Interface Modding

I know you can mod some of the interface, Star Wars: Requiem for example uses a modded HUD that makes it mostly transparent, but I'm not sure if you can move things around the UI. I'll try to find out sometime later.

That would be awesome - thanks!

Any luck?

Thanks!

Look in the .window files and you will find your answer!!!

Ahh - I see!

I seem to be having a bit of trouble though.  I'm starting with this file that I see should move the info card:

InfoCard.window

I'm trying to change this value:

offsetFromBottomBarBottomRight [-10, -101]

to various things (like:)

offsetFromBottomBarBottomRight [140, -0]

It doesn't seem to do anything (?)

I've also moved the empire tree down modifying this file:

EmpireWindow.window

itemOffsetFromTop 10

to

itemOffsetFromTop 100

This DID move it down, however my goal was to move it to the right.  I tried adding an itemOffsetFromLeft, but that just made the empire tree vanish.

Any pointers?

thanks!

That's weird. I messed with the InfoCard before, but it was a while back - I think I edited the bottom bar's size to be larger and then made the top transparent to preserve the existing height, but not sure about that, and that was only to change its height (although you might be able to use a similar technique depending on how the area is checked). I assume you've tried changing one value at a time to see if you get results ("-0" might also mess some stuff up, but you said you tried other numerals and it didn't change anything)?

Ya I dont think I saw any changes work on infoCard.window, but I'll try again.  The -0 was actually a value I saw from someone's mod that changed the UI, so I tried that value to see if it did anything.

I'll look again. I'd REALLY like to buy this game

Ya tried it again - neither of these seem to do anything:

offsetFromBottomBarBottomRight [-340, -0]
offsetFromTopCenterWhenFullScreenDialogOpen [-500, 760]

(I've tried various values for x, both positive and negative)

I'm definitely messing with the right file though as this changed something:

entityIconSize [50, 50]

changing the 50,50 to 150,150 made the window larger (to I'm assuming fit the 150 size icons.)

Not sure what the issue is, but I just changed it to offsetFromBottomBarBottomRight [0, -139] and it moves around perfectly. Also tried X axis values. Do you have the game set to watch files in your User.options?

Aha, I figured it out.

When you stretch Sins beyond a certain size, interface elements reorganize themselves. This has unexpectedly just broke my interface mod I've been working on, since I have had it running in 1024x768 mode for testing, not realizing that when the Sins window is expanded, interface elements move. Since the top bar is always, well, on the top, it's not an issue there, but everything on the bottom changes.

Hence the infocard problem. At a high resolution like 1920x1080, the infocard moves from above the right panel of the bottom bar to the very bottom-right of the screen, after which the change on offsetFromBottomBarBottomRight apparently has no effect.

I'll probably shoot off an email to Ironclad regarding this and the other interface issue. Things like this kind of make interface modding beyond simply recoloring and changing alpha channels pointless. The mod I was doing moved the resource counters to the bottom, and it worked at 1024x768 (although anything short of 100% alpha is faded, since the icons and numbers are not rendered on top of the brush) but like I said above, I can no longer make it a standard feature without forcing people to use a resolution from 1998.

Ahh!  Thanks very much for looking into it.  Please update me with any information they provide if you can.

Very few games support multi-screen. The ones that do don't do it very well. This is fairly new but I can't see much happening with this as maybe 1% of people have multi screens.

Have you tried changing screen sizes in window mode. All game info is shown in a single window. with multi screen support, they split the window in 2 (never heard of three). I did find a work around for another game but each windows update reverted everything so I gave up. This was a while ago tho.

Good luck and keep us posted.

Very few games support multi-screen.

Very true, but this all changed with Eyefinity (and soon Nvidia's Surround.)  They basically lie to windows and tell it that it is one big display, so as long as the game can deal with the resolution then it's more or less supported.  The only thing that tends to crop up is how developers decided to handle HUD elements.  Since very wide screens did not exist before, they typically offset elements from the left or right, but to look correctly on multiple displays, it would have been best to offset from center (which I'm trying to change in these .window files.)

Bump - any word?