Awareness 1 is more useful than awareness 2?

Ok, that's just plain broken. Anyone have any thoughts on how to lessen the cool factor of awareness 1?

Some ideas, though some of them might be a bit lame ...

1. Change the percentages. It's GREEN to 50%, YELLOW to 25%, and then RED. Make GREEN from full to like 90%, YELLOW all the way down to 10%. So for the middle 80% of health, all you see is yellow - more guesswork regarding the status of the monster. I must admit that initially (before hearing other opinions on the matter) the jumps from 100% to 50% to 25% bugged me. The same basic jumps are there for Awareness 2 as well.

2. The bar on Awareness 1 is purposefully not progressive in color to make level 2 a little more "cool". However, they use 255 values for their colors to make them more visible. We could drop the color values on Awareness 1 to like 150, and then for level 2 we'd play with the percentages such that with level 1 like answer 1 above, it would be a bit more smooth, but with the full brightness for the mid-steps (IOW, level 2 would have 255/0 Green/Red at full health, scaling to 255/255 Green/Red (which is yellow) at 50%, and then the Green goes away the closer the monster gets to 100%, you get closer to RED at 255). Thus, level 2 would have a smoother progression (less guesswork regarding monster status) and a brighter bar.

3. Level 2's bar changes size based on the health of the target, yet the main reason for having Awareness is more the visibility benefit than anything else. We might want to consider not resizing the bar - particularly if we choose 1&2 together.

The only other thing I can think of is changing the costs, so that 2 isn't more expensive than 1. I think that's one of the big blocks is that you spend those 20 points on Awareness 1. When it's purchased, there's no telling, but there's almost always something better to spend 25 points on than Awareness 2 ...

Looking over my three suggestions, I like 1&2 quite a bit (and while I won't be changing my percentage suggestions on Medic Awareness, I may play with the brightness levels as above), not so keen on 3 though.

If you wanted to see what it looked like for testing, I could probably extend DruidAwareness a little more and do a DruidAwarenessInteraction extension of Mysterial's AwarenessInteraction by Thursday/Friday evening.

You could size the awareness 1 bar to be not so tall. If it was only a quarter the height it currently is, it wouldn't have the same visual impact.

You could change the colours so that instead of bright red/yellow/green, you get a duller tone that doesn't stand out so much. (I think this is what would be achieved by BotFodder's suggestion of 150 for awareness 1 colours?)

For Awareness 2, you could put a box around the max size of the awareness bar, colour coded to match, so that you don't get the problem of the bar almost disappearing as the monster health reduces, because the box will remain to show where the monster is

You could switch the drawing. Make awareness 1 a bar that disappears as the monsters health goes. (Perhaps not even changing colour?) Make awareness 2 have a solid bar that is basically green but gets red filling it up as the health goes. So at 25% health, you have 25% green bar followed by 75% red.

Could just have one level of awareness?

could have awareness 1 showing a number for the health instead of a bar e.g. 47%. No where near as clear. Could even make it in a dull colour

Remember that the people who bought awareness 1 did so knowing how it performed. If you nerf it, it may be fairest to give them their points back.

Szlat wrote:

You could size the awareness 1 bar to be not so tall. If it was only a quarter the height it currently is, it wouldn't have the same visual impact.

Boy I tell you that positively hurts. Especially when the colors are muted.

IOW, it's a good suggestion. I tried making the horizontal size smaller too, but I can't figure out how you would center it.

Szlat wrote:

You could change the colours so that instead of bright red/yellow/green, you get a duller tone that doesn't stand out so much. (I think this is what would be achieved by BotFodder's suggestion of 150 for awareness 1 colours?)

Exactly. I must say between muting the colors and making the bar thin, I'm looking for Medic Awareness 2 on my test characters big time.

Szlat wrote:

For Awareness 2, you could put a box around the max size of the awareness bar, colour coded to match, so that you don't get the problem of the bar almost disappearing as the monster health reduces, because the box will remain to show where the monster is

Um. How would you do that? Rendering/Drawing stuff in UT I'm not all that good at right now. From the Medic Awareness point of view, I have it so that if the target is at their Medic Max, they have no visible bar. I think it's good there; but you're right - if regular Awareness had the box, it'd be nicer.

