One of the recent things I’ve learned is the meaning of the iconography at the front of stargates. And I’ve started giving them more attention.
The general problem with this information is that generally gate to gate warps seldomly drop you off at the front of the gate.
A couple of different ideas to surface this information consistently.
Have it shown in the gate tooltip. Show info for the gate and then with tab navigation is possible to read thst info beforehand, but cumbersome.
Player direction aligned holograms. No matter the direction or alignment of the gate, the holograms shown are always on the left-right/top sides of the gate.
There can also be an approach where the gate is aligned to each client, similar to sprite animations in 3D games. Though that breaks the jump destination alignment and points of reference (“get in front of the gate” “uhm, where is the ‘front’?”). Thus this one kept for last as an idea.
Well, if they make the “icons” 3D-hologram animations, they can be seen from whatever angle you approach the stargate in the exact same way, just sayin’
As gates are aligned to their jump destination and players by default land at the nearest side of any object they warp to, it’s to be expected that the player usually does not arrive facing the alignment of the gate except in very rare cases where warp and jump directions align.
This is not a problem.
For one, your camera normally isn’t locked to the direction your ship is facing, but can be turned. You could even center the camera on the gate if you wanted to check the holograms before you jump.
Also as part of the jumping animation your camera automatically aligns in the jump direction allowing you to see all the gate holograks head on with zero player extra input besidea the jump gate command.
The mid-jump animation leaves little room for parsing the information. Sometimes I swear it feels like half a second for me.
Landing in front, or visibility across sides, leaves “breathing room” to casually parse the information. The extra “look at”, or zoom, scroll out, rotate is a hassle for some information that can be a value add or just taking in the flavour of the game (hollograms during insurgencies for example).
No problem, but an improvement in the visibility of in game information and animations.
Additive visuals to the game particularly during long distance travels.
The holograms currently are 2D, but if what I undserstand Syzygium suggests happens and the hologram become intelligent enough to project in 3D towards wherever our camera is there wouldn’t be a ‘side view’.
While 3D is more usable I prefer the style of 2D holograms, they feel more physical and realistic as something that is projected in space and exists there rather than something that is projected toward us through our game UI.
I usually prefer more world elements and less UI in games if possible.
Right now the holograms are textures applied over a transparent plane. They’re 3D. What he actually wants is to turn them into 2D sprites, so that they’re always rendered facing the player.
I think this is a bad idea, it wouldn’t look good. It would make more sense to add this data to the gate’s tooltip in the selected item window. The information is already accessible without being physically at the gate, since you can view the holograms along with a description of what each one means in the gate’s info window.
3D Objects can be designed in a way that their purpose is visible from all sides, for example by rotating them. Or (a little bit of cheating) by letting them always face a player looking at them.