I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of ns_ maps, I prefer co_. With that in mind I've had this one issue, amongst many others, that I've had for for years now.



Text overlapping huds

Now, one of the great things about the NS community here on the forums (I lurk), is that people have all kinds of tips and ways to help low end computer users like myself play NS fairly decently. The chief things cited for people to do are lower resolution, and lower detail of the game.

This clashes with CO_ maps.

I've asked the AMX mod guys for help and basically they say it's not possible to move the Armory Status/CC Status hud text without needing special plugins for every server I plan to play on and that's more of a NS problem itself since the game isn't really meant for low resolution. Ok I can get that. But at the same time that kinda shocked me since the two chief ways to gain frames is as mentioned, lower your resolution and lower the detail.

Now I can play in 800x600 but then in a good 10v10 or better CO_ server I'd be getting single digit frame rates.

I know the Game Time text can be made smaller with small fonts. I've already got a small font package installed for my NS, and it's fine for every other font in the game, but the text still overlaps my Health/Armor hud. I can go even smaller on the NS font size but then all text in the game is too small to read, so you go from an unreadable Health/Armor hud to a readable Health/Armor hud but everything else too tiny to read.

Please, between the NS guys and the AMX guys, there has to be a way. I'm not asking for some magical tweak to gain me a hundred frames or super snazzy high poly things, I just want these two sets of text, moved slightly above the huds they respectively overlap. That's a small request I'd say. Think of it as a Christmas gift ;(

I know this is probably better served in the Tech Support forum but no one ever answers there, and Search shows up nothing related to this really (and anything it might find is often old back from 2002-4 since the site was basically gone the majority of 2005/6).

Thank you for your time

To clarify a bit; I said the Amory/CC Text is plugin related and the plugin author would have to update to accommodate for the low res (either allowing users to hide/move the text) and the servers would need to update the plugin. The text that is a complete NS issue is the game-time & "defending" or "attacking" text (lower left corner).

I'll have a look at this later. All of the text positions should scale to suit the screen resolution. We can't help you with the Armoury/CC/Hive health display plugin though.

Ok how about moving the Health/Armor and Ammo huds to the top of the screen? That frees up all the real estate on the bottom for the huds I can't control really and keeps the others from being overlapped.

That option won't be investigated. The HUD will not be radically changed to support the small minority of players who play at lower than 800x600.

lole asy fix, resize the sprites to be smaller and lower.

If you're talking about the Health/Armor and Ammo huds, I don't think that'll work. By default the huds are already this semi transparent color ingame, that itself can be difficult to read depending upon map at the time. Making it smaller just makes it harder to read, it'll be out of the way if moved yes, no over lapping but that's just exchanging one way of not being able to read a hud with another way.

Yeah, slayer - take a look at his screenshot. The game time text is in the exact same place as the health and armor text. Making the heath/armor sprite smaller might help a bit, but it'll still overlap some.

puzl - It's really cool that you're responding to this and attempting to fix a bug that affects only a very small minority of players.


Maverick - you're already using my low poly packs, right? :-)

I've got some stuff installed, ambient sound removal, tweaked cfg, etc I was gonna look for low poly stuff but nsarmslab doesn't have their files up anymore.

I don't say this a lot - but seriously dude buy a new computer.

The guy insinuated to me in a PM that he doesn't have any money for paypal for constellation membership, which I also assume means he doesn't have a credit card, which means he doesn't have enough money for even an upgrade to his computer.

Plus, (I'm not saying this applies to Maverickk), I remember what it's like to be 14 with no job, using your parents computer which they won't upgrade, and doing everything you can to play the games you want. Sometimes upgrading just isn't an option.

Isn't Half-Life ESRB rated like 15+ ? No comment...

I can understand being frustrated about the overlapping sprites, But honestly Im sure the development team has enough on their plate already that overhauling the HUD to accomadate a resolution that most monitors dont even support anymore is really out of the question. Id suggest trying to save about a hundred bucks and buying a year or two old ATI or NVidia card. If youre having trouble running half life 1 at 800x600 your video card must be ancient, so really you could probably just spend $40 on an old Geforce3 based card and it'll run HL1 fine.

As much as I respect you, Brig, that's a horribly shortsighted statement.

1) It's a quick fix - check to see if the user resolution is 640x480, and offset the text if they are.

2) Almost every monitor supports 640x480. It's part of the VGA standard.

3) What if he's running on a laptop without a 3D video card? How can he upgrade?

4) NS generally runs at about half the framerate (or less) of Half-Life, so try to not to get your games mixed up. I can run HL just fine on my 2.0GHz Celeron laptop with Intel Extreme Graphics. It's not worth the hassle to get NS running acceptably on it.

well he should really offer more info on his computer while asking something like this..

