Status Bar improved GUI

[Eleazar]

I'm not saying that the HP bars couldn't be improved, but the comparison in daylight on snow is really a corner case (and thus biased against normal case).

Snow is an extreme, but not a rarity when you also consider snow hills, snowy-forest, ice, and snowy-topped mountains, and to a lesser degree, light terrains like the pebblely road. All of these blend too easily with the white box, and the white XP bar, and not only during the day.

How many of the XP bars can you quickly gauge in the attached night screenshot? An Answer: -->Probably nobody will notice that the MoL is at XP 35/100 .

Also on mouseover and selection the background is turned to day-brightness, and the unit is artificially brightened. Both of these contribute to making the white box/bars less distinct at the moment the player is most likely looking at the bars. The eyes tend to be where the mouse is pointing.

I suspect that one of the reasons you originally associated mouseover with the intention to get HP info from the sidebar (beyond the programer's normal proclivity for numbers) Is that you've subconsciously learned that the HP bars are too often hard to read.

[Ranger M]

Probably nobody will notice that the MoL is at XP 35/100 .(there is something in here)

no he isn't, although the elvish rider guy (outrider?) might be.

EDIT: *hits self on head*, Ugh, I see what you mean (I had to lean right next to the screen to notice)

[turin]

In my experience, with the current graphics, the XP bars are almost universally illegible. (The MoL is a case in point.) Nuff said. We should do what Eleazar is suggesting.

[Sapient]

Ok, I'm sure it is worth trying out in trunk, but I don't think these screenshots represent the most usual cases. The two units on snowy forest look fine. The other ones are standing next to a Mage of Light (a specialized L3 unit) or on snow.

[Jetrel]

Demo:

Megane in the Art Contributions forum posted what I think is an improvement/refinement of this. Probably the key thing is that it shows that there is no reason to separate the HP/XP with open space; they can simply share a 1px border they already have.

Oh, and, rather off-topic, but I made this up before realizing I was looking at this developers-only forum, in case anybody thinks it's useful; the bars are the same length as the black ones proposed, are unobtrusive, and leave plenty of space above for an orb.

I don't know whether having the "empty" parts being translucent is a good idea, but that's a different aspect. The key things that I think are a win, here, are the sizing, and the arrangement.

[Eleazar]

Megane in the Art Contributions forum posted what I think is an improvement/refinement of this. Probably the key thing is that it shows that there is no reason to separate the HP/XP with open space; they can simply share a 1px border they already have.

Oh, and, rather off-topic, but I made this up before realizing I was looking at this developers-only forum, in case anybody thinks it's useful; the bars are the same length as the black ones proposed, are unobtrusive, and leave plenty of space above for an orb.

I don't know whether having the "empty" parts being translucent is a good idea, but that's a different aspect. The key things that I think are a win, here, are the sizing, and the arrangement.

For the purposes of this discussion i'm ignoring the global opacity fade that happens to the bars when not mouse-overed.

My first idea on page-1 had the empty part of the bar semi-transparent. However after further comparison against various backgrounds, i came to see that it is just as important the the empty portion of the bar be obvious, to gauge the relative fullness of a bar.

The #1 enhancement i'm proposing is a completely opaque "empty" portion of the bar. I'm undecided weather it should be black or grey, both are optimal in different situations.

The #2 enhancement is the black outline. I believe i've made my case for that.

As for Megane's example he (or she?) is a promising new contributor that's done some nice units. But the whole reason this is tricky is that a given GUI element may work great in one situation and badly in another. It's not particularly thrilling to have an alternate proposal favored based on a single example. If someone believes they have a better solution, please do me the courtesy of trying out that idea against a few diverse situations. To make that easier, i'm uploading one of my testing PSDs.

Truthfully i've already played around with bars that didn't have a gap inbetween, and bars that were 2 rather than 3 pix wide. While Megane's basic idea is better than what currently in game, i don't believe it's the optimum solution.

I found that the connected bars could loose their individuality, and the eye could try to resolve them into a single entity. This would be more common with 2 pix wide bars.

I still stand by 3 pix wide bars, (except for the less important AMLA bar) as they are less likely to become visually entangled with vertical items like weapons. My proposal still covers the unit less than the current bars do. For those interested in revealing every possible pixel from under the bars, i commend this idea.