Reticle HUD: A combat UI overhaul

Overhaul of the combat UI that puts the “Head-Up” back into “HUD”

Download at CurseForge

Features

General

  • Combat UI redesigned into a compact ring around the reticle
  • Meters use small dots which dim/brighten to mark important values, avoiding the need for numerical displays
  • Meters are dimmed while not in combat and health/energy are not full
  • Meters are hidden while not in combat and health/energy are full
  • Meters are visible while in mouse mode
  • Health meters briefly indicate damage taken
  • Target’s health meter has markers at 75%, 50%, and 25%
  • Energy meters have markers at 5 and 10
  • Sticky targeting: UI continues to track enemy target if reticle is pointed away while in combat

Show/Hide

Assault Rifle

  • Fuse meter has marker at timer value when grenade will become cooked
  • Fuse meter pulses while grenade is cooked
  • With Explosives Expert passive slotted and/or KSR-43 weapon equipped, fuse meter’s marker and pulsing are adjusted

Blade

  • Chi meter pulses while full
  • Spirit Blade meter has markers at 3 and 1 (to indicate whether using Tsunami or Swallow Cut will consume all remaining Spirit Blade charges)
  • Spirit Blade meter pulses while at 1
  • With Supreme Harmony active slotted, chi meter has marker at 3

Blood

  • Corruption/martyrdom meter changes color depending on whether corruption or martyrdom is greater than 0
  • Corruption/martyrdom meter has markers at 10, 60, and 90

Chaos

  • With Duality passive and Tumultuous Whisper active slotted, paradox meter has marker at 6

Dual Pistols

  • Chambers meter changes colors depending on colors of chambers
  • Chambers meter has markers at 2.5 seconds and 1 second remaining during a lock (to indicate whether using Unload or Dual Shot will leave enough time for an additional ability to be queued within the lock duration)
  • Chambers meter pulses during a lock

Elementalism

  • Heat meter has markers at 25, 50, and 75
  • Heat meter also has markers at 79, 86, and 94 (to indicate whether using Mjolnir, Fire Bolt, or Fireball will cause you to overheat)
  • Heat meter pulses while overheated
  • With Maxwell’s Demon passive slotted, heat meter displays a darkened overlay while affected by Maxwell’s Demon, to indicate the heat “save point”

Fist

  • Fury meter has marker at 60
  • Fury meter pulses while at 60 or greater

Hammer

  • Rage meter displays a deeper-colored overlay while enraged (like default UI)
  • Rage meter pulses while enraged

Shotgun

  • Shells meter changes color depending on type of shells loaded
  • Shells meter has markers at 2 and 4 (to indicate even-parity shells for Odds and Evens passive)
  • Shells meter pulses while empty
  • With Odds and Evens passive slotted, segment of shells meter pulses while current shell is even-parity
  • With Enrich passive slotted, shells meter also has marker at 6 while Depleted Uranium shells are loaded

Download at CurseForge

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Version 2.0.0 has been released, and contains the following changes…

  • Added health meters
  • Added activation meters
  • Added dodge meter
  • Added nametag
  • Added activation callout
  • Added rangefinder
  • Changed meter style
  • Improved performance

Version 2.0.1 has been released, and contains the following changes…

  • Fixed player’s activation meter not working if default UI is disabled
  • Fixed dodge meter not hiding if recharge ends during loading screen
  • Improved performance

Version 2.1.0 has been released, and contains the following changes…

  • Changed nametag, callout, and rangefinder style
  • Fixed neglect to change meter style for Dual Pistols
  • Changed Fist’s fury meter to pulse while at 60 or greater
  • Changed Hammer’s rage meter to pulse while enraged
  • Added support for Odds and Evens passive
  • Fixed support for Enrich passive

Any possibility for some tick marks on the opponent’s HP for various percentages?

Can the bars get a rim so that there is no chance that they get hidden by equal/similar color backgrounds in the game world and increase visibility. And can we get number, at least as an option?

I was actually waiting to see if anyone would bring that up. I was undecided about how to handle it, due to a few issues I run into while working on the health meters.

I originally tried adding markers for the health meters at 75%, 50%, and 25%, but since each value requires two markers due to the the meter being symmetrical (a total of six markers), the health meter ended up looking slightly cluttered.

