Awareness 1 is more useful than awareness 2?

Hmmm ... I just realized that I have the DruidAwareness 2 bars going the other way (white for close to death). I got the color transitions right, just not the direction.

We'll see how it is during testing. It's just a matter of putting a "1-" in front of something if we want it to go the other way.

Would we want to take the white bar out of Medic Awareness before the test? Or see how it goes and get opinions?

Wha? You mean the white bar when the player cannot use any more healing at all?

Leave that in. I put it in after I played with the ability for 20 minutes and decided I needed it. Otherwise, I couldn't quite tell when the patient was 100% by the bars.

Moof wrote:

I put it in after I played with the ability for 20 minutes and decided I needed it. Otherwise, I couldn't quite tell when the patient was 100% by the bars.

Yeah I was kinda torn - if you see that little bit of blue, then they can still use healing - but sometimes it's hard to spot that little bit of blue without the white.

With that you can kinda see what I've done to DruAware2 to make it more "appealing" than Mysterial's ...

BotFodder wrote:

... but sometimes it's hard to spot that little bit of blue without the white.

So I just committed a change where the colored bar is centered; instead of shrinking right to left when health gets better, the colored bar stays centered over the white one.

Not going to change regular awareness just yet - want to get opinions on whether or not this is cool, and even if it is, if it's needed on DruAware2.

I would say if it was needed on DruAware2, then it would be better if the bar grew the more damaged an enemy was (which is what I originally had intended) rather than shrinking like it does now.

I like the centering! A lot!

Okay, on the current state of the ability:

First, it appears that the check for preventing the bar from appearing on the current player is broken on a listen server.

Second. Color changing. The reason I did the "flash to white" thing was primarily that, while testing the ability, I found myself staring at the bars and not the patients' health numbers while healing, and I was unable to tell (under the old awareness bar system) when the patients were fully healed up.

That is drastically improved with the new white-backgrounded bars, but I still think it would help. Unfortunately, it would be faster for you to simply make this change than me, since I'd need to debug exactly what you did with the Canvas.

So, proposal: As a patient's health approaches Medic max, the central bar shrinks, eventually exposing the white background fully. At Medic max, make the bar turn blue entirely. It's the opposite of what it was before, but the same effect: a sudden, striking, highly noticeable change that will let the medic know this patient is all done!

Moof wrote:

So, proposal: As a patient's health approaches Medic max, the central bar shrinks, eventually exposing the white background fully. At Medic max, make the bar turn blue entirely. It's the opposite of what it was before, but the same effect: a sudden, striking, highly noticeable change that will let the medic know this patient is all done!

You know in the back of my mind I've always been thinking that this is what was missing.

Committed.

I'm going to go ahead and change DruAware2 to be a growing as you damage vs a shrink as you damage bar and set up the centering.

EDIT: Better than that - instead of growing over a white bar, the "background" bar is "green", and the colors start changing from the middle. A near dead monster would have a very red bar with only a little bit of green showing on the edges.

You're the man.

Gah you posted - I edited RE: background bar for DA2 being green, not white ...

Someone wanted to debate color with me. While they can't reply in this forum, I thought I'd at least explain the two things involved with the color choices:

What we're used to - what is logical
IN both Awareness and Medic Awareness, there's a general understanding that Red is bad (close to death), Yellow ain't so good, and Green is good (healthy). In Medic Awareness, we add a color to indicate "extremely healthy": Blue. In both Awarenesses, at level 1, you don't get any color progression - just a small bar indicating some kind of damage level.

Math and Color Combinations - Gradual Changes
It turns out that these color choices work extremely well when you have to apply math to color combinations and do blending. The component colors of a display are Red, Green, and Blue. Full Red and Green with no Blue component is Yellow. Without going into horrendous detail, you can set it up so that at low health, There's Red, but no Green. You start feeding Green in from, say, 0 - 50% (as an example - not the actual math), so that at 50% the bar is actually Yellow. Then you set it up so that Red is taken out from 50% to 100% (again, not what I actually settled on, but close enough for our example), so that at 100%, there's no Red, and the bar appears Green.

Now, we have instances where there's more than 100% health available. So what you do at that point is start adding in some blue, until at some arbitrary middle point, the bar looks Aqua. Then you start taking out the Green again until the bar is a solid Blue.

This way there's no need to figure out a new color scheme between the two levels. At both Awareness 2's, we also resize (and center) the colored bar (on a white or green background - white in MA, green on regular Awareness) based on the health of the target. In MA2, the bar shrinks the healthier they are, until they hit what we're hoping is the medic max (150 over Start/Max) and then the bar suddenly turns a full sized solid Blue (thank Moof for that dramatic change - I wasn't quite headed in that direction when I started to rummage through his code). On Aware2, the transitioning bar grows, going from Green to Yellow to Red on a Green background as the target gets wounded (NOTE: in PvP games, you'll start seeing some blue there if the target is above its HealthMax).

So the decision wasn't really all that arbitrary and is simpler to code without throwing in some odd color combination or progression.

If you still don't get it, take a long look at the color palette function of any drawing program, and the RGB values that go from 0 to 255. And yes, while there is technically a nice Purple color by combining Red and Blue, we're looking at a linear progression here, and there's no need for an additional color, and the exclusion of a third component value (say, to make "pink") is undesired due to the additional complexity it would add - so take a good look at the image on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum and take that as my last word.