HL-"It's a secret to everybody..."

Always better to read than "Pay me for the door repairs."

Anyway, I'm terrible at keeping secrets when I'm excited about something, and even though the proof-of-concept is less than ideal to demo the intended feature, here it is.

We are adding damage-zone-graphing to combat, you will be able to see at a glance how wounded the fighters are, and where- this will feed off the overall limb condition for now, though I have considered making a more detailed version of it down the road.

For the time being, I've elected to use a single relatively fit unisex character for the graph, the exception being the "breasts" damage zone will be omitted for characters that have no developed breasts...

This is achieved by a simple series of overlapped PNGs, color-shifted with CSS. The displayed "yellow" is the base color, red, green, black, and gray are created by the CSS filter alone.

Once the images are imported (see the CMS file-support post), and integrated into the new UI, we won't use static "green"/"red" conditions, instead we will apply a gradient value dynamically between those ranges, based on condition 0..1 for red-green, and -1..0 for black-red.

As you've probably guessed, green is fine, yellow is hurt, red is critical, and black is effectively dead/destroyed tissue.

And, because we're using layered PNG24s, instead of some 8-bit format with only a single transparency value, we can gently blend the overlap of regions, for a more subtle implication of how they interconnect. The most obvious of these is probably groin/genital damage, which overlaps some with abdominal damage/condition- but if you look closely you can also see overlap with the arms going into the pectoral, trapezius, and latissimus areas of the chest and neck zones.

Anyway, the design is fairly simple to integrate or update, and is our first usage of color-shifted, layered images in HardLife- something we will be using a lot more down the road when start adding character and scene graphics late next year.