<aside> 🚨 If you have not already read the previous boards it's recommended you do so. In this board we will be discussing the implementation of Option 2.
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So we started by developing the system for adding Damage Indicators above players in scoreboard, as depicted in our mock up video that we did. The video showed me walking up to a player, hitting the and the health below the player being displayed and then after 7 seconds the health being hidden.
After we settled on developing Option 2, during development we ran into a strange issue, that basically meant that scoreboards even if you don't include a player in them, or you try to remove a player from them, it just shows them as having 0 hearts. What this meant that you would go up to someone and hit them, and the scoreboard would be created but then everyone else on the map would suddenly show as having 0 health. We tried to figure out ways around this, but the functionality seemed baked into the client so there wasn't much more we could do at this step. This looked weird and we weren't happy with the result so started tweaking how the system works.
As some of you may remember, an old game of our calls TNT Trouble. In this game you could collect TNT and run to the enemies base with it. Each TNT had a timer and when you picked it up, it would show above your head. Fortunately, we still had the technology available from this game that let us show text above a player, which almost seamlessly follows the player without lagging behind. We've started work on implementing this change and this is the first image of what we've managed to create.
The advantage of a Hologram over a scoreboard is that we're not limited by any string length limits or forced to have a number in it. This means that we're able to show things such as regular hearts and absorption hearts as different colours in the hologram much easier now. We'll be experimenting with these magical features over the coming weeks.
A damage indicator showing using Holograms rather than a scoreboard.
Here we have a video of a fight using the new Hologram system. Note how you can see the players health as well as the number of absorption hearts they have as well. It's currently not perfect and we're still trying to improve it, but we felt that it would be nice to share this early version of the Damage Indicators.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/8bb3072a-8404-420b-9889-25d4180de3a2/Video.mp4
We not only wanted to give players the traditional damage indicator, consisting of a heart and a number to show how many hearts a player has. A popular display for seeing a players health is showing a player's health bar above their head, as this display is commonly used by mods. Since we were using a completely custom health bar system (not using scoreboards), it opened up the possibility for us to implement a feature like this. The new damage indicator can be enabled via the settings menu, as well as the damage indicators can be completely disabled now.
The setting that can be toggled to change how damage indicators show.
<aside> ⚠️ We're referring to Damage Indicators in game as "Health Indicators" for now as we believe it's clearer as to what it is.
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Here are some photos of what the new Damage Indicator bars look like in a game of FFA:
