This isn't long (Preview edit: Yes it is), but it felt like something I had to do before I went to bed at 4:40 AM EST. Lovely sleeping habits I have.

Anyway, I saw it somewhere around here about playing without a HUD, especially with a realistic weapons mod like Ballistics, and decided to try it out. Bots on Inhuman, and me without so much as a crosshair (to be honest, I did have team names, but that's because UT isn't a bright game, and I don't wanna take the chance on wasting any needless amount of ammo on my buddies. Call it cheating, but I was infact seperated from them most of the game.

Onto the story, I'm actually surprised at how well the whole match went. I was scrambling around for better weapons and ammo, not knowing how much my machine-pistol had when cha-CHING! Battle Rifle! Everytime I saw a foe I'd jump behind cover and take pop-shots. Even ambush with a grenade or two. When I saw a friendly, I stuck with them until I lost sight of them, briefly taking down anyone they were dealing with, then continuing on my way.

What was most peculiar was...I never needed health! It was...the strangest thing. See, at first, when I wanted to try this, I just pressed "-" enough so that there wasn't anything up there. Then there was teeext and everything else. But I decided I didn't want the text and stuff after 2 deaths, an MRT6 and a cleverly done fire-nade. Then I went into settings and saw a "Hide HUD" feature, in the HUD tab. Jesus Christ it hid everything: Ammo text, player taunts, "Killing Spree", the crosshair, everything (except team names, blah blah. I could remove that, too. It's the option below). But back to the point, once that happened, for the next 9 minutes, I never died, and I never picked up any health! It was the strangest thing. The most I did was pick up *1* armor vest, but I know it doesn't absorb all damage. As well, I never used regeneration, and only picked up 2 +5 bandages, but other than that, I never picked up any medkits, despite me running over them any chance I got. In almost every firefight I got into, I got hit with at least one bullet. In fact, I took a good chunk of a shotgun spread right in my side, but after I took him down, I scrambled for health and never needed any!

It was quite exhilerating, really, running with only instincts in mind. Running out of ammo mid-fight. It was great...the thing is, it just missed a cooouple of things, which is where these come in...

MOD REQUESTS! Actually, mutator requests, but here they are. I hope they aren't difficult

-Everything's...getting dark/fuzzy: This was inspired by an arcadish zombie game, Survival Crisis Z. Despite there being a rather obvious health bar, what would happen was that as you took more damage, your vision got darker. Not to the point where it got pitch black, little by little, as you got hurt more and more, you could see less and less, and that's what I would like from this. I know visual mods are feasible, just look at the lightning gun/tazer. However, UT is dark enough as it is, so what could be configurable is whether the player's vision gets darker or more fuzzy/blurry as they take more damage. Obviosuly, when they're 20 and below, it'll be quite hard to see. More incentive not to run and gun, hm?

-Empty guns are dead weight: This is more Ballistic oriented, but in fact, I don't think it's all that necessary. However, it'd be a cool option to have. Ballistics acts, to say the least, a bit crazy when you run out of ammo and you don't know it. Obviously, with lovely HUDs and whatnot, you SHOULD know when you're running low. However, for the hell of it, I figure there should be an option where if you're down to your last clip, and you run out of ammo, and you press/continue to hold onto the fire button, the game should just TOSS the weapon and immediately switch to the next in line. At the same time, I could just recommend that the game makes the player switch faster to a different weapon, but either way, I find that most ammo is found next to their respective gun, so...yeah.

Wow, I had a lot to say. I'm sure my Whatpulse team'll thank me XD

I'm glad there's a general board to rant in. G'night.

Sounds interesting. I for one love the idea of your vision going away after taking more and more hits.

Maybe go kind of like a Doom approach too (like with the invulnerability pickup), like say you got over 100 health your screen gets brighter and brighter, making it hard to see but letting you know you can take a couple more hits before you need to worry.

A mod along those lines is called Blood Loss I think, you don't get dimmer but it slows ya down, and you eventually bleed to death if you can't get your health back to a certain level. If I find a link I'll edit.

i like the idea of the screen gettings faded and fuzy when ur about to die! i like the idea of not knowing how much health,ammo,(ect) that you have....

You sort of know how much health you have left when the screen gets pretty screwed up.

so..?
if u get shot in real life u realize ur gonna die(u dont need a health bar to tell u've been shot lol)

UT isn't real life ya know.

you mean UNREAL?

I have blood loss, and I actually used it for that round.

Sadly, though, I didn't get to realize the franticness of death because for some reason I never went below 100 health =(

Anyway, how hard would it be to make a mod which makes your sight dimmer/fuzzier/more blurry as you take significant damage?

UT2004 supports motion blur, so it wouldn't be too much work on the coder's behalf.

so unreal + real = "error, cannot compute"?

Nah, Unreal + real = Unreal + real.

If it is Unreal x real, on the other hand, it will simply be Unreal^2.

maybe it should be to the effect of getting drunk in Fable...the blurring in that was fantastic, by the time ur wasted the image looks like a runny oil painting