Yes indeedy!

I propose an upgrade to the current ingame interface of Soldat!

Currently, we are limited to bars or text to display our health, ammo, and jets, etc.

What we really need and want is a series of images forming an animation instead!

eg. instead of a jets bar (jet-bar.bmp), you would have a series of images for the jets.
Such as jets000.bmp, jets001.bmp, jets002.bmp, etc all the way up to jets100.bmp
If you had no jets, it would display jets000.bmp, and if you had 50% jets, it would display jets050.bmp, etc. all the way up to 100.

This would enable mod-makers such as myself to make the most awesome looking interfaces you can imagine >:)

Michal - Surely this wouldn't be that hard to implement? And think of how much nicer we would be able to make the game look! It'd be simply awesome. It'd keep me and everyone else happy making interfaces for years! :P

.. or make soldat be able to use gif. The license thing is over anyway, they don't hold the rights anymore.

gif is ok too, BUT some people dont know how to make animations. So an integrated animation would be better (ie jets000.bmp, jets001.bmp, jets002.bmp, etc )

Emmm, i like it, but maybe instead of jet000.bmp to jet100.bpm, make it to 10...

Yea, but gifs are limited to 256 colours :P

If you use optimized octree colours, you won't probably notice anything.

mar77a - No, we would need more frames than that :)
Otherwise there would be no visible difference between 1% health and 10%, same for ammo and jets.
Precision is needed.

Meandor - Yes, but for high-quality images, multiple gradients, lighting for 3d things, etc. You run out of colours pretty damn fast ;)

I LOVE THIS IDEA, and imagine the cool new interfaces nightcabbacge can make :P

I also love this idea, but I suggest the animation frames are all put in the same file, such as jets.bmp, with all 100 frames under each other consecutively. To change frame in code you then just change the texture coordinates.

i like this idea but i would prefer gif format

quote:Originally posted by bb_vbI also love this idea, but I suggest the animation frames are all put in the same file, such as jets.bmp, with all 100 frames under each other consecutively. To change frame in code you then just change the texture coordinates.

Or, better still, all under one folder (probably what you said in a different way...).

I am all for this idea, as well as animated weapon-gfx, cursors and majorly...
SCENERY!!!

i suggested this before, only it was for weapons. i'm all for animation. i'd love to tackle animating soldat! =)

tats a double.....

well .gif would be indeed more efficient. However i think that it will make it like 10 times harder for mod makers to create mods good. There are ways using mild and simple coding to weakly animate health bars like tat. with that i mean u could have the color turn to red the lower u go (for health) as well as decrease the size. and also u could have like the health symbol be a heart that beats (not like love heart but like human heart) - maybe even have animation for that to determine ur health instead of a bar. and the jet symbol could have like firy things coming off shoes to symbolize jets. However i believe it said in the rules (too lazy to check) that we're not gonna have animation wihtin the actual game except for the bullets and player. (grenade n box falling are a lil different) - yea...im pretty sure it said no animation as scenary pix

AWSOME THIS IDEA ROXXORS!!

and imagine the file size -.-

Well, it wouldn't come with the original soldat but as user made animated interfaces.. I don't think that's a problem.

This can actually be done. If you make the bars long enough and split each 1/100 of it into a single frame of your animation, it works the same way.

it'd be best a a gif or tileset, but how about as many images as you want, so you dont gotta make 100 damn images? :P
or how about, only night cabbage is aloud the priv-ledge? :P

lolz

Thanx for ur input into this guys :)

So far we've got a few sugesstions...

+Individual BMPs inside a folder, 1 folder per "bar replacement" eg. health, vest, ammo, jets, etc.
- I think this is probably the best idea. Clean, simple, and no colour limitations.

+One BMP per "bar replacement", in a vertical strip perhaps...
- Could get really messy if you're making large graphics... would end up being many thousands of pixels high :P Also, probably easier to make a whole bunch of BMPs (batch rendering, etc.).

+Animated GIF
- Main problem with this is the colour limitations. 256 colours doesn't always go a long way. Just think, there are 256 shades of gray alone ;)
256 out of 16,777,216 colours... eep!

Also, it would probably be too difficult to use loop animations, because you would have to have an animation for each state... if you have 100 states that's 100 extra animations.

Probably best, at least for now, if we try to get the initial animation into the game.

Basically what I'm meaning is, say you fire your gun. At the moment, a little bar shrinks. w00t?

What I want is, instead of the bar shrinking, it just replaces the graphic with another one.

So, as a basic example, you could have a box of ammo as your ammo gauge. As you fire your gun, bullets get removed from the box :) That's just a basic example, but you get the idea.

It would just make the game look so exceptionally much better.

We would need roughly the following:

100 frames for Health
100 frames for Vest
100 frames for Jets
100 frames for Ammo
50 frames for reload
1 image per nade (so 5 total), each separately positionable
And maybe some frames (20?) for the lag dot :)

Also I was thinking, it would be nice to customise the weapon label... at least the colour.

This would be simply leet.

I love this idea, but i think it would be cool to have either gifs or multiple images, if you use gif it would be a lot smaller. Either way, it is a good idea, to make soldat look even better.

And another thing. I think it would be awesome to be able to put gifs in maps liek as sceneries. Im sure it would lag though. Just imagine a cloud passing by...fog overcast...shooting stars...and swaying trees...oh the possibilities..

Im in favor of this,since it would add more options as far a customing is concerned. Great idea N-Cabbage.

mike - it would cause no additional lag if it was synced to the map.some compression might be a good idea... has to be lossless, for multiple reasons. GIF/PNG, etc.

vang - yea, it would enable us to make some really awesome interfaces.

quote:.. or make soldat be able to use gif. The license thing is over anyway, they don't hold the rights anymore.

i'd suggest the use of a png file instead of a gif. png's have never had any copyright anything to them the way gifs have, and they have every feature of gifs (animations,transparencies,etc) with none of the restrictions (most notably the 256 color restriction), in addition, i believe it supports true color with alpha (meaning you can choose the level of translucency, not simply 0% or 100%).

while we're at it, i think that i'll through in a few ideas:

the current method for most bars should be kept as an option since mathematical manipulation is always smoother than literal frames (in terms of movement and memory usage).

additionally (and i apologize if this has been mentioned in another post), the ability to specifiy the z-position of any interface element would come in handy in case you wanted to put any given image over something like an icon or bar.

finally, would come the ability to specify the alpha for any given interface element.

.gifs are restricted to 256 colors? My avatar is a .gif and I think it has more colors than that...