BC46 / freelancer-hd-edition

Freelancer: HD Edition is a mod that aims to improve every aspect of the game Freelancer (2003) while keeping the look and feel as close to vanilla as possible.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/freelancer-hd-edition
161 stars 14 forks source link

Changing the HUD requires fewer file changes than anticipated #160

Open BC46 opened 1 year ago

BC46 commented 1 year ago

Currently, when we change the game's HUD textures, whether it's for the HD vanilla HUD, or the new dark HUD, we rename quite a lot of files in the DATA/INTERFACE directory, see https://github.com/oliverpechey/Freelancer-hd-edition-install-script/blob/9f2383b722a07cf9b6a371fbdb72059fb653fce4/mod_options.iss#L597. However, I recently learned that only one HUD file actually needs to be updated in order to change the entire HUD, which is multi_attentionreq'd.cmp. This has to do with the way Freelancer loads textures; it loads a texture with a name and caches it so that when it gets requested to load a texture with the same name, it just uses the cached one.

The following text file may yield more information: https://github.com/biqqles/aurora/blob/master/reverse-engineering.txt.

This still needs to be investigated however, as I haven't actually done any tests with it yet. If this is found to be true, we can remove most of the custom HUD files, which would make both the installer code and mod size smaller.