[Prboom-users] Ammo empty/full patch

[David D. <dam...@ch...>]

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/games/ammocount.prboom.patch
is an itty-bitty patch to the prboom source that changes weapon HUD
colours (and status bar colours if the status bar is not "always red")
to reflect weapons being completely without ammo or completely full of
ammo. I wrote this because I'm fed up of setting the "red ammo"
percentage to 1% to approximate what I actually want - ie, to know
when some weapons have no ammunition at all (after all, the difference
between one rocket and no rockets is quite significant).

Why did I choose the colours I did? First of all, I didn't want to
break the existing red/yellow/green/blue convention in prboom. A lot
of the remaining colours are very pale. Hence full ammo ends up
CR_BLUE on the HUD, CR_BLUE2 on the status bar, just as "super" armour
and health amounts are. No ammo is trickier; on the status bar CR_GRAY
is a perfectly good grey but on the HUD it's bright white and also
already used for weapons that take no ammo; CR_BROWN is the least
white of the remaining colours (CR_ORANGE produces white text and
orange ammobar for reasons I ahem don't understand) so CR_BROWN it is.

Other ideas which I am too lazy for:

Cause a CR_DARK to exist and use that for no ammo (and armour? And
presumably health as well, for consistency, not that you care about
ease of reading the HUD in the heat of battle once you have 0 health).

Make these colours actually configurable as automap colours are. They
must be a nuisance for people with anomalous colour vision.

Understand the refire routine for each weapon - which might be altered
by dehacked patches - such that the BFG9000 shows "empty" with <40
cells and the SSG when only one shotgun shell is available. This is
easy if you don't take account of dehacked (but gives the wrong
answer), very hard if you do.

-- 
David Damerell <dam...@ch...>
Clown shoes. I hope that doesn't bother you.
Today is Second Mania, January.
Tomorrow will be Second Aponoia, January.