In-Game HUD: Custom Text

[mlugg]

Which component should be improved?

UI/UX

Describe your suggestion

A HUD element allowing for cl_showpos-esque text overlaid on the screen, but with significantly more customisability.

Expected result

This idea is based off of SAR's main HUD, however there's room for much more extensibility. We can probably loosely follow the model being used in Wormhole.

The user will be able to create any number of text HUDs on-screen, each with an arbitrary number of lines. These lines can have substitutions in braces; for instance, a line pos: {pos.x:2} {pos.y:2} {pos.z:2} would show your position with each coordinate truncated to 2dp. Substitutions with a leading . are built in stuff; for instance, {.color:FF0000} can change the text color to red. There will probably be builtin ones for alignment to prevent text jumping around as e.g. coords (and hence text width) change.

TODO: how should fonts be handled? SAR just exposes font indices from vgui, but this isn't very user-friendly. Panorama will hopefully make it easy to have a more elegant solution (like maybe actually... selecting a font?)

We should ideally have a nice HUD for changing these bits of overlaid text, but that will probably come later; the interface will be purely command-based at first.