ChupacabraHUD

condition green compass for better navigation

compass as target tracker

target tracker does not block view

custom missile display and missile ID feature

general layout

Introduction

The ChupacabraHUD was created for Staer9's Chupacabra ship. There were some specific guidelines to be followed including curved bar gauges. Here is the stand-alone version of that HUD. Enjoy this work completed October 15, 2011 (original version).

CommonSenseOTB proudly presents the following HUD inventions:

• Curved Bar Gauges
• Custom Missile Display w/missile ID feature
• Compass as Target Tracker
• Shield Capacitor Gauges.

Overview/Features

The ChupacabraHUD is done in a style where primary information is located central to the crosshairs making for quick assessment of your situation.

Forward and aft shields and speed are done as a curved bar gauge which is animated and composed entirely of selector: drawSurrounds. These gauges flash and change color in an attempt to highlight the current state of the gauges.

Altitude and cabin temperature gauges are only displayed when close to any suns, planets, and moons. The compass is animated and automatically provides a big compass for navigation on condition green. When the ship has a target, the compass automatically stays out of the way when the target is in the crosshairs. There is a target tracking mode that provides a large compass to track targets while dogfighting. Very effective to keep track of exactly where a target is.

Early on during the design of this HUD, I came up with a way to make a custom missile display. Each missile pylon requires a gauge that has spacing set to something huge like 5000 or 10000. Each gauge is then placed to display a particular pylon at the right position and you will not see the other pylons for that gauge as they will be off the screen. That's it. Simple eh? To go along with this first ever custom missile display is a missile ID system which uses n/shift+n to select individual missile pylons and highlight them and print the type of missile and pylon number as a message the player can read. This is another first. Works well and could easily be adapted for use in other Huds.

Another first in this hud is a gauge for oxp equipment, in this case, custom displays for forward and aft shield capacitors. This eliminates the spamming of messages seen in other huds and also eliminates the sounds necessary to inform the pilot that the capacitors are charging. Now you can just see the information you want with no clutter.

Lastly, an enormous scanner allows pinpoint accuracy of objects around you.

Overall, it is a fully equipped and very playable/usable HUD. Enjoy!

Summary/Future

While not the best method for drawing curved bar gauges, the methods in this HUD can be used for control and animation in other animated hud designs. For my next curved bar gauges hud it is probably better to wait till post MNSR when using images for the animations will become possible and one can can make a fantastic(perfect)curved bar gauge and this will improve upon this concept considerably. That will be lots of fun!

Requirements

• Oolite v1.75.3 or higher due to CTD when the player dies on earlier versions of oolite.
• Compatible with the Sniper Camera System v1.1.oxp.
• Compatible with Target Reticle Sensitive.oxp.
• Compatible with the shield capacitors and will display a simple gauge for both front and aft readings.
• No dependencies.

Developers

You have unlimited permission to use these hud.plist/equipment.plist arrays and scripts as the foundation of your HUDs provided you give fair attribution to the author (CommonSenseOTB). As well all variables, equipment names and hud.plist names must be uniquely labelled. NOW GO AND MAKE SOME AMAZING NEW HUDS!!!

Downloads

• Version 1.1 (14/10/2011)
• ChupacabraHUD is the stand-alone version of this HUD.
• alternative download

Check here for more Information

To post your comments and suggestions on this new HUD concept please click here

Staer9's Cupacabra ship (for bounty hunters & pirates)