What's the best compass or clock you've seen in a game?

[Nathaniel3W]

I'm working on the HUD for the world map section of my game, which is going to be a lot more strategic, whereas the battles are more tactical. The view is going to be kind of an overhead tactical view that you can spin around, and the world is going to be pretty big, so I'd like the player to have a compass. I'd also like them to have a clock so they can at least know how far away sunrise and sunset are. I have some ideas of what I'd like to do, but maybe you have some suggestions. Have any of you seen any examples that you thought were really well done? They don't even have to be examples from video games if you've seen a cool compass or clock IRL that you think would look cool as part of HUD. Thanks for all you help, codexians.

 

[Severian Silk]

Bethesda-style horizontal compass is okay I guess.

Oops never mind.

As for the overhead view, just mark one side of the map with a N and arrow for North. Players can figure out the rest.

[edit]

Notice the 'N' in the top right corner. That is North.

[edit]

Notice the horizontal bar in the top right in Arcanum. It shows time and the day/night cycle by scrolling a 'picture' from right to left.

PtD also has a clock in the bottom right corner. It is too big IMO.

 

[bozia2012]

I thought this will be a fetish thread, but in this case I have nothing to contribute.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Warcraft 3 had a huge-ass time-of-day display top center of the screen.
Maybe you could try something like thief 3's hud, with a central gem that brightens and darkens based on time of day, and a compass around it?

 

[Severian Silk]

I have also seen dials that rotate and show sun, moon, stars depending on time of day. I can't think of an example right now however.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Oh hey, those are the hatchling dragons from Daz3D. Looks like they didn't change much.

Personally, if it's purely to tell the time, I also quite like the rotating dial things that have night and day on them, though I guess that depends on your UI and if you have space. Doesn't your game have dynamic lighting anyway? The player could just look at the lighting and the shadows during the day to tell the time, though I'm not sure about sunrise. That could just be a gameplay feature, haha. Nights are bad! Are you going to have a minimap on-screen into which a compass/timepiece can be integrated?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

So it sounds like we like the sun/moon dial thing. I can do that. And it sounds like a simple compass is good enough for everyone. And I like the idea of the HUD changing a little between night and day. I think I can do something with that too.

Doesn't your game have dynamic lighting anyway?

Yeah, but I don't think it'll be noticeable enough for people to tell the time by.

I'm trying to think about how adding something could make the game more interesting and not just noisier. With a day/night cycle, I think I have these options:

• Fatigue, increased by marching and fighting, decreased by resting. Fatigue affects how fast you travel on the world map and how effectively you fight in battle.
• You can get ambushed while resting, which will put you at a disadvantage in the battle.
• Managing supplies and inventory weight. Supplies get consumed at a certain rate multiplied by the number of soldiers in your army. I'll have to limit the amount of supplies you can carry in some way, and make that one more thing you can level-up so that you can travel farther without resupplying. This might be important in getting to some cities if you have to cross a lot of wilderness along the way.
• Certain enemies that only spawn at night.

There are probably more, but those are what I'm thinking of including right now. And I'd just like the player to have some indicator of time, so he knows how fast he's consuming supplies, how much longer he'll have to run away from that skeleton army, when he might be able to sneak past the ogre army, and maybe more.

Are you going to have a minimap on-screen into which a compass/timepiece can be integrated?

I'm not sure how I'm going to do it exactly. I have an idea that I'm working on and I'm going to see how it looks. Then of course I'm going to post it here for feedback. :D

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Thanks everyone for your input. Here's my first draft:

During the day, the clock turns a light color and the sky turns blue. The path is a whitish color and the grids are translucent yellow, which looks green on top of the grass tiles. The compass tilts to stay parallel to the ground. The camera angle is more vertical the more you zoom out. Also when you zoom out, your coat of arms appears over your hex because it's pretty hard to see your tiny characters from that far out.

At night the compass darkens, the sky indicator turns purple (also, at all times the sun and the moon indicators rotate exactly opposite each other). The grid turns blue and the path turns purple. (These are not randomly chosen by the way. They match the highlight and main light colors respectively.) You'll be able to see when I upload a video that the compass and clock movement are pretty smooth.

Here is everything at just after dawn. When you zoom in, the coat of arms disappears and you can see your character close up. Also when you zoom in, your viewing angle is more horizontal and you can see that the compass is slightly more tilted away from you. As the day progresses, the sun rises higher along the dial, with the pinkish color keeping up with it. Then when the sun reaches about 30 degrees, the sky indicator had faded back to blue.

Any thoughts on colors, design, anything that should be added or taken away? From here I think I'm going to get rid of that flourish because I'm going to need the space to add some kind of fatigue meter and food meter. I think I might make both half-circles that fit under the compass. They'll grow shorter as you get tireder and run out of food. I kind of like that circle design and I think I might try to replicate it elsewhere, first in the combat HUD where you can switch from melee to ranged attacks. I am a little concerned though that there's too much fine detail in the HUD and it gets blurry. I might want to try using simpler designs.

 

[Mustawd]

Actually, that's not too far off fron what I was imagining as well.

As an alternative, I was thinking of having the directional arrows on the outside and the day/night cycle on the inside. Not sure if that'd be too distracting.

 

[pippin]

Or you could try something different and make the compass to be an actual item in your inventory, like Grimrock did (for a recent example).

 

[Severian Silk]

Thanks everyone for your input. Here's my first draft:

Very good! Nice clean lines too!

