UI options and customizability

rantology

<div class="IPBDescription">in advance of the upcomming consistency checks</div>So I heard Max saying in the PAX panel today that very soon there is going to be consistency checks going into the game. It will make sure all the LUA in your game files matches the LUA on the server.

So while consistency checks are awesome and will be very much welcomed, I would love to see some more customizability for the UI as well, because right now there are a few tweaks and mods that myself and I'm sure many other players make to the .lua to help clean up the UI due to personal preference. (Check out <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=119630" target="_blank">Yuuki's simpleGUI mod</a>)

For me personally, I would love to see options for the following:

-Alien crosshairs (on all lifeforms)
-Maine waypoint icons
-Healthbars and Nametags

Even just options in the game menu to simply turn these features on/off would go a very long way. Having different fluff for nametags/waypoints like being able to scale the size would be amazing.


If you make different tweaks to .lua make sure to post it so that we can make of list of basic UI options we would like to have. :)

fanatic

+1.

There either needs to be an extensive customizability menu (I can't imagine they'll find time for this) or significant portions of the lua needs to be exempt from consistency checks, like the way it was in NS.

If the players have no choice but to edit game files to customize their HUD, and a few other things, to their preference, and consistency checks block that as well, you'll end up with a significant part of the community simply refusing to play with the consistency checks enabled -- similar to the mp_blockscripts debacle in NS.

Laosh'Ra

+1.
please add an option for Field of View (degrees your view covers) as well! imo it has a huge impact on the perceived pacing (low FOV feels a lot slower) and people have a lot of different preferences for this value (it also depends on your screen size and your physical distance to it) so having some minor adjustments for the various life forms is not necessarily enough for every player.

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there was a topic with instructions on how to manually change the FOV and since nobody replied about my question wether this can be considered cheating or not (you can see more at the same time if you increase it) i do this myself in every new patch.

Dghelneshi

I've talked a little bit about this in another thread but allowing even a single lua file to be modded is allowing cheating since the "game" part is not separate from the UI part (i.e. the UI has access to A LOT of information and functions that can be used to cheat). They would have to implement a second Lua VM to handle the UI to be able to separate those two by only giving the UI part access to very specific information.

Unfortunately, this is not an easy process and it actually poses another problem: The original UI needs access to some information that could be used for cheating, but it also should be able to be modified and replaced by mods... I wouldn't know any easy solution for this problem.

The only thing UWE can do for now is provide toggles and sliders for all sorts of stuff, which shouldn't be too much work to implement. I will not be able to play this game on my 5:4 screen if it doesn't have a FoV slider and NO I cannot buy a new monitor for another year or so.