Regarding the Combat vs. Exploration mode:
I too use exploration mode for the above stated reasons. If I’m in an interceptor I need to see all smaller ships as they are potential threats / targets, the corvettes for repair / re-arm, every mine / torpedo I could intercept, the position of the defense platforms, etc.
The only thing missing for me personally is that the targeted ship should really…
STAND OUT
…from the rest of the icons.
DreamKeys
I never really used the MFD. Too many targets were right in front of my ship. To be transparent; I’ve only played two days.
If symbology in the MFD was more helpful I might look at it more since I like to shoot torpedos at carriers.
I do like the indicator on the side of the HUD that indicates where you need to angle your direction of travel to find it again.
The color of the non-selected (non-active) weapon was a little too dark; i.e. I never saw the torpedo in the bomber until I saw it in the radial menu.
My experience with the exploration mode was is that it signaled the clearing of the area. i.e. last enemy killed, exploration mode kicked in.
Thanks for sharing this.
Quite a bit of simplification in there. Which is alright if the game stays deep.
Here’s how I feel about this.
On first sight it does look quite interesting. I can remember the big discussion about the centre bar though and how much influence things in the centre region had.
Here’s the thread I am pointing at: To bar or not to bar - that is the question
For now I did dig up my old score thingy and compare the two:
Current
400 Points - 0 * 4 [R1] - 7 * 3 [R2] - 10 * 1 [R3] - 20 * 1 [R4] =
349 Points
Proposed
400 Points - 136 [Center] (Debatable) - 13 * 4 [R1] - 15 * 3 [R2] - 12 * 1 [R3] - 19 * 1 [R4] =
136 Points (With Center Deducted) / 272 Points (Without Center Deducted)
I feel it is not worth it. Have the virtual MFDs do the work. Add the real MFDs for fun. Have a reason to look down. I would use them for weapon status and use mouselook to look down and use them. I really would.
The proposal looks quite cool though I have to say. It’s intriguing. How did it play as you have tested it?
(By the way, I love how the interceptor turned out without the Bar … that curve … it’s super unique)
Sounds great. Being able to switch ingame with the default being alright for new players will work out great. Fighter pilots have the same issue with tons of information having to be displayed and limited screen-space … MFDs are the solution they use with the pilot being able to control what is displayed depending what he needs.
I really like the Idea of Combat mode being depended on what the player does instead of the surroundings. Combinging it with “target selected” and having the “clear target” function return to it might work.
New player experience is important here. I don’t think new players will ever clear their target though.
As for veterans like us … it hurts to fly while wearing blinds. That’s why I always prefer the Exploration mode. Faded Icons was the biggest achievement when it comes to icon clutter. It seems that wasn’t enough for new players.
This probably will work. Does this also include guns and blasters?
if this gets implemented. Please two events for next and previous weapon in case people want to bind the mousewheel (I probably will, with a modifier key).
To note here is that this is quite a significant change.
There’s a lot of difference between going in the direction of weapon groups with that allow for different weapons and types or going more the FPS route where there is only ever one weapon delectable.
Currently using MK6 and 7s Together already is doable but mostly any other combination doesn’t make much sense. I feel it is good if the ship load out makes sense.
If I have to frantically switch between groups to be competitive because else I am not using the maximum DPS the ship can output … then that’s not desirable.
I feel like switches would be called for when ranges change and when target type changes.
Cool. About the alternate selection mode. I think both could be run in parallel without much usage problem if implemented well.
At first when I read it I though having “primary function (left mouse)” and “secondary function (right mouse)” also close the menu. Being able to toggle or select multiple things makes sense though.
Looking forward to this. 
I’m willing to try, but I fear you are going to end up going down a rabbit hole of needing to physically redesign the cockpit. Physically splitting the MFDs up and placing them forward, to the sides, and a little bit down is what I think will end up needing to happen to make this truly work.
For combat mode, I would like to suggest that instead of filtering things not on the list completely out of the hud, have their icon reduced to an approximately 20 pixel size dot. While that might not seem like enough to bother with, couple it with it’s local relative movement and you should be able to distinguish it from something like a background star fairly easily.
I think there will still be a high desirability to have an alternate weapon fire option within any given weapons group. Though given previous changes where you can’t fire both at the same time, this is certainly a logical change. Recommend flexibility on this as it really only became a problem with capital ships and multiple different weapons with different projectile velocities.
I want to hava a functional cockpit with working MFDs.
At ALL costs!
I am serious here.
Some HUD/cockpit thoughts from me (sorry if this repeats what others have said, I haven’t really read much of this thread):
Head position
MFDs
Front/rear radars
Ammo information
Central HUD
Exploration vs combat HUD
I’ve been thinking for a while about the bars not showing up when full ( not just energy by the way, but also shields / hp etc… ). The real problem is that you no longer have a way to tell if a bar is full, or empty.
Indeed, and that is why I would limit it to only the energy and heat bars. The others are useful to see all the time, but those two - which are related to their respective weapons - only need to be active when firing and therefore you are consuming energy/building heat.
Players will quickly pick up what is going on. But you’re right, if hull/shield did the same, it could be confusing. Plus I like having something to kind of bookend the two sides of the HUD.