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Mustawd I hadn't thought about the compass on the outside. That would be a unique look. Too bad I didn't try that earlier... I probably should try it out and see how it looks, but with limited time and all, if this is functional and good enough, I'll probably stick with it.

pippin That's a good idea too. I think it worked for Grimrock because it adds to the feeling of claustrophobia and being lost in a dungeon. Taking a look at the compass and getting your bearings should take a little bit of effort in that situation. I think though that for the strategic portion of my game, I don't want to slow down the action. I just want players to be able to get to where they want to go.

Severian Silk thanks! Did you see my update over in the JRPG section? It shows the whole thing in action. I don't want to cross-post too much around here, so I put major updates in my main game thread under JRPGs, and I put specific questions and smaller issues here in the Workshop. I think everyone on this thread has been following the game for a while, but just in case anyone missed the video...

 

[Severian Silk]

Very nice! But, oh wow, you are mixing 3D with 2D sprites! FFT could pull this off because it locked you into isometric perspective. But doing this with free camera movement is off-putting to me.

 

[Mustawd]

Very nice! But, oh wow, you are mixing 3D with 2D sprites! FFT could pull this off because it locked you into isometric perspective. But doing this with free camera movement is off-putting to me.

I've been saying this for a while. Free camera rotation is a BAD idea.

 

[Severian Silk]

Very nice! But, oh wow, you are mixing 3D with 2D sprites! FFT could pull this off because it locked you into isometric perspective. But doing this with free camera movement is off-putting to me.

I've been saying this for a while. Free camera rotation is a BAD idea.

Or he could use 3D models. (Which is something I have no idea how to do either.)

 

[Glop_dweller]

Very nice! But, oh wow, you are mixing 3D with 2D sprites! FFT could pull this off because it locked you into isometric perspective. But doing this with free camera movement is off-putting to me.

Bungie's Myth 1 & 2 did a grand job of using a free 3D camera & landscape with 2D sprites, and animated [presumably 2D] ~3D gore chunks.

Spoiler

As for time keeping HUD... The SSI GoldBox titles all had a prominent compass & clock center screen. Where each step ticked off a minute of game time; with the option to [exhaustively] search the area every step, at the cost of ten minutes instead of one.

Spoiler

But Fallout 2 pretty much takes the cake here, With full day/month/year/hour/minute clock, and day & night gauge:
(No compass though, and right & Left always mean East & West in the game.)

Spoiler

 

[Severian Silk]

Very nice! But, oh wow, you are mixing 3D with 2D sprites! FFT could pull this off because it locked you into isometric perspective. But doing this with free camera movement is off-putting to me.

Bungie's Myth 1 & 2 did a grand job of using a free 3D camera & landscape with 2D sprites, and animated [presumably 2D] ~3D gore chunks.

Spoiler

:barf:

 

[Maggot]

Ignore the homos free camera is fine in games like Myth and early Total War when it was sprite soldiers only.

 

[Mustawd]

Bungie's Myth 1 & 2 did a grand job of using a free 3D camera & landscape with 2D sprites, and animated [presumably 2D] ~3D gore chunks.

Actually you're right. I forgot we had already discussed this before. It's an issue with his engine not having an isometric view. Or something.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-kickstarter-funded.96941/page-4#post-4496920

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Oh no! The 2D sprites issue again! Haha. Thanks for finding that link for me Mustawd saved me the trouble. Yeah, I think if UDK/Unreal 3 could do true isometric, I wouldn't have to worry about the sprites being distorted.

I recently learned the term "8-bitish" (from Mr. Pink was it?) and I'm trying to keep in mind what I like about old games and what I didn't like about them, and tweak my game's look based on that. I've been struggling the whole time with the look of the game, with retro sprites, a high-res UI (designed by me with no previous GUI experience), and a 3D background.

(I've been trying to find the right 3D background look for a while, going back and forth between more pixelly and more detailed.)

Spoiler

Anyway, point is, everything is still a work in progress, and I'm still tweaking the look of the game even as I near the engine's feature-completion. I think I'm keeping the camera's free rotation, at least on the battlefield and on the world map. But I think in towns I might switch to the traditional fixed camera like from FFVII and Chrono Cross. But like I said, still a work in progress, so I could change anything if it'll look better.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Bungie's Myth 1 & 2 did a grand job of using a free 3D camera & landscape with 2D sprites, and animated [presumably 2D] ~3D gore chunks.

I loved those games! Early on, I kept going back to look at those to make sure that they really were fully 2D characters. Also out of curiosity I went back to look at the original Doom and the original Wing Commander to see if all of those really were sprites. Totally different genres, I know, but I just had to take a look at how people used to simulate a 3D environment using 2D assets.

 

[Mr. Pink]

The screenshots look a lot better lately.

There are many examples of 2d low rez sprites on 3d that look fantastic. the problem has to do with the sprites themselves. From what I can tell, they seem like they came out of a rpgmaker sprite generator, so they're only oriented orthogonally which makes them look bad when viewed from diagonal angles. Games like shogun total war or age of empires had at least 8 facing directions per unit to prevent this. These games also either never had free camera, or restricted theirs to a certain angle to keep the images looking good, (example: you can't view shogun total war from top down, or get too close.)

You could compromise by making it so the camera will rotate horizontally in neat increments of 45 degrees, and was locked into a specific viewing angle that complemented the sprites. All isometric 2D games where the width of the tile is twice as long as the height have a vertical viewing angle of 30 degrees.

To me, the biggest problem with the engine is that it renders real perspective instead of isometric. Real perspective is a can of worms that's almost impossible to deal with when combining 2d sprites. If you let things get smaller the further away they are from you, but the sprites are all looking the same direction, it just looks wrong.

 

[Maggot]

You hold hold down right mouse button and rotate the camera in any direction in Shogun TW so it wasn't all that restricted. Medieval TW let you zoom in right up to units too.