Transparent fullscreen HUD

[Meerschweinmann]

Hello again.

We wrote last year or so about something we called mini HUD or VkQuake HUD.
A transparent downscaled full screen HUD.

As you are now implementing different HUDs i wanted to remember about this here.
Eventually the possibilities are now better as last year.

In resolutions of 2x and more, it would be nice when the HUD could be scaled half size or so.

I had made a mockup i paste here.

As always, thanks for your time :)

[JNechaevsky]

Well... Good news is - now it is possible to do mostly any fullscreen status bar, it won't lead to the mess in the code. Bad news is - right after implementing «Remastereed» status bar, I've tried to implement resolution agnostic, 2x downscaled, ranslucent patch drawing functions.

The result was something like this, except much worse. 😅

Details

It is possible, I just need to make a proper function for downscaling.

[Meerschweinmann]

Hoho, looks like using a strong noise Filter 😃

But i like it in some way anyway, because it looks like it is doable 🎉🎉🎉

[NightFright2k19]

With these you just have to be careful to take widescreen statusbars into account. In this version you wouldn't want any sort of gapfillers, so the sides need to be cut off in order to always end up with 320px width.

[Meerschweinmann]

Good point Herr Nightfright. Meanwhile there are 854 pixel wide statusbars around. These will take too much space for a fullscreen HUD in this case.

[JNechaevsky]

Got the function working as resolution-agnostic, 2x downscaled in any resolutions. Aside from disaster with patch coords and not at all terribly unharmonious in size STbar stats widget, it works:

Details

Even on 1x rendering, yay!

Details

There’s potential, there are 16,777,216 colors for beautiful transparency. But this status bar basically requires duplicating existing drawing functions so nothing breaks in the original ones, and that just leads to spaghetti code and a mess of functions. I really don’t like the pixel size difference between the status bar and the KIS widget, but I also don’t want to pile on more exception cases just to shrink KIS too.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do yet. It’s definitely not worth mindlessly nailing together a bunch of code just for a status bar like this. As for “cropping” the width to 320 pixels - I don’t know yet if that’s even possible at the code level, but technically, you can draw a patch of any width without issues. There might even be situations where a user deliberately wants a wide bar.

Details

[Meerschweinmann]

Awesome to see that fast growing process!

And even this Mini hud is probably hardly readable in 1x resolution, it is consequent to offer the option in that resolution too.

As you have screenshots with and without transparency, would it be possible to choose what you want to be transparent? Only the gray background transparent and the Numbers and the mug shot solid?

I can speak only for myself, but when i want to keep the Game screen clean and minimalistic i choose automap for all widgets. Pressing Tab to see then KIS values while searching for the last enemies or secrets ist not a problem for me. When doing this most of the enemies are blasted away and the action has calmed down. And in the end the Mini hud is an option or not? So everyone can decide what is looking good.

[Meerschweinmann]

And about widescreen statusbars. When it makes too much problems i can live with it when they are wider but half size. I can edit them myself to 320 Pixels.

[NightFright2k19]

Good news about this:
It's about to come to Woof, after adjustments to the SBARDEF format. Widescreen images are automatically cut! Downscaling is still out of scope for now, but don't give up hope...