UI Revolution Project

The goal of project is to utilize old UI mods and create new ones. New mods must be customizable in order for user to be able to enable/disable things user needs/doesn't need. Code base must be extendable for further development and be performant as well, so, user won't have issues with lagging game.

Here are already mods having more comfortable and customizable tools to work with.

TeamInfo Share

Provides with UI and communication with teammates about nukes, smds and experimentals.

Current functions:

• timer
• count of loaded missiles
• % of completion
• toggable UI of categories
• customizable positions of texts

Upcoming functions:

• color customization
• more types of categories

Idle Engineers Light

Provides with UI info about idle engineers, idle factories, upgrading mexes and loaded tmls/smls displayed as icons on worldview.

Current functions:

• toggable display of icons

Upcoming functions:

• various icons to choose (user's as well)
• square + text mode

ECO UI Tools

Provides with mexes panel with functional buttons and info about mexes. Displays upgrading mexes with icons on worldview.

Current functions:

• T1/T2 mexes
  • start upgrading and pause
  • start upgrading and pause for those on screen
  • select all
  • select all on screen
• T1/T2 upgrading mexes
  • pause all
  • pause one with lowest progress
  • select all
  • select all on screen
• T1/T2 upgrading paused mexes
  • unpause all
  • unpause one with highest progress
  • select all
  • select all on screen
• T3 mexes
  • select all
  • select all on screen

Upcoming functions:

• toggable icons
• customization
• resource usage panel
• various icons + square with text
• autopause

HotBuild Overhaul

Corresponding post.

Better chat

Corresponding post.

Specific Target Priorities

In Dev TBA

Selected Units Info

In Dev TBA

Smart Ring Display

In Dev TBA

4z0t's Score Board

TBA

Advanced Selection Tools

TBA

Additional Orders Extension

Adds new orders combining some functionality of others or quality of life ones.

• Select ACU/goto to it / OC mode
• Select all idle engineers on screen not ACU
• Select nearest idle t1 engineer / reclaim mode
• Remove last queued unit in factory
• to be added
  In Dev

EzReclaim

Displays reclaim labels in reclaim mode. Groups reclaim labels and colors text according to amount of mass in it.

In Dev

UI Mod Tools

The library of tools for UI modding. Docs are coming with 4th (mb 5th) version.

• Options for UI mods
• Query wrapper to work with tables
• Unit functions
• Layouter for UI

What's next?

As you can see there are a lot of mods being developed by me, but why?
Let's look through mod vault and select the most popular:

Supreme Score Board

Legendary mod, I appreciate work been done by HUSSAR. It is one of the mods I really like. However it has obsoleted. Code base is poor, so, you can't add, you can't remove. It takes a lot of space in UI making user with smaller screens struggle using it.
In addition, It doesn't match factions' skins and doesn't hide with whole UI (Ctrl+Shift+F1).

Idle Engineers 1/2/reloaded

Performance issues, poor code base. Uncustomizable.

Supreme economy

Takes a lot of space in UI. Bad UI design. Poor code base. Uncustomizable.

Advanced Selection Info + similar mods

Performance issues. Uncustomizable.

ECO Manager

Legendary UI mod. There were rumors that you could become 3k using it. No, but you would have performance issues, bugged funcions, broken hotkeys and vulnerability to icon spamming (aka smds everywhere). In addition poor code base and uncustomizable functions you might not needed.

Cool, hah? But who am I to decide? Well, you decide to believe me or not.
Since I am doing this alone I can't even think about revolution and that's why I want your help.
I need:

• Devs: Very specific, but if you really want, ask me
• Testers: I can't test all things I do
• Promoters: Spread our goal around others and blame listed mods

Keep in mind that I also participate in FAF development and this extends to FA UI as well, there are tons of issues to be fixed.

Obviously you are highly motivated and the ui modding world is going to be a better place with you doing all this.

However there are already mods that do these things and making them slightly faster / prettier / better code, is not as useful as adding a new feature. For example just skip all that stuff above and make a mod that allows two construction queues - the repeat queue and the one off queue. Imo that is more useful.

Stop copying old mods

What’s with all the negativity he can do this as well as making new UI mods

@zeldafanboy he is fine

@nine2 said in UI Revolution Project:

Obviously you are highly motivated and the ui modding world is going to be a better place with you doing all this.
However there are already mods that do these things and making them slightly faster / prettier / better code, is not as useful as adding a new feature. For example just skip all that stuff above and make a mod that allows two construction queues - the repeat queue and the one off queue. Imo that is more useful.

We're a community - we all do things. It doesn't matter whether it is the most useful thing we could be doing, as long as we have fun doing it.

I'm looking forward to the new / adapted UI mods - if you record your work / progress then we can even add them in as videos on Youtube as part of the game development series, or as a separate series specifically about UI mods. It would be a great resource for people that don't know where to start .

Fair

Updated Additional Orders Extension

Updated EzReclaim

I will offer to help. I have 1 (one) mod to my credit, but it involved a deep dive into the control group/selection set UI, and am now familiar enough with the lua structure to go into the weeds on a particular element and A. figure out what's going on/what makes it tick and B. help develop a solution that isn't a total piece of shit.

I also think updating old mods/having a solid set of common mod tools is super valuable to the community, both from a player standpoint and for having a set of mods to point to as examples for people who want to implement other things.

And you always get more done working as a team.

@slicknixon pm in Discord 4z0t#3189

Oh wow, this is a quite the promising project. I was looking around to see if I could get EControl separately (courtesy of UI Party), and found this. I have been trying to learn Lua writing so I can use 'A Hotkey Keys', but your Hotbuild Overhaul appears to accomplish the same thing (and with a GUI no less!). The only other mods I use which are relevant to your listed features (so might be worth looking at them); 'Advanced Target Priorities 1.1', and 'Better Reclaim View' (this one specifically b/c it works with UI Scaling). I would very much like to sign up for testing/feedback.

Glad to see your attention, I would like to look at them too, but rn I'm preparing something interesting

@ctrl-k said in UI Revolution Project:

Glad to see your attention, I would like to look at them too, but rn I'm preparing something interesting

Sweet! Keep me posted. The mex viewer of EControl is just so good, I really don't know think I can play without it (recent patch messed up UI Party, which sadly does not have a reset button).

What is going on with the Specific Target Priorities? I have been tinkering with the mod and am interested in knowing what is going on there.

@kalethequick it produces priority based on unit hovered with cursor and applies to selected ones

I understand your vision, even if some people might interpret your excitement and comments about old mods as a little abrasive. I'll be watching to see where the project goes. As a developer, I understand your desire for cleaner code and more flexible interfaces for the user.

After trying all the idle engineer mods, I do like yours. A couple issues though (which might be related to using BrewLan icons):

• I can't tell if my ACU is idle
• I can't tell if factories are idle
• I do like that the Engineer idle indicator isn't so big and blocky like other mods, but I would really like to see the option to adjust the color, size, and shape

@woofiewilly thanks for review! I'm glad that someone is still interested in this stuff. About IEL:

• Yeah, acu doesnt have any icons rn
• Idle factories are highlighted with green triangle
• Those are textures, you can't change shape and color in the game, however you can try to use your own replacing in mod textures, you can use pngs, but i recommend using dds which are faster to load by the game.