By, HUDson Soft!

Last time I found that the "people can only remember 7 plus or minus 2 things at a time" should be reworded "interfaces should have no more than 5 to 9 things displayed". It led me to think about how other games do their interfaces. And then the GUI for the FPS genre of games came up. There really hasn't been any innovations to the GUI since Half-Life really. Or even Doom.




It may or may not be a problem. "Don't fix what's not broken" as they say. However, a little innovation in this area would probably serve this industry quite well. It may even inject some valuable years into the cash cow that is the first person shooter.

So obviously you can't get rid of the main window. That is a pretty crucial part of the interface. Without it, a first person shooter wouldn't be first person, a shooter, or a game for that matter. So there's one to keep.

A useful tool in other genres of games (and other applications) are context-sensitive menus. They always work quite well for giving users more specific control over their environs, such as games like The Sims, and applications like Word 2007. I really like the way Cryis implements Sim-style mouse-wheel menus. While they aren't context sensitive, their design would be made more useful if it were context based. Perhaps this would be a more useful method for popping up things like avatar abilities, actions when next to a vehicle, or for customising powerups. Sort of like the communication system of Republic Commando, only controlling player actions, rather than communication options. This would only popup on trigger by the user eg. on middle click or something like that.

Then again, I don't think a HUD should completely remove every staple of FPS huds. Ammo, health and armour should remain as it is: on the corners of the screens using an unintrusive font.

So ammo, health, armour, main game and context sensitive menu. Five things, well within the maximum number of interface elements. This is how I'd "revolutionise" a first person shooter's HUD. Admittedly, it's not much of a revolution, but the combination of successful elements from other popular GUIs would prove to be a great success.