Originally Posted by Malorn
What you describe could be achieved with a single health bar. Its just bigger and at a certain point the vehicle becomes disabled and starts on fire. When that happens depends on how big the 'disabled' health bar is vs the normal health bar. Just stitch them together.
You seem to dislike having a false sense of health where you see a health bar and it's not really the health you have because some of it will mean you are disabled.
That seems reasonable to me to show players exactly how much health before their vehicle will be useless rather than hiding it inside a health bar.
But on the other side of things, its also important to show hostile players exactly how much health is required to blow something up. I assume there will be an advanced targeting implant or something similar that shows health of targets. The opposite is true for blowing something up as being in i - you don't care about disable, you just want to know how close something is to being dead and having two health bars is deciving as to what it might really take to destroy the tank.
|
I don't think a two-colored health bar would be deceiving. You could have green on one side, red on the other. While in the green you still had control of the vehicle. Once in the red you'd lose control and the vehicle would start to slowly take burn damage, and at 0 it'd explode. Seems pretty straight forward.
EDIT: doh semi-ninja'd by Xyn. Xyn, I'd much rahter have one single two-color bar than have a second one appear once the vehicle got disabled. I think it'd throw ppl off a bit too.
Originally Posted by IronMole
Planetside used to have vehicle disabling on aircraft (lost control at certain damage) until they changed it to the bailing mechanism.
|
Before late 2005 ground vehicles used to get disabled too once you reached <10% armour. You'd suddenly lose all control of the vehicles movement and you'd slowly roll to a stop. I think you still had control of your weapons/turrets though.
And it sucked for exactly the reason Malorn mentioned. It was hard to tell on the armour bar at what exact point you'd lose control, so often you'd think you still had a little "life" left when suddenly one stray bullet would cause you to lose control. It felt like the game was almost taunting you since if you had just a
tiny bit more health you could've escaped. But once you lost control you were as good as dead since in PS1 a stationary vehicle is a dead vehicle. Losing control just prolonged the agony, largely due to the uncertainly of being able to tell at what point you'd actually get disabled.