Had some feedback that the main menu page should be altered to show the name or the mod and the Play Online option should be removed. They are of course correct and its been on my mind for a while.
So, last night I delved into the horrid black hole that is the Alien Swarm Main Menu. And quite frankly its a pig to edit.
Half life 2's main menu was a joy to work with. After an hours work I could have a cool looking background map with new options showing and even get a logo up there... job done.
Not so with Alien Swarm. Changing the menu options should be as easy as modifying the mainmenu.res, gamemenu.res and the english translation.txt file. All do-able in a text editor.
However, every time I change any of these the menus get corrupted and the flyout menus (the menus that pop out from the side of the main options) go all funky and become unusable. Most frustrating.
The other immensly frustrating thing is that the bacground for the menu is a .bik video file. I need