Personally, I like knowing when one more blast will finish something off. I don't want to have to empty round after round into a ship and not really know at what point it's going to blow up. It's an important gameplay mechanic, because in that one moment, our minds are weighing the pros and cons of continuing to attack. Does the ship simply have too much health? Is its health regenerating faster than we can destroy it? How many more hits will it take? Will we be able to take it out before that megalithic cruiser that's approaching pulverizes us to a thin paste? And so on.

I don't like the idea of the green/red health bars - they don't seem to fit in with the rest of the game. The LTP seemed to do a good job of it, though - a simple ring around the ship, like Flatfingers said, that fades or turns dark as it's damaged. With that kind of health indicator (or even a dual-ringed health indicator, with the outer ring for shields and the inner ring for hull), it should be possible to tell after a few fights exactly when the ship is going to be destroyed.

(Oh, and, if damaged ships can't learn to run away from losing fights, Josh hasn't done his job with the AI well enough. In a world with pseudointelligent AI, getting kills is MUCH more difficult if you do it right, because they're actually trying to stay alive. I speak from experience. I've done a few things like this myself. I know this isn't quite the place for it, but. It needs to go somewhere.)

In regards to health bars, you have to keep in mind that LT will also be an RTS game. I quite like the health bars. I also think that when play shifts to a more RTS view, it is needed. You won't be able to handle massive fleet vs fleet battles without some sort of at-a-glance view of your health.

DWMagus wrote:In regards to health bars, you have to keep in mind that LT will also be an RTS game. I quite like the health bars. I also think that when play shifts to a more RTS view, it is needed. You won't be able to handle massive fleet vs fleet battles without some sort of at-a-glance view of your health.

Well, yes, I agree with this... but the green/red is a bit distracting in first-person mode.

Talvieno wrote:

DWMagus wrote:In regards to health bars, you have to keep in mind that LT will also be an RTS game. I quite like the health bars. I also think that when play shifts to a more RTS view, it is needed. You won't be able to handle massive fleet vs fleet battles without some sort of at-a-glance view of your health.

Well, yes, I agree with this... but the green/red is a bit distracting in first-person mode.

Y'know I'm pretty sure there will be an option to turn them on or off.

I have already changed the colors to be less obtrusive As for the general concept of health bars, though, I don't understand why it would be a problem

As for rapid menus, the fact is that when you learn the nodal menu it is very fast to navigate and can be disorienting for a newcomer. Every time that I navigated through it, I was doing so with a purpose, and at this point it feels very natural to me to do it at that rate. While I get that it can be annoying to watch in a video, I strongly doubt anyone is going to complain when they get the game that "the menus are too easy to navigate quickly!"

Due to absolute chaos at work and wanting a nice span of peace and quiet (and wakefulness) to watch this at home, I only just now got round to checking out the latest dev update. Which I have watched, I am not exaggerating, probably 10 times in a row. Josh, you know from earlier discussions we had how important mining and trade and the kind of epic, empire-building level of gameplay is to me. What you've outlined in this latest update, especially with the new commodities interface, is in my opinion even above and beyond what EvE Online has achieved. I love, love, LOVE the prospect of being able to organize and delegate large-scale operations to a vast fleet of ships as you did with your mining operations. It's intuitive and sleek and altogether easy to understand and, by all appearances, to navigate.

Which can be said for the whole of the new interface. It's minimal but still immersive and that's a hard balance to strike for. Were the little periodtics distortions/flickerings around the text and other interface elements an intentional design point or a side effect of the new vidcap software? Because if they were the former, I really liked it! It added to the immersion, not often enough to be a nuisance but frequent enough to warrant notice when just staring at the screen watching the universe pass by.

I haven't had chance to comment 'til now, but my thoughts are the same as everyone else: great job, Josh! Can't wait to play it...

The sleekness of the interface on display makes me wonder if I won't change my play-style somewhat when I actually get my hands on LT. I had thought I'd play it mostly as I played Freelancer post story completion, but having some sort of organisation turning over cash in the background does look rather appealing...

Sort of à la Tony Stark, uh? It's great to be able to play with expensive toys if you have a big corp financing your whims

mcsven wrote: The sleekness of the interface on display makes me wonder if I won't change my play-style somewhat when I actually get my hands on LT. I had thought I'd play it mostly as I played Freelancer post story completion, but having some sort of organisation turning over cash in the background does look rather appealing...

