Soldiers' Life bar visibiliy

[astuur]

The life bar that is displayed above a soldier' head uses player colors for health and transparent for missing life points.
However the player color is displayed in a very dark shade, that is hard to discern on such a small bar.
(Blue = RGB 2,2,74 [HTML: #02024A]; Red = RGB 119,19,9 [HTML: #771300]
I suggest that the color should be changed to a more saturated and lighter version of the player color
like Blue = 0,0,255 [HTML: #0000FF] and Red = RGB 255,0,0 [HTML: #FF0000]
Like of course for the other colors.
I have added a PNG that shows the comparison

[astuur (astuur)]

The file Sold_new.png was added: comparison existing and proposed life bars

[Nasenbaer (nasenbaer)]

Implemented in svn rev 4946

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

I'd like to reopen this bug because of the transparency of the missing hitpoints. At least to me, this makes it hard to always tell reliably in front of every background. It may be somewhat better if we'd still used get_playercolor()[3] as per Peter's commit instead of the [2] it seems to have been changed back to, but really there may still be backgrounds that make the transparency confusing.

That's why I'd like to propose making it opaque, e.g. as in my branch lp:~nha/widelands/soldier-healthbar

What do you think?

[Astuur (wolfsteinmetz)]

The health bar for me serves a dual purpose; show health and identify where my soldier are.
Of course you can always look at the soldier himself to see the player color, but I usually don't.
So, when the hitpoints are almost gone, you now cannot see the playercolor. (all is transparent).
Replacing the transparency with the complementary color would help here.
I had been thinking exactly along the same lines.
In fact I have modified some screenshots to reflect that, but I am unsure about the results.
Having the complimentary color in there seems quite distracting - especially if that color is also
used as someone else's player color.
Again this is something that you must see in the game, and I am waiting for a merge and Tino's package
to see this.

There is an alternative, maybe: If you could change the now uniform (white) border around the health bar to
the playercolor, you could either leave the transparency as is, or replace it with grey.
The border might have to be a pixel thicker though, to be seen clearly.

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

To clarify, in my merge the "complementary" color is actually a shade of gray based on the brightness of the player color. So if you have a bright player color, the gray will be dark and vice versa.

I tried it with literally complementary colors, but found that to be very confusing. A last option would be to use different shades of the player color.

[Astuur (wolfsteinmetz)]

Ah ... I see ... I did not understand the first time.
Shades of grey might be pretty perfect.

My idea with possible doubling the border looks downright ugly.
And even the player color border in single pixel brings new visibility problems (see arrow)
depending on the background.
So I quess, you solution might well be best.
I'm very much looking forward to see your branch in the game.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I like the suggested change to make it opaque. I vote for the lightest and the darkest shade of playercolor so one can still identify one's soldiers even if they are near death.

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

Using playercolor[3] vs. playercolor[0] doesn't result in a high enough contrast in my opinion. See the attachment, the contrast for blue really isn't very good. At least black also suffers from the same problem.

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

Is it really that important to show the player color in the health bar? After all, the soldiers themselves have plenty of playercolored parts to tell them apart.

[SirVer (sirver)]

your screenshot is convincing. So let's try your greyish approach in trunk for a while and see how people like it. I am Voting for merging it.

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

Okay, I've merged that branch now.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Released in build16-rc1