ID:151889
 
Ive never been a fan of displaying a lot of text to the output for damages while fighting. In my current game im working on ive created two outputs and hid one under the other and use a button to switch between the two. One if for chat and general information and the other is battle data like if you hit someone and how much damage (when you kill someone it goes on the main output). But I decided that if you dont have it on the player cant really tell whats happening. So heres the questions...


What ways are good to show damage being done and what are some pros and cons to using them?

with that I have a few ideas but not sure which are better here are my ideas

1. Use screen objects to flash damage numbers (dont really like this one because my damage is percent based so peoples health doesnt change throughout the game)
2. Use flick to flick like a damage animation on who was hit. Like they blink or something
3. Have a health bar for the enemy either below the character or somewhere on screen to show the health.

Lastly I was wondering if anyone had more information on the bar control being added in 430. From the post the Lummox put sounds like it might be able to replace the health bars on screen (hopefully relieve some CPU usage due to update teh health bars)
If you do not like textoutput, you could use sound and simplified visual means.
The attacker having a red square blinking around him and a sound to go with it. A different sound when the situation gets critical maybe.

That is enough for a player to realise she is under attack, without using any text or numbers to pop up ;)
Battle of Evermore displays a sword with the tip pointing in get_dir(attacker, victim) direction when the attacker successfully makes a hit, which I always that was a nice idea. It can be done pretty efficiently, too, if you learn how to reuse images/objects.