Hotkeys on your HUD

[cmal]

I was wondering if anyone else has thought about adding a HUD on your screen that displays what objects you have hotkeyed. I am pretty forgetful, so I kept forgetting what weapons I had hotkeyed, especially between sessions. I think it might be useful if there's a set of icons that vaguely resembles what the item might be displayed on the screen. I haven't looked too deeply into how it might be done or even if it could, but I do know that FOSE has a function for getting what you've hotkeyed and DarN has shown us some awesome HUD mods with his UI and FOSE.

[Skree000]

that would be AWESOME!!!! id really really love that

[rebel28]

A bit like Half Life 2.

 

I'm not sure if this is possible, but what about a minimap, It gets a bit annoying to keep having to open up my pipboy to see if I'm going the right way.

[cmal]

I don't think the minimap is possible yet, since I don't think there's any way to get access to the resources for it. Maybe in the future when the FOSE Team resumes adding functions.

 

Anybody know anything about XML and how FO3 uses it? I tried looking at DarN's work, but I'm having trouble figuring some stuff out and DarN himself is MIA (nobody's heard from him in a while over in his UI thread at the Beth forums).

[BigKevSexyMan]

Well, I know the guy doing the Diablo 2 mod found a way to put up the health and mana globes on the HUD. He'd probably know how to do it easily.

[Cipscis]

HugePinball would also be a good person to ask about UI elements.

 

Cipscis

[HugePinball]

Hotkeys in the HUD should definitely be possible, especially since there are already UI elements built in for it. This is probably another interface feature that many people don't know about (like inventory filtering). If you hold down a hotkey while in GameMode, the hotkey graphic will show up for a few seconds:

 

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/thumbnails/566876-1249298754.jpg

 

I'm assuming you'd want to do some different things, like have them in a list or toggle the visibility on and off. I'd start by looking at how this default hotkey display is implemented in the UI xml, because you'll likely want to copy parts of it. You'll almost certainly need to copy how it displays the name of the hotkeyed item, since we still don't have a way to retrieve and work with strings. I'm not sure if you'll be able to adapt it to display the names of all the hotkeyed items at once - I'll take a look at this too.

 

If I recall correctly, template graphic (the blank squares and numbers) is a single image, so if you wanted to do something similar but in a different format you'd need to make one or more custom graphics, but that wouldn't be difficult. The hotkey icon images and the center icon are all separate image files, but like the item names, the file paths are also strings, so you'd likely need to copy the existing UI to do the same thing.

 

You might also want to check if DarN already did something with this in DarNified UI - I don't know myself. I'll look at a few things in the default UI xml files and report back if I learn anything else useful.

 

 

BTW, a mini-map might not be as impossible as you think. I can't immediately think why you couldn't overlay the same map graphics on the HUD, as long as there is a specific path or some other way to reference it. I don't know if the UI has a method for resizing a displayed graphic, so it might have to be the same size. Whether there would be issues with it updating dynamically is another question. If you can't resize graphics directly in the UI code, I'd bet that someone could create an external program or a future FOSE plugin that could continuously create a custom image file based on the default map image. Another future project maybe :)

[cmal]

Cool, thanks for the insights and help.

 

As far as I know, DarNUI does not have the hotkeys as an implemented feature, but there may be unfinished code laying in wait in the files.