My buddy and I are trying to come up with ideas on how to effectively present information related to 'combat' for our game. The combat will consist of players (5 vs 5). Each player will have up to 8 or so attacks and/or actions per round. Worse case scenerio is 80 text messages to output per round. If there are ten rounds, then you can obviously see how much more text will be displayed. To make matters worse, we would like to include emotes (commentary) along the way while the battle is taking place. We are leaning towards having a nice gridlike view (i.e.: Final Fantasy) with an area to output all of the text. Before we get too involved with one set idea, I would like to know if other's out there have come across similar situations in which they've had to think about how to present it. We want to make sure the majority of users do not feel overwhelmed by the sheer amound of text being displayed. Basically we are looking for other ideas, thoughts and/or resources (links, etc) for additional research on the topic. Thanks!

Could you describe what kind of messages could possibly be output? I think I have some ideas in mind based on what you're talking about, but it would help if you could specify what the game displays. Also, I may be misinterpreting you, but I wasn't aware any Final Fantasy game besides Tactics used any sort of a grid system in combat.

As far as what I meant by FF, I meant to say the same style (left to right/side view) w/tiles.

As far as all of the different types of messages output, here are some examples.

Each action would be something like:
<playerA> attacked <playerB> with their <weapon> and hit and/or missing for <damage output> damage!

Now emotes througout the entire combat will be for example:
<playerA> says 'Come get some!'
<playerB> says 'Let's see what your made of!'
etc..

Each person will be able to enter in emotes for specific situations.. example. If the player does a critical hit, they can put in their own message for that situation.

Does that help?

Basically, you will see.. the output will be a massive amount of text.

Thanks!

I see.. but why are you giving each combatant 8 attacks per round? Wouldn't that make combat ridiculously drawn-out and boring?

The best way to go about damage display is the standard system most RPGs have used up until this point, which would be to display the amount of damage done (or if the attack missed) over the victim's head. A combat log with the combat messages you describe could be minimized in a bar at the bottom of the screen (docked, but movable), and you could expand it and see what happened earlier. Player messages could appear somewhere else, perhaps below the player who said it.

Other than that.. honestly, I don't think you CAN clean up display. 80 actions per round is simply overkill.

Maybe you can let the player set a flag to filter the messages. You can have all messages log in the master log, but the displayed log is a subset of those messages.

Quote:

<playerA> attacked <playerB> with their <weapon> and hit and/or missing for <damage output> damage!

Sometimes the player doesn't need your messages, they can already see the weapons and the current hp on screen. If they want to see the exact damage they are doing, they can filter everyone's attack except their own.

How about... not outputting any text at all?

Make the whole thing graphical queues. Final Fantasy did it.

Attacker blinks.
Defender shakes when hit.
Damage number appears over defender's head.

you would also add the appropriate visual queues for status, health, actions, and so on.