Unvanquished Forum

The medipad is a flat structures that a single humans steps on to regenerate health and stamina over time. So far we only have a very rough concept for it:

Like the other human buildables, it should have glowing elements that can go out when the structure loses power (which is usually done by disabling the addition map). Additionally, it should have means of displaying that it is currently healing someone. Part of this effect can be a particle effect that we place above the pad while it's active, however it would ideally be backed by some glowing or rotating elements on the medipad itself. It is also possible to extend a mesh hidden inside the pad's body via an animation and apply a translucent effect shader on it (this is what the human spawn does when teleporting in a player).

Speaking of the telenode, feel free to let it inspire the art style of the medipad as it has similiar mechanics:

Unlike the telenode which spawns humans in a certain angle the medipad should be symmetric as it can be used from any side; Ideally the medipad would be round as in the sketch above. Also note that the telenode is about twice as high as the medipad should be (you're not supposed to step up on a telenode, just down from it).

There is the plain hp medipad. I will add screws and other detail stuff in the normal map.

Hi Chris, looking good to me! What do you plan for the surface? An animated glowmap or plain metal like the telenode? Note that, in addition to the healing effect, we'll need some way to display that the medipad is powered, like the lights on the telenode.

I have two ideas in mind, but I don't know what to choose.
#1 is more "medical" with stainless steel and bloodlines, like an autopsy table
#2 is cool glowy sci fi

what do you think?

I think I prefer number one, mostly because I always found it hard to make a good looking glowing effect of the size of number two. We could revive the hologram projector from Tremulous with the glowing spot in the middle, spawning a rotating swiss cross while it's ready to use.

numero uno

@Viech a rotating swiss cross sounds good.

Looking awesome!

You know what's possible? we could display a heartbeat when someone's on top or a line (or something different) if no one is via a scrolling glow map and by swapping out shaders. The only thing we'd need for that is a seperate texture space for the blue display. Not sure how much work that would be given that you already unwrapped it. If it means that you need to redo parts of your work then don't do it and we'll just swap between two static displays instead.

Yes, I also had this in mind, not exactly a heartbeat but some animated bars and graphs and whatever.

For this I wouldn't change anything on the model itself. I would just slap a transparent plane above the display with it's own separate texture. This texture can then be animated how we like.

I dump some ingame screens here too:

Looking really good ingame! A transparent plane sounds like a good solution for the display.

poVoq informed us that computer games have been critized for using the swiss red cross. I didn't read up on the specifics but I see the point in not using the symbol light-mindedly. I guess an alternative would be using an adaption of the Rod of Asclepius as an animated hologram.

In case we go with such a hologram, we would need three animations for it: appearing (when the medipad finishes construction and power is available, when someone steps off of it or when the power is turned back on), idling (power is available and no one is on top of the medipad) and disappearing (when someone steps onto the medipad or when power is lost). The idle animation could just be the symbol rotating or something more fancy involving the snake(s). For appearing I could imagine a small version of the logo flying upwards from within the blue dot towards its idling position while scaling up to full size. No rotation should be done at this point so that the idle rotation can start from a "neutral" orientation. This is how Tremulous did it with the red cross if I remember correctly. Disappearingwould be the opposite and the hologram mesh would be hidden inside the medipad body again. Instead of just scaling you could of course create a more fancy animation involving the snake(s), too. Sounds good and doable?

Really? People have been complaining about the red plus sign in video games? Why?

How about using a green cross instead?