Customizable Alternate HUD

[BlueFireZ88]

Out of all the features in ZDoom I've seen, the most stagnant is the Alternate HUD. It's a great concept, but it feels so contradictory to everything ZDoom is trying to do, which is allow as much freedom as possible when it comes to developing anything for Doom and it's engine family of games. But yet you can't customize it at all. Not one one change can be really done with this without breaking it, and just seems like so much more could have been done with it. Isn't there anyway of making this feature more flexible?

[Blue Shadow]

But yet you can't customize it at all.

[wiki=ALTHUDCF]Not "at all"[/wiki].

[Gez]

[wiki=CVARs:Display#Alternate_HUD]And a bunch of CVARs, too[/wiki].

[BlueFireZ88]

Ok,ok, you know what, nevermind. I just realized that this case I made wasn't thought out as well as it should have been.

[Kinsie]

The althud is never going to be exposed to modders beyond ALTHUDCF by rule of Graf Law. Apparently this is so there's always a stable HUD if the SBARINFO HUD is rendered "abusive" in some way shape or form that nobody seems able to define.

[Blue Shadow]

That's sounds reasonable to me.

[Enjay]

The fact that it can be customised at all is a concession. I believe that Graf added the althud to GZDoom (later ported to ZDoom) mainly to cater for his own needs. It was never intended to be a fully customisable alternative to the regular HUD.

[Ed the Bat]

This is actually making me reconsider my stance on supporting the ALTHUD, to a point. Trying to keep it looking nice has actually lead to a few other complications in my project, when maybe I should just not encourage its use at all and ignore it.

[wildweasel]

My mods tend to have too many ammo types, turning the alt HUD into a complete and utter mess. If people like it, that's fine, but I'm not going out of my way to "fix" it.

[Ed the Bat]

My mods tend to have too many ammo types, turning the alt HUD into a complete and utter mess.

This is exactly the problem I had. All of the 'available' ammo types are listed (in my case, literally hundreds...) on the ALTHUD, and adding weapons to KEYCONF makes them all 'available' for everyone at all times. KEYCONF was important to me for backwards-compatibility, so it was either a clean ALTHUD, or working compatibility. One of those is more important to me than the other.