The other issue I ran into is related to barriers. If a barrier pushes the health meter over 100%, the markers would no longer accurately represent the actual health. I considered dynamically adjusting the markers, but that would lead to various performance trade-offs depending on the particular implementation.

So if you have any suggestions or input, I would greatly appreciate it.

One of the primary design goals of this mod is to avoid cluttering the screen with numerical displays. I feel, in most cases, an exact numerical value isn’t necessary, because only specific threshold values actually matter (which this mod uses small dots which dim/brighten, and/or a pulsing effect, to indicate).

The meters had borders before, but I was never satisfied with how the borders were drawn, and removed them in version 2.0.0, and increased the opacity of meter backgrounds to compensate. It seemed fine to me at the time, but if others are still having visibility issues, I’ll add borders again in the next update.

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hi, first of all this mod, for me, is maybe the most relevant one i use since you released the very first version; it feels to me the way tsw/swl should be since beggining, that said, ill try to give you my humble feedback on the new features (i was waiting for all of them since forever) 1. i feel the new mirrorish target healthmeter a bit complicated (not a big deal but need adaptation), maybe unmirroring it would feel more neat and solve those issues you mentioned? in my opinion it doesnt need any marks but if that were the case 50% and 35% should be the ones, as those are the tresholds for some talisman/weapon sufixes. 2. would be so awesome to integrate the defensive target into it too; again, mirroring style would be too much i think. 3. would be awesome (based on boobar, another very convenient mod) if you could make the target castbar more dinamic, like different colors/bar blinking/sound alert for impairable/purgable/cleanseable/avoidable stuff, could be customizable or not as long as it delivers the right info in the right way. Again, thanks a lot for making this mod in the first place. :slight_smile:

I do think this would probably be the best option to make HP threshold ticks less cluttered.

The thing is, the thresholds for weapon/talisman effects don’t have any effect on the way you play. You’re not going to change what you’re doing because Destruction procs are happening now.

Thresholds that affect possible planning are generally the kind of thing you would want to know in combat (for example, knowing Recursia casts Infernal Criticality at 75/50/25% HP, when approaching that last one you may wish to begin saving up energy to the use to burst her down instead of getting there with 0 energy and no cooldowns available. I went into detail about many of the existing dungeon thresholds in Starsmith’s Dungeon Guides: Elite 5+ - #23 by RoseQuix thread. There are some that are missing (The Varangian, for example, I think I remember them being 90/75/50%, but have not had the opportunity to confirm I remember them right from TSW), but the general theme is that many of them are 25/50/75% so those three would cover the majority of cases (and even the cases in which it doesn’t, it’s easier to gauge where it’s at with some landmarks between 0 and 100)

I don’t know what information you have available exactly regarding the state of those, but I assume based on the vanilla HP bars, you can get the amount of HP, max HP, and the barrier amount. With that information, you could perhaps make it, functionally, two overlaid bars, basically like the AEGIS shields of old. Recalculation of the “max barrier” level can be done any time the barrier level is increased.

Though, honestly, I’m not sure I’ve really ever cared how much of a barrier was left so much as whether there was or was not a barrier present.

indeed rose, i see your point and agree. on descendent feedback, when i was first reading the post, tsw aegis healthbar is what came to my mind too, but altough im ussually only concerned about the barrier presence when its a reflective one, in some cases people wants to bruteforce barriers (cough spider cough) and for that should be better to have a way to know the barrier status; again, aegis style seems to me a great way to solve it, also if you want to keep the simetrical style, maybe you could make both health and barrier bars to deplete in oposite directions, or towards centre, but i honestly preffer old fashioned right to left if you ask me.
how former aegis style would help fix the hp/shield barrier overflow? aegis meter was basically a main healthbar surrounded by a secondary shieldbar (aegis related colour with some transparency) then whatever happens to any bar doesnt affect the other as they arent additive side by side as in your design and in vanilla game, instead health/aegis just coexist regardless eachother. as a matter of fact, some mobs/bosses had more than one layer of aegis shields, how funcom dealed with and deliver all that information in such an efficient way is actually amazing me as i write this. you can youtube some tsw nightmare raids/tokio dungeons videos to catch what im saying.
PD: please make the barrier bar pulse if the barrier is refflective :hugs:

I’m happy to hear you’ve been using this mod since its first version! It’s very helpful to have feedback from people who have used this mod for a long time and have a good understanding of what it’s still missing.

