CSQC HUD roundup

Knowing that we now have CSQC to do all sorts of stuff, I've decided to have a close look at our HUD system, as well as HUD systems of other games like Quake 3 Arena. I've found out that the mod CPMA for Quake3 (as well as the Q4Max mod for Quake4) offers the possibility to configure the style of the elements of your HUD by modifying settings in a dedicated file. Here is an example:

Console
{
	rect 0 0 640 48
	time 3000
	font threewave
}

WeaponList
{
	rect 0 64 48 16
	color 0.2 0.2 0.7 0.75
	font id
	fontsize 12 16
}

StatusBar_HealthIcon
{
	rect 200 448 24 24
	image "models/players/mynx/icon_pm.tga"
}

As you can imagine, this is just a small snippet.

This whole thing is called the “SuperHud” system. They even developed a HUD editor for creating new HUDs in a comfortable way. This system allows you to alter stylistic parts of the HUD elements, like position, size, image, font, background etc. This file would not control which elements are actually shown, as you would still configure this by settings such as “showfps”, or using similar variables. This system should only alter the style of the elements if they are shown. Elements that are not contained in this HUD config file would be displayed using a default (hardcoded) style. Anyways, I think that Nexuiz could actually use such a system as well.

Oh, and to be complete, a way how something could work for a player who wants to load a new HUD (just an example console command):

set sbar_hudfile "myhud.cfg"
loadhud