Crab Spider Targeting system

So I'm working on the next issue for my comic Legacy of Sin, and in it there's a scene where the Crab Spider character is thrown into a wall and his helmet is damaged screwing up his targeting system. Well I started thinking about how to show that and I figured the best way was to do a POV shot from the crab spiders's perspective which then got me thinking just what would it look like? So I started dabbling and tinkering with a screen shot.
Well, here's what I came up with:


Here's my thinking behind the lay out of it.
All of it's controlled through a neural link. Along the top of the view you have the main menu. In this case the "weapon systems" tab is selected, hence it being red. That expands the weapons selection menu from the upper left corner of the screen which functions as a wheel. A combination of Eye motion tracking, voice command and neural connection spins the wheel to the intended weapon, in this case it's the entire armature array, what I've got labeled as a Phased Plasma Particle Projection Array in the image. The system that is just selected, it's icon would be displayed at 125% normal size, that's why the image of the array in the image appears so much larger the Particle Project image below it. Once the weapon is selected the selection wheel resends into the corner of the screen (or rather around to the side of the view since this would actually be a panoramic view from inside the helmet.

The lower left corner of the display show system read outs, mostly stuff like fuel and reservoirs of needed fluids, kinda like the gas and engine temp gauges in your car, just a few more of 'em.

The lower right corner is more detailed targeting information showing location info mostly relative on a 3-axis grid. I think the rest is pretty self explanatory.

So, what do you think? Is there something else that should be there? Something displayed differently? What would you expect to see?

Any Apache Pilots around by chance? What do those have displayed on their HUD? F-16s maybe? A-10?

Heh, i agree

sorry for being flippant initially, i think you're off to a good start there. Something you could add on the target info is range in meters/feet, whichever. Also a small directional compass in a corner, coordinates maybe. I think info he would be fed would include the outside enviroment, external temperature?

Personally, I'd be super irritated that my "weapons systems" block so much of my view... Those weapons displays take up way too much screen real estate.

And this may be a preferential thing, but I think your choice of font is too... um... normal... I almost want it to be one of those (almost) unreadable "high-tech" fonts that look all futuristic.

just some ideas I got from random internet gfx that I threw together real fast; perhaps it will give you some ideas.

little bit of Predator on the outsides gfx; that's how I always pictured the inside would be like the Predators hud.

So I did some thinking and figured the Crab Spider should use a panoramic display for a full 360 degree field of view with augmented reality systems over laid on that view. So I made this (The full res version is about 20 megs. if you want to view that I recommend downloading it, it's linked through this reduced res image).



Basically the screen is separated into 5 sections, though I couldn't properly produce this in a 2D environment so I made what you see there.

Basically the middle section, the lower half of the height is the forward view with the active screen, in this case the Weapons and Combat system. This included targeting information, Weapon selection, target coordinations and Target information. As you can see, the crab spider is presently targeting the Longbow Eagle, but he's maintaining secondary target locks on three other Longbow as well in preparation for multi-fire attack.

Like my original concept the weapon selector expands out to what you see there and functions like a wheel cycling to select different weapon settings. When the setting is selected, the wheel retracts back into the corner.

The right most section is the support system/Team status window. I wanted to add more, but I think what is there gets the idea across. This screen allows the Crab Spider to select and access his support systems, whatever they may be.

The left most screen is the Navigation and environmental screen. This contains the map and radar displays. Both of these systems combine to present the image you see where the field of view is displayed through the bright red triangular area. The blue areas represent visual dead zones. Areas that the Crab spider can not see.
The Compass cycles around the top of the screen and displays the current heading as a bearing off of North of south, as shown in the display, the crab spider is presently facing 67.9 degrees off of north meaning he is facing north east.

To upper middle portion of the image is... well... the top view. If the Crab spider were to look upward.

All of these screens can be rotated to the front for whatever situation is present at the time. Meaning the Navigation screen can be on the front should the Crab Spider require it.

So... thoughts?

I think the panoramic view works great; may cause you more work, but looks good to me.

Well I took Ironik's thoughts about useful informtion and kinda reworked the displays. Now what were numbers are visual gauges with what I'm calling a "Seeing is good" approach.

Basically the idea is if you're in the middle of a fight, you're going to be focused forward on your target and you don't what that vision obscured, so your focus would be one the middle 1/3 of the screen, but you can still see the gauges by your peripheral vision. I oriented the gauges so that as numbers that should be high (Armor integrity, ammo reserves and the like) are depleted the gauge will go down and thus recede from your immediate field of focus and like wise the numbers there you don't want rising (IE Internal temperature, reactor pressure ect) if they rise the bar will like wise pull up and out of your immediate field of focus. Hence, "Seeing is good" If you can see the gauge with out looking at it, the material that gauge is measuring is in good standing. Once again, I've got the higher res version linked through the lower res version.



I wasn't really sure how to handle the comm channels so I kinda just threw it on there.

Ah, that's more like it. You can see instantly what's going on. Really nice.

As for the comm channel, the icon representing someone is a good idea. Whenever someone speaks, their avatar pops up.

Oh, I just had a thought.... You know what would be a cool moment in the story is if a battle gets out of hand and devolves into a crazy firefight where everyone is screaming at once... and each time someone says something their icon pops on, but in their panic everyone is screaming at once and multiple icons are popping up, much like a runaway pop-up ad online. Throw in a bunch of word balloons with fragments of speech and you'd have a nice visual representation of the chaos of battle.

Like that scene from Aliens when the aliens attack the marines and everyone is shouting at once. Doing that in a comic would be cool.

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The one with all the stuff on the sides. Dear god no.

Overall; Why is everything red? Also, why reinvent the wheel? I would imagine that a modified in-game HUD would work fine for conveying this type of thing.

This is looking good!

In line with the suggestion to use colour for fast reference, perhaps you could use orange to outline hostiles, like you did the Rikti Drone. I liked the look of that, but I understand you wouldn't want to eliminate all the detail in view. Perhaps highlight 'soft spots' on the target, maybe coloured for usefulness. Immobilize, kill...

Mostly red is good. I can understand Arachnos wanting to keep things "black and white", so having a red palette should reduce the chances of them humanising the objects they see.

I agree it is possible to sneak up on one of these guys, so perhaps 360 degrees is too much.

The comm voiceprint (white) is the most visible object in the picture. I would imagine that should be the hostiles.

The predator stuff is nice. For Arachnosness, perhaps the objects in view could be linked (web-like), such as the suggested order of engagement of the hostiles. Or equipment icons of the hostiles could be arrayed around it, that might look web-like. I imagine perhaps the view somehow could present the targets as being caught in a web already, awaiting feeding time... but I don't have a simple way to project that.

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