The symmetrical design for health meters was a deliberate design choice, inspired by action RPG’s like Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls Online, so it’s something I would like to try to keep. I’ll put some thought into a defensive target health meter; I was originally planning a separate mod to handle defensive target and group health meters (a “healing HUD”), but it doesn’t look like I’ll actually have time to do all that. :sweat_smile:

I’m unlikely to make the activation/cast meter smarter, though. Adding support for reacting differently to specific things would require implementing and maintaining a reference list of enemy abilities and buffs (since the game doesn’t expose this data), which isn’t something I’d be in a good position to do, as I’m actually a rather casual player. The same applies to the suggestion regarding reflective barriers, unfortunately.

I did refer to your post to see if there was any consistency in the health thresholds of boss abilities, and it did seem markers at 75%, 50%, and 25% would provide the best coverage.

The AEGIS shield design sounds like a good idea for barriers, but I’ll need to investigate if it would be feasible to implement, as the arc-shaped meters were rather tricky to implement to begin with.

I think I’ll start with small changes, and simply add markers to the target’s health meter at 75%, 50%, and 25%, and ignore the barrier issue, so I can see how people feel about it first.

oh man, a healing hud would be so awesome indeed, hope you find the time for it, also, the smart castbar is something you can see on boobars mod as i reffered, so the data is there for sure, i was just hoping to get all features from both mods in just one design but i understand what you are saying, im more than happy with the actual status of the mod

I went ahead and forked it and put together a version that has 25%/50%/75% HP thresholds as well as an outline style barrier.

Current implementation of the barrier has a few oddities to work out (display resets to 100% if you look away and look back). I have some ideas on how to fix it, but have run out of time for the night. My fork is located at https://github.com/RoseQuix/com.secretworldlegends.mod.hud.reticle

bar

Don’t mind the absurd number of pips, I was playing around with something when I took this screenshot

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Nice, a fork. You’re speaking my language.

I see how you implemented the barrier design. It seems an obvious solution in retrospect; I was overthinking the “border” aspect before. There’s a small issue due to the transparency of meter backgrounds, but we can probably use a mask to block out the overlapping area. But as you mentioned, the main issue is in determining the maximum barrier value. As far as I’ve seen, the game doesn’t provide this data, so there doesn’t seem to be a dependable way of handling it.

Yeah, the transparency is definitely something I’d like to fix, it’s not high on my priorities at the moment since I’ve found I’ve not generally noticed it in combat. But it sounds like you’ve got a good solution in mind for that issue.

As for barriers, I’m currently going with the idea of having an associative array of dynel IDs to maximum barrier values and removing them when things die. This will still be inaccurate if a barrier is cast, damaged, and then you look at the enemy, but… well, there’s only so much that can be done with the information the game provides.

I’ve also been looking into making it an option to continue to track offensive targets even after looking away. It’s looking promising at the moment but still has some kinks to work out.

Suggestion: An option to turn off the target and hero hp meters would be nice.

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I’m a bit surprised by the amount of requests I’ve received for options to disable parts of the mod’s UI. I originally envisioned this to be a combat-focused mod, with the goal of presenting all combat-related UI in a more-efficient manner, but I’m getting the impression there’s a segment of people who are/were using it for its minimalist design to improve immersion.

I’ve been meaning to look into adding a settings window for the mod, but due to the game’s UI components requiring Scaleform and an old version of the Adobe Flash editor (both of which have been discontinued and are no longer available through normal means), the endeavor would be rather complicated, so I can’t promise any timeframe.

In the meantime, if you’re not using Fist, Hammer, or Shotgun, you can use the 1.x releases of the mod, as the 2.x releases, which added the health meters, don’t have any changes affecting other weapons.

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I’m with you, I’ve been contemplating some design decisions to get more data in there efficiently and effectively rather than less.

I personally want some kind of skill cooldown watcher, but I can’t think of a good, readable, minimalist way to integrate that into the interface.