Repairing Gears #4: Information Management, Part 2
I want to go over just a small portion of the information we want to display for this week’s topic. We’ll look only at the unit frames, the area that displays the health and “special” bars (mana, rage, endurance, energy, whatever) of you, party members, and your target. I promised diagrams, so I’ll go ahead and get right into them, and then wrap it up with a small tie-in of why they were designed this way.
Now, let’s take a moment and go over what’s there. The first large circle on the left side is the player information area. The outer ring is health, the second ring is whatever “special” bar should be showing and the innermost ring can be used for a couple different things. For instance, it could fill up as you gain experience in the game, or perhaps it could fill up as some sort of quest counter, for a specially designated quest in your log (as you kill “x” amount of people or collect “x” amount of item it goes up.) You could also just show what level the person is there, or their class icon, the uses would depend on the game in this case, but I’m just trying to keep it generic. Directly to the right of that is the health/special bar numbers and percentage, which are fairly self explanatory.
Below that is the party member bars. They are small and only show the information that is really useful. Health and “special” with a small spot for their name above (you’ll notice your character does not have a slot for name, if you don’t know the name of your own character, you have bigger problems, it shouldn’t need to be displayed on your screen.) To save even more room have the XXXX/XXXX health and special bars moved right on top of the unit frames and set the percentages just to the right.
Finally, to the right is the target bar, which is basically the same as the player bar, so it shouldn’t need to be explained any more. The question of why not make all the bars small and rectangular probably comes up, especially if we are trying to save room, but there is a reason for the display of target and player in this way, that will be discussed next week though.
That will wrap it up for this weeks Repairing Gears, next week we will look at how buffs/debuffs show up on these unit frames and a bit more as well.
unit frames, information management, repairing gears, player, target, party
March 21st, 2007 at 10:03 pm
[...] If you head on back to last week’s Repairing Gears you’ll be able to get a good picture in your mind from the diagram for what I am about to add to it. Right on the player’s circle (or target’s circle, for that matter) would be attached smaller circles that have a color/graphic on them representing a certain debuff type. For instance, there may be a circle on a person when they have a poison on them. Mousing over that circle would display the information about the poison (damage/time remaining). If they also had a disease on them then they would have 2 circles sitting around their bars. If there were multiple debuffs of a certain type on the person the mouse-over effect would show each debuff. Fairly simple. For buffs there would really only be 2 circles that would ever be needed. They would be buffs you were able to cast on yourself (with mouse-over for time left and effect) and other buffs that players put on you. Simple. [...]