Health Visuals: A suggestion about knowing just how screwed you are

[jbox1]

Short Answer: Make parts flash when low on health

Long Answer: Currently there is no way to tell the health of your parts. Sure, you'll find out soon enough when that cannon no-scopes you from off your screen, but this is both inefficient and also defeats the purpose of knowing the health of the now non-existent part. There needs to be some way of indicating the health of individual parts to the player, so they can have better judgment about their current situation. There are a number of ways this could be achieved:

• Health Bars: Simple and efficient, but could be intrusive to the otherwise clean GUI of Nimbatus.
• Fade Effect: Parts could fade away as they take damage. This would be easy to implement, but probably not very elegant.
• Flash Effect: Parts could flash red when they are low on health, similar to a number of other games. This would be easy to implement and also very intuitive to the player.
• Individual part sprites: This is much harder to implement but often returns a good result. Simply having individual sprites for parts to represent how damaged they are quickly conveys there state. The issue with this is that every part would need to be individually sprited several times, which is inefficient for the developers.
• Particles: Particles are cool. No denying it.
• Reusable damage texture: Similar to the individual part sprites solution, reusable damage textures will literally show damage in the form of the part seeming to have taken damage. The difference here is that the textures for each level of damage is reused for all parts. This would be much more efficient, saving time. The issue is that it may be troublesome because all parts are shaped different, which could complicate things.

[Markus]

Great suggestions! This is an important topic, not sure how to handle it. I think the variant with the reusable damage texture, coupled with sporadic particle effects would be the most economic and elegant solution. It takes some time to implement and test, as well as drops the performance again  We have to evaluate some ideas and then see what we can implement.

Another idea would be different "view-modes". The normal mode is like how the game looks like now. But if you press and hold "Tab", then the view switches to "Damage-View", and then each part which is not damaged is completely green, and the more damaged it is, the more red it is. Not sure if this would be an elegant solution  

[jbox1]

2 hours ago, Markus said:

Another idea would be different "view-modes". The normal mode is like how the game looks like now. But if you press and hold "Tab", then the view switches to "Damage-View", and then each part which is not damaged is completely green, and the more damaged it is, the more red it is. Not sure if this would be an elegant solution  

Keeping the GUI clean would be the best way to go I'd say.