It takes strength to resist the dark side. Only the weak embrace it. =P

In consideration of the health bars, I imagine that you now have a use for the holographic version of the ships... Why not just make the holographic version your targeting computer? assign each module on a ship a health pip that indicates online (blue) or offline (red), and then you can take out individual modules from a distance (assuming you have guided weapons) and if you were zoomed out, you will be able to see clouds of red and blue, giving you a good estimate of the battle.

But then you only have a colour difference which is the worst kind of display to make usable for colour-blind people. With a health bar you have shape and brightness to work with.

Gazz wrote:But then you only have a colour difference which is the worst kind of display to make usable for colour-blind people. With a health bar you have shape and brightness to work with.

I think you saw in the video how easy it is to change the color scheme - I don't think color blindness will be a difficulty for anyone, as far as gameplay goes. (Colorful ingame objects or backdrops such as nebulae might be a different matter. Not sure, as I'm not colorblind myself, but I know that this kind of thing can be worked around.)

I like the idea of being able to affix one of Josh's widgets permanently to the left or right side of the screen in an HUD manner, where it shows a rotating "holographic" version of the ship you're attacking, like Hyperion said. I don't like the red/blue idea as much, except for on said holographic HUD version - the actual target can just have a health bar or brightness indicator (averaging the HP of all systems), and I'd be totally fine with it. I love the idea of being able to check out all the HP values for individual systems at once, though, and the holographic HUD thing would give you that - provided you didn't give it a black background like the menus Josh pulled up in the last video.

The red and blue distinction were only examples of colors that can be used. Josh has already shown that colors can be readily changed. However I do think to accommodate an easier visual understanding, online and offline modules could have brightness distinctions, as well as an applied texture in the hologram.

I am fully in favor of having clear representations for health, but I think it would be much preferable to have health be module /nodal based than aggregate. I want to be able to have long range guided missiles take out the thrusters and then swoop in for the kill, taking out their weapons one by one before I get into range.

Small Feedback:

1) I dont know why u need hundreds of NPC in a relatively small area like that asteroid field u shown, each deliver a very small amount of ore to the station. No wonder u had to disable the collision. The universe has become to live, for sure, but do not overtake it. For this field i would say - a maximum of 50 ships, which are actually working on things would be enough. Lets say 5 big cargo ships spreaded around on hot spots in the field, which filled in by 5 small miners each = 30 ships. Plus 20 free slots for police reaction force against piracy, or maybe 5 defending fighters on each cargo vessel, something like that. I would give additional 10 slots for a big bang capital armed with a fine squadron sitting on the station, just in case anyones doing trouble onto the workers.

2) I would love it, if u could change the standard interface to actually NOT showing any brackets, squares or bars on any objects. Just a free view to the space. If i wanna see whats going around me (see the brackets), i have to activate a scanner, or hit a button for an once active scan to show the brackets on all ships, or some ships in some directions. And if i klick on some ship and set it as target, THEN u can show the health bar in addition. Thats some thing of immersion to me, i always hated that in other spacegames - entered the system and everything is shown in brackets, even if it doesnt interest me.

3) For the next update: Could u please, please show a warp jump, or some (fast) traveling trough the LT Space?


thanks 4 reading, even if i complain here.

Just as another data point, I do like the idea of 1000+ ships possible in a system.

Not in every system, but some particularly active hubs, especially if the "space is big" feature is turned on.

On the other hand, I agree completely with hoping it will be possible to switch off HUD-based display elements around ships, for an approximation of looking at space with naked eyeballs. It's not as important in a space game where a HUD is normal as in a fantasy game where HUD-like UI elements pinned to characters is completely mental. Still, it would be nice even in LT to be able to see the world bare-eyed.

Finally, a thought about simulation numbers. We're talking about X number of ships... but it's really the NPCs notionally "inside" those ships that need to have their decision-making simulated, correct?

Well, that makes me wonder: what about capital ships that have (potentially) tens or hundreds of crew members?

Is there only ever exactly one player/executive per any ship regardless of its size? If not, then those non-commanding NPCs will need to be simulated, too. And although workers are not full AI, they still do some decision-making, don't they?

So does this mean there will be a performance difference between simulating 1000 fighters in a system, and 1000 dreadnoughts?