesn't change it at all. It gets hard to see when your cloaked though, since the draw color for HP and for cloaking is about the same.

HOWEVER--rather than arguing about that, we can agree on something. If your health IS hard to see in a bright room, that will only be true if your HP is drawn in the normal white color. Once the game draws your HP in red because you are wounded, it will be easy to see. So this will actually solve your problem too!

Testing shows your HP is currently drawn in Red once you are below 25% HP--although since your armor is nearly always gone by then, that usually means your already on deaths door. 60% HP would be a much better threshold.

*does better test*
Here's what happens against a bright surface:

And since the screenshot is rendered without the NS gamma ramp, when I actually took it the floor and the HUD text was exactly the same color, namely a near shade of white.

HP, what HP? all I see is Fade arm:

It's not quite that bad for me, but an opaque option would be nice.

Hm. I've never even noticed that the hud could be that bad. I guess I use the sounds of bullets hitting to figure out the dmg or something. I think the hud is pretty much fully customizable so it might be possible to have numbers going from 9 to 0 and from green to red for example. With a little practice you could tell the fade hp by taking look at the colour of the first number in your hp. Or then just modify it to some other colour that is clearly visible in ns enviroment.

I don't have a problem with seeing my hp.

My knee isnt broken, so I dont see how yours can be.

its not that hard to see...

Yes, I'm sure you're all having a fantastic time making fun of Renegade's ability to distunguish between shades of white, but remember the actual IDEA of this thread is to draw your health in RED below 60%. (Or some other number could work too). Does any one have any comments that are actually on topic?

I think you've misjudged the replies in this thread, they are corroborating what I've stated (and implicatively the OP's suggestion).
Ontopic: 60% is too high (especially if this includes armour), at that value, red would become the new orange, and then you'd just become acclimitazed to seeing red all the time. I'm thinking no more than 40%.

actually i was going to say the same thing renegade just did

60 is a bit high and your health will always be red-- i was thinking like 33% or so

Maybe 67-100% green
34-66% yellow
0-33% red

I don't think any specific amounts are going to do good since its more situational awarness than any exact hp when you're supposed to flee. Just make the colours give a bit extra feedback and it should be good as it gets with numbers. And maybe use the same colour indication for armor also.

The algorithm that decides whether to draw your health in "friendly white" or "damaged red" doesn't look at armor at all. It only looks at health.

If you'll check back to the top of the thread, in the 2nd post I ran the math for every lifeform with and without carapace, and at 60% remaining HP, most lifeforms have only about 30% or 40% total remaining life since armor is already gone. The skulk has a higher remaining percentage than most, but since his total health is so low to begin with that still represents only about 1/2 of a second in enemy fire.

The current setting is to display in red at 25% or below, and honestly, when the topic was first posted I had to go back and doublecheck to see if it EVER showed in red, because at 25% you tend to live about another 1/4 to 1/2 a second regardless of what lifeform you are. Remember the last 50% of your health disappears THREE TIMES as fast as the first 50% does, once you run out of armor. 25% HP just shows up way too late to be useful information.

I completely agree

maybe but after youre below 100 hp you dont look at what color the hp meter shows you just get the hell out of the room. when i read your post i started thinking about something like a color for the first digit that shows what 100 youre on in your hp.

like

300
200
199

and all red if its under 100 (like now i think?). numbers and colors can be changed obviously. of course you could have all the digits that color, not just the first, but maybe this thing has its upsides... maybe

oh yeah and i dont mean this as a idea&suggestion for the game so much, just that someone with some knowhow could do a custom sprite like this (unless it needs some coding? i dunno)

If sprites are even used for colors(iirc you just have a sprite sheet with all the numbers in some neutral color, and coding changes the actually displayed color), you couldn't set what % it changes at.

So this is still a really good idea, and needs bumping.

I am very short sighted and colour blind and have problem seeing the HUD too, I _can_ read it, but it takes a bit of effort. If a variable was implemented, such as "cl_customhudcolor" or "cl_hudtransparency" it would be pretty nice. I would use "255 255 255" for white so it pretty much works like the "con_color" var, or "0" (for transparency) to have the hud completely opaque.

So. Red HP indicator at 50 or 60% instead of 25%. Still a good idea?

My guess is that the devs don't really look at this forum anymore.

I suppose we could argue about the ideal % setting to keep the thread alive.

we do still read it, and this is a great idea. We aren't focusing on client side changes right now, and wont be until a 3.3 project is started.

i'm all for this idea too, or at least customisable hud colour. i find the marine one much much easier to read currently than the aliens, especially when you're in a hive area (where defending can obviously be important)

I'd love to see a nice, thick, contrasting outline for the hud numbers. Make em easy to read against any background.

Text is dumb in an FPS. This idea, while fine for treating a symptom of a transparant HUD that's affected by bright and dark backgrounds, doesn't solve the problem. A total health bar (health+armo+any bonuses) would and also withstands the internationalization test.

Seeing a bar go down by half is instananious to recognize and requires no math interpritation when 300/150 drops to 280/20 and fails to represent I've lost half total health even though I still have 280 of 300 HP (and I still have to account for how many hives there are as well).

we had this lovely cool blue bar for resources, and it got scrapped. (aw)
So why not use that bar for health then