Oh and you need to sort out your Question 4 Snappy, it seems to contradict itself..
(Ns runs at half the Frame rate of HL. So why should HL run on your laptop and not NS)

I thought my point was fairly clear.

Both HL and NS _run_ on my laptop. NS is much more demanding than HL is, so I get worse framerates in NS than HL. I get acceptable framerates in HL, but unacceptable framerates in NS. My point is that NS and HL are not interchangeable. Just because someone can be happy with the performance of HL on their computer does not mean they'll be happy with the the performance of NS.

I'm just trying to give some cheap solutions to the problem. Since its almost certain that there will be no official fix for the problem. He can either wait for someone to fix the problem, which is also unlikely to happen, or do a cheap upgrade to get his PC up to NS spec. NS ran fine on my old computer, and that was a Pentium 1.53GHz with a first generation Geforce 3 card in it.

Edit: and it had 768mB of old non-DDR RAM.

That, our he can go to www.nsarmslab.com and download the low poly count models some one made. I never understood why some one would take the time making them, but I think I understand now.

The only models that you can't get low poly there are the alien life forms, but they do have low poly for all the structures and marines.

I don't want to flame you, but please read the thread.

Lemme clear the air some, since Snappy has done some to help me out and all.

Yes, I am your typical poor slash low budget gamer. Due to family reasons, I've not been able to locate a job after college, so I've got some time on my hands for gaming. Obviously if worst comes to worst, any old average joe can get a job flipping burgers to eventually build a new pc. Call me stupid but I didn't pay a ton of money for an education only to end up working at a burger joint.

Now as for NS, here are my basic system specs;

600 Mhz CPU
512 MB SD Ram
GeForce 4 MX 4400 (PCI)
ESS Allegro Onboard Sound
Windows XP Pro SP2

I added the ram and video card, both were budget items I got for $20 or $30 over the last couple years. While my machine doesn't run killer titles of today, it can run HL pretty fine, hell I've even got a playable framerate in Half Life 2.

Now I'd like to point out, I'm not asking for some killer tweaks by the devs in my original post. As I mention above here, I get enough frames to play NS. It's simply the fact I have to use a lower resolution to obtain this framerate, and the fact that the huds are pretty stationary on the client side makes it kind of difficult to see information. A good example is, in CO_ maps (my preferred choice) sometimes seeing Marine ammo is very difficult. You'd be amazed how easy it is to mistake the number 6 for the number 8 when half of the number is covered up by an overlapping hud (speaking of shotgun ammo as the example).

Framerate wise, thanks to some of the low poly packs, some of the config.cfg tweaks to really bring the details down and such, I can easily maintain 15-25 FPS in a 24+ person server, even more frames in the server isn't as crowded. For some they might baulk at that but to me? That's totally playable. Sure it hampers gameplay, low frame rates always will hamper gameplay in a first person shooter. But it works.

Basically NS is the only game I go for. I've got HL obviously installed as well as CS1.6 and TFC. Neither CS or TFC or even regular old HL hold up to the gameplay of NS. If I could, I'd donate to Constellation not for the neat little icon ingame but cause I've followed the game over the years and love it. Never was good enough for competitive play, hated to see the site go down for almost a year+ but it's still the best mod for HL, good enough to be it's own standalone game imho.

And as I've said before the game can be run in a higher resolution, if I wish to greatly diminish my frame rate. That 25 frames I was getting in a 26 person server suddenly goes down to 10 or 12 per second. Probably even less for all those custom maps most servers are running (for some reason the regular set of maps that come with NS run smoother than player made maps). Plus to be honest, I'm very used to 640x480 resolution in gaming. There are obvious benefits to a larger resolution, the wider field of view, the glaringly obvious more hud room, but if it's possible to use a lower resolution and only lose a small dosage of viewing range, I'll take it (in hopes of the hud overlapping issue can somehow be solved.)

Thanks for those that are trying to help and offering suggestions. Happy holidays.

Just to chime in a little, but the system spec you posted will not run XP with everything turned to it's equilent of "detailed". Well, it'll run it, but the system as a whole will feel sluggish, especially after you add the MX4400 drivers...

Try turning the system to "performance" by following these steps.
Right click on My Computer;
Left click Properties;
Left click Advanced:
Click on the Settings button under Performance:
Choose "Adjust for best performance", then close all dialog boxes.

You'll find that Windows looks ugly afterwards, because it'll disable visual advances, but it'll scale for better performance on lower hardware.
Despite not thinking of it as a tweak for NS, it will lower system overhead, which may then give you a few extra frames ingame

Wow your computer (or graphics card) is old.

Did this. There are no mouse cursor shadows or dialog transparencies etc I always turn all that off after I install XP. I also have most of the stuff in the Nvidia console turned off, no AA, set it to fastest performance not quality, etc I've been gaming many years, I have as little running in XP as needed.