Help with Changing/Adding to HUD

[Jacrispy]

Hey all,

I've decided that I want a new HUD in my game, with advanced features and options to my liking. I've never modded before, but am well-versed in Java (CS major.. shocker, I'm sure).

 

I can find plenty of old tutorials or threads on the subject from older versions of the game, but anything with the current versions of Forge/MC 1.15 seem to only be about block GUI. I've looked through the documentation, but can't find anything other than block GUI there either. I'm not even sure where to begin to make changes to the HUD.

 

For reference, what I'm mainly looking to do is change the layout of the HUD, (ex. moving the hotbar to the top of the screen, or the left side of the screen etc.) but eventually will be adding new HUD elements as I familiarize myself with the concept. 

[imacatlolol]

Yes, sadly most documentation is outdated or lacking, and few tutorials are comprehensive enough for more advanced feature implementation.

The inner-classes of RenderGameOverlayEvent are what you need. Specifically, for changing the vanilla HUD elements, you'd want to cancel the Pre event for a specific element (e.g. the hotbar) to stop it from rendering normally and then render your own stuff manually. Take a look at ForgeIngameGui for more details on how the HUD is rendered.

Always make to check the element type when using the event, otherwise you will end up rendering something multiple times and cause other graphical issues.

[Jacrispy]

So if I want to render my own stuff - this makes it sound like I need to import assets for the HUD if I want to render them anywhere but the default location?

[imacatlolol]

1 hour ago, Jacrispy said:

So if I want to render my own stuff - this makes it sound like I need to import assets for the HUD if I want to render them anywhere but the default location?

In a sense, yes. There's no quick way of changing the HUD layout since it's all hardcoded. However, you don't actually have to "import" anything since TextureManager#bindTexture handles all the heavy lifting (it simply takes a path to the texture via a ResourceLocation).

I recommend spending some time dissecting the vanilla code and playing around with it to see what does what. I generally advocate against copy-pasting vanilla code (partially for copyright reasons, among others), but since you mentioned that you're good with Java there shouldn't be a problem with doing so as long as it's just for learning/prototyping.

[Jacrispy]

1 hour ago, imacatlolol said:

In a sense, yes. There's no quick way of changing the HUD layout since it's all hardcoded. However, you don't actually have to "import" anything since TextureManager#bindTexture handles all the heavy lifting (it simply takes a path to the texture via a ResourceLocation).

I recommend spending some time dissecting the vanilla code and playing around with it to see what does what. I generally advocate against copy-pasting vanilla code (partially for copyright reasons, among others), but since you mentioned that you're good with Java there shouldn't be a problem with doing so as long as it's just for learning/prototyping.

Thanks for the tip - I guess I'll start poking around the vanilla stuff and see what I can figure out.

As for copy/pasting.. I don't really plan on ever releasing what I'm doing, it's mostly a combination of me being bored while quarantined at home, and being nit-picky about minecraft's layout... so even in the worst of scenarios, copy and pasting stuff to mess around for myself isn't a worry.