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IDProjectCategoryLast Update
0005573Valley 1Suggestion - UI IdeasFeb 2, 2012 11:05 am
ReporterBluddy Assigned ToChris_McElligottPark  
Severityminor 
Status closedResolutionnot fixable 
Summary0005573: Different damage flashing animations
DescriptionI like the flashing white effect when I hit something, but it'd be good to use more "industry standard" colors.

Flashing red would be regular damage. Faster flashing with red, orange or black might be for headshots or when a monster is hit with damage it's extra sensitive to. Flashing green (or white if you're planning on including poison) could be for things the monster is mostly immune to. Some other flashing could indicate slowing damage; alternatively you could have some kind of particle effect for that.
TagsNo tags attached.
Internal WeightFeature Suggestion

Activities

Chris_McElligottPark

Feb 2, 2012 10:39 am

administrator   ~0018500

Unfortunately, due to the nature of how the flashing works, nothing but white is possible -- any other color will just trend to white anyhow, because it's adding the color values together.

In quite a few other games I can think of (mostly older games, but also a lot of indie games), flashing white is quite the norm. I actually got the idea from Cas at PuppyGames, and he helped me figure out the blending mode to actually do the effect.

Bluddy

Feb 2, 2012 10:49 am

reporter   ~0018501

Would it be possible to render a red block using the alpha values of the sprite? That way you'd get the sprite's shape in red.

What kind of blending are you doing for the white flashing?

Chris_McElligottPark

Feb 2, 2012 10:54 am

administrator   ~0018503

It's straight additive stuff. And yeah, we could do a wholly red block in the shape of the sprite, but then we'd have to render the sprite exactly the same way twice in order to make it actually do the flash -- otherwise it would just jump straight to red, so you'd have to make it fade in instead.

I'm not convinced that some of those things would be as visible anyhow, and we've already got other ways for denoting status effects. Even if there weren't some technical challenges with it, I'm not sure I'd love the actual end effect, and this seems like a sort of polish thing that is actually beyond the scope of even 1.0 because it doesn't add much to clarity compared to what's already here.

Make no mistake, we still want to do lots of polish stuff, but if we're going to be shipping 1.0 in 6-8 weeks we have to be really judicious with what we're doing in general. That's an incredibly tight timeline.

Bluddy

Feb 2, 2012 11:01 am

reporter   ~0018504

You could also render the original sprite with alpha of 0.5 and the red block with 0.5 plus using the sprite's alpha values for the edges, so you'd get a tinted red effect that wouldn't be as extreme. The colored blocks would just be untextured polygons so producing them wouldn't require a texture or anything.

Not a big deal though -- I thought it'd be pretty easy to implement, but I understand you have to sift carefully through what you're going to be spending your time on.

Chris_McElligottPark

Feb 2, 2012 11:05 am

administrator   ~0018505

The thing that makes this even trickier is that many enemies are now made up of multiple sprites, for instance, and so all of that has to be managed in layers properly, etc, etc.

At any rate, thanks for understanding on this one.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
Feb 2, 2012 10:37 am Bluddy New Issue
Feb 2, 2012 10:38 am tigersfan Internal Weight => Feature Suggestion
Feb 2, 2012 10:38 am tigersfan Status new => considering
Feb 2, 2012 10:39 am Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0018500
Feb 2, 2012 10:39 am Chris_McElligottPark Status considering => closed
Feb 2, 2012 10:39 am Chris_McElligottPark Assigned To => Chris_McElligottPark
Feb 2, 2012 10:39 am Chris_McElligottPark Resolution open => not fixable
Feb 2, 2012 10:49 am Bluddy Note Added: 0018501
Feb 2, 2012 10:54 am Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0018503
Feb 2, 2012 11:01 am Bluddy Note Added: 0018504
Feb 2, 2012 11:05 am Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0018505