The rest of your suggestions I'll have to ponder a bit. But I've already incorporated some of them into Medic Awareness - it will be committed shortly if you want to play test it.

One of my solutions was to make it a binary ability at level 1. Dead, not dead. (Medic Awareness was healed/not healed.)

Moof wrote:

One of my solutions was to make it a binary ability at level 1. Dead, not dead.

But then why would I buy the ability at all?

I wonder if the hud on this could be changed to use the hud form the vehicles or some such... something not nearly as wide...

Thoughts?

Wide as in vertical height?

That can be changed in one line within the Awareness skills. Let me know what size you'd like to see and I can commit that when I get home from work.

Moof wrote:

That can be changed in one line within the Awareness skills. Let me know what size you'd like to see and I can commit that when I get home from work.

Actually width as in horizontal I think is what Dru's looking for.

In the Medic Awareness code I've already set the height for MA1 to 25% size of MA2; horizontal width I could change but couldn't figure out how to center.

The code for vehicles is actually "buried" here and there - specific to the ONS game code, apparently.

Maybe look at a powernode?

I found it in the ONS, and see if I can find examples elsewhere. I'll play with merging some of it into the MedicAwareness code, and see if I can come up with a mix of:

MA1: Solid bar, not to tall or wide (like maybe 50% high and wide as current Awareness is), with muted colors. Thinking about it now the 25% high bar MA currently has is a bit too small.

MA2: More like the vehicles, perhaps not as tall as vehicle bar is, but as tall as Aware2 is now, 75% the width of Aware2, with a white border (like the vehicle bar).

I figure once we get MA working like we'd like, we can port the solution to DruidAwareness.

Oh hey I understand a few things now ...

I should be able to do at least this much (thanks to http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/HeadsUpDisplayTutorial):

MA 1 - solid bar, "centered 50% height and 50% width of current awareness bar", four somewhat muted colors based on current health.

MA 2 - solid bar, "centered, maybe 80% width/100% height of current awareness bar", colored bar that shrinks and gradually changes colors based on health status of target, but now with a white background (IOW, a colored resizing bar over a white bar to show relative status).

If this looks acceptable, what I propose is:

MA2 - take away the white background. On MA, I don't think a background bar is needed. Just have the bar shrink as the target gets healed up; this way a fully healed target will not have some attention grabbing thing.

DruAware1 - Similar to MA1 - solid bar, smaller than DA2 bar, three stops like current Aware1, but with red at 10% health and green at greater than 90% health (per my original suggestion). This will be doubly misleading in PvP matches, as anyone above their "HealthMax" will be Green, even if they're at their Medic Max!

DruAware2 - Similar to MA2, but keeping the white bar background to consistently provide the "easy to see" bar that people like Awareness for. The non-white bar would shrink (grow?) and change color based on target health (showing brighter colors and smoother health vs. color progression). Might also allow for resizing based on Monster vs Player, so that on PvP matches, enemies that probably have a Medic Max (all, but mainly players) show up with a new color (bit of Blue thrown in) and the bar resizing takes that additional health into account. Also, since we will have the white background bar, maybe we want the bar to grow instead of shrink the less healthy an enemy is (so that when they're close to death, they have an almost full size mostly bright red bar).

BTW - the background bar could be black and not white ...

Let's give it a try and see what peoples think

Play with the current MedicAwarenessInteraction (just committed) and see what you think. MA2 bar is same size as regular Awareness bar is now. MA1 bar is half as wide and half as high (technically, quarter size).

The white bar in the background of MA2 can easily be ditched or changed colors.

Will play with DruidAwareness a bit and commit/add what I come up with (gonna try and take friendly monsters out of the Enemies list). If it we decide it's high in the suckage factor, we can always roll back.

And DruidAwareness now set up like medic awareness.

EDIT: Comparison pic for you: