HUD

From Black Mesa: Wiki

An example of the Black-Mesa HUD showing most of the in-game notifications as well as subtitles.

Overview

The HUD, or Heads Up Display, is the on-screen representation of the player's vital information, such as their health or ammo.

Its layout is similar to other games in the Half-Life series:

The health and HEV suit power of the player is displayed in the bottom left corner of the screen
No flashlight status since the flashlight battery never runs out.
To the bottom right of the screen the ammunition currently available in the weapon.
By pressing 1-5 or using the scroll wheel will display your inventory of weapons in the top left.
If the player goes through a hazardous environment, an icon representing what is harming the player will display on the bottom left of the HUD just above the health indicator.

Redesign History

The HUD in Black Mesa uses Distance Alpha graphics and true-type fonts for the numbers and text. The distance alpha images were chosen because they look almost as good as vector images (looking crisp at all tested resolutions), are easier to make, render faster and use a constant amount of texture memory. Also they are fully customizable through .res files. [2] The crosshair and icons are all true-type fonts [3].

The finalized iteration of the HUD is all new code and uses a post-process shader to create a glow and scanline effect [4].

The HUD has gone through many iterations throughout the life of the project with several iterations having been shown to the public.