On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Leonardo Herrera wrote:
> In combat, an hp bar can be useful, too:
The problem with this is that they're harder to read when there's lots of
bars displayed on the screen at the same time. The principal advantage of
a meter is that you can interpret it at a glance. Consider your car's
speedometer: you have some sense of what the needle location means, so you
don't need to actually read it to determine your speed. If the meter were
sliding about the dashboard[1], you'd have to focus more to read and
interpret it, which certainly reduces its usefulness -- maybe to the point
where it has no significant advantage over just a simple numerical
display.
It might not be that bad. It really depends upon how fast, furious, and
spammy your combat (and related) systems are. Certainly it's worse than a
static bar, as you might achieve with:
send_to_char(ch, "\0337" /* Save status. */
"\x1B[23;24r" /* Set static region. */
"\x1B[24;0H" /* Where bar is ... */
"Health: [%s]" /* The bar. */
"\x1B[0;22r" /* Set text region. */
"\0338", /* Restore old status. */
SBAR(hb, GET_HIT(ch), GET_MAX_HIT(ch), 5));
which would work on good terminal emulators, but not much else.
> OTOH, A feature of this kind belongs more to certain types of MUD (H&S)
> than to a RPG oriented one, IMHO.
Would you elaborate on that? I can't fathom why a seemingly innocuous
interface element, like a meter, would belong more to one type of game
than the other.
-dak
[1] Let's just say you got a *little* too into your Hendrix collection...
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