Keep in mind though that asymentry can look quite ugly and if most of the time the HUD is ‘left heavy’ because
Also
Why wouldn’t empty be visible? Isn’t the black shadow currently shown when emptying. I think there should be a way to tell the difference between arbitrary empty and full at all times.
Then if the whole thing is faded out you see that the reference 'for instance black shaddow is missing.
As for icon blobs. As I mentioned a lot of times now. They shouldn’t exist. Ever. They are not useful in any way if there are 30 icons on top of each other. No point really. It’s ugly.
If there is functionality to select between those ‘blobs’ then at the same time those blobs shouldn’t look like blobs. Else it’s hard to tell when you can use that functionality.
The idea to have combat/exploration mode bound to [if you have an enemy targeted] is a no go.
There are tons of reasons to target different enemies and tons of reasons why i might not have a hostile target in a combat area. None of it has to do with my desire to use a certain mode. Those modes are too important to trust any automatic. There must remain a manual option to chose what you want.
Tough choices!
For me, the cockpit is the eye of the craft, and modern fighters are completely designed around the pilot’s head position. I can understand if you don’t want a bubble canopy, due to (I’m guessing) the vacuum of space and wanting to convey a reinforced structure type feel to the player sitting at the controls.
But looking at it, it feels like the pilot’s head is in the wrong spot, or the canopy itself needs re-shaping. I would ditch the clunky MFD, it looks nice, but it’s not really helping the situation. You have this nice big flat front facing window that is completely under-utilised. Tuck it (MFD) away so you can only see it when you pan the view around. Embrace the HUD displays. That’s how I imagine a space ship would function, anyway. It’s all about giving maximum vantage to the pilot. Sit the pilot a bit lower, thus rasing the support beams out of the peripheral. Open up the front facing window. Move the head closer to that window so it’s more open. My 2c
Personally I want an almost completely physical cockpit where only a little bit of information is projected on a HUD.
I think this fits to the type of science fiction Infinity Battlescape apparently belongs to (tech like in the movie “Alien” instead of tech like in “Minority Report”).
A cluttered and overused HUD is not very immersive imo, because it is so separate from the actual game world.
This separation between HUD and game is already a bit too much right now imo.
Sometimes its too easy and expedient to focus only on the information displayed on the HUD instead of the “reality” outside of the ship.
This also happens because many times the enemy ships are so small/dark that they aren’t really visible anyway, so all you have left to look at is a rectangle. This is also the reason why I like to get fast and close into the battle because otherwise its visually not very exciting (also a good reason to keep weapon ranges low).
So I would prefer ship-system-information to be integrated into physical MFDs (heath, weapon info, etc.) and that only information is shown in the HUD that is not feasible otherwise (ship markers, crosshairs etc).
I think the game would benefit from that in terms of immersiveness and visual quality. I also think every pixel obscured by a 2d HUD element is kind of a shame considering the visual quality of the game world and its structures.
It is funny, i find myself on the other end of the Physical Cockpit vs. virtual HUD spectrum than TARS.
I prefere a maximum of functionality in the HUD and as little cockpit in sight as possible, allowing to look outside without “head turning”, something i just do not do outside VR and with no headtracking setup. If i want a full view around, i switch to third person camera. And right now, a lot of important information is missing in 3rd person, that a virtual HUD could still display no problem.
Full physical cockpit has the difficulty of having a whole new job to do for each ship, and i also think it would not work for capitals at all. I can see the appeal, but i doubt Battlescape will ever go to a flight simulator - like cockpit solution.
Imho, just like most games, there will be a compromise. We could think about what to move to the physical displays. But that is still tough…
Why not have the possibility to turn on/off various Mfd’s by pressing a key.
This way people can decide themselves which Mfd’s are more useful or not for them.
Just an idea.
Hi, I think that you need to let the Players arrange the appearance of the cabin and devices themselves, for example, like skins. And to make it possible to fight from a third party, in this case the skins will be located where the player places them.
We just started work on our new HUD this week and it will be configurable so you can place HUD widgets, we refer to them as Virtual Multi-function Displays (VMFD), wherever you like. That being said I’m not sure what you mean by “fight from a third party”.
Hi, The game from under Steam starts, there is no problem with this. I had entered that the servers are empty. Interested in translation into Russian. Sorry for my poor English, I studied other languages. Fighting from a third party can be viewed from this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv1rjVizjog&t=3s
Ahh, you’re talking about playing in the 3rd person (no worries about the english). We do have a 3rd person flight mode but we currently aren’t planning on allowing 3rd person flight with a HUD. We will be providing more translations as the game matures, Russian is high on our list as we have a large number of Russian players however I cannot provide an exact timeline for a Russian translation.
Hi, tell me which program you can translate if I take the English localization file and translate it in the program. I tried several programs, it doesn’t work.
Any program that can read / write a .csv file, like OpenOffice Calc or Excel.
For the font to appear in game, you need 3 things:
UI_Font_Main_Name,“Roboto Condensed”
UI_Font_Main_Path,"$Dev/Client/GUI/Fonts/RobotoCondensed-Regular.ttf"
UI_Font_Vertical_Offset,0.1
UI_Font_Scale,0.8
As for the rest, each line should contain a tag and its russian translation.
See this thread for the template:
