Health Bar Improvements
There are several different health bar "systems" in UO currently,
each of which are independent of the others. This makes the UI very noisy and
disconcerting. Worse is that the healthbars are not very well designed, and
they are not particularly usable. The current proposal to add a targetting HUD
to this pile is going to make the overall interface even more complicated, and
the developers should sieze the opportunity to normalize the entire health bar
interface in general.
In particular, I propose the following:
- Common healthbar gump: All health bars use common design, with name on top, and three bars below the name for hp, mana and stam. Of course, the gump should be themeable.
- Appropriate coloring: The background color of the healthbar gump should reflect the color of the opponent. This does not currently work with pets in either the 2D or 3D clients at the moment. Furthermore, the current character's own healthbar does not reflect the character's current status (it is not red or blue or green for example).
- Skill-based status updates: By default, only the
HP bar is updated. If you have sufficient evalint, anatomy or animal lore,
the other bars are also updated, as appropriate. The exception to this would
be party members; all of their bars would always be updated by default, as
it is now. For example, the following healthbars show the "normal" mode
(HP updates only) and another mode that shows automatic stamina updates from
sufficient anatomy skill:
- One-click name changes: Names that can be changed
have a button beside the name. Clicking the button causes the name text to
be highlighted so that immediate typing causes the name to be overwritten without
any additional selection being needed (although it should still be allowed
in case you just want to change part of the name). Pressing escape, pressing
enter, or clicking the button again causes you to leave the edit mode. Names
that cannot be changed do not have the button. Here is an example of a pet
healthbar with a name button:
- Improved mini-bars: The mini-bar should have three
rings, instead of being a bar. Each ring should reflect the HP, mana and stamina
of the target, using the same logic as the healthbar gumps. Here is a very
rough sample of what a HP bar might look like:
- Dynamic mini-bars: Dragging a healthbar gump off a targettable object should cause the mini-bar to automatically appear below the object, regardless of whether it is currently targetted or not. That way I can monitor all my critical targets (guildmates, party members, pets, enemies, etc) without having to look at all of the gumps and then figure out which gump goes to which object.
- Automatic mini-bar options: There should be options to automatically display mini-bar for each of the following: party members, guild members, alliance members, enemy guild members, all enemies. That way I would not need to drag the health bar off everybody to be able to see their immediate status.
- Highlight colors: The existing highlight system should remain in place, and should not affect mini-bar coloring. I can tell the color of the targettable object by mousing over it easily enough.
- Current-target HUD: The proposed addition of a current-target HUD would be an excellent addition to the above system, and would require no additional gumps or other changes.
The above changes would provide a simple, clean and consistent UI for monitoring the health of targettable objects on screen. Coloring and behavior would be consistent; player skill would provide valuable supplemental information about the health of targettable objects; mechanisms like partying would continue to have value; routing tasks such as renaming a pet or summon would be simplified; and targetting would be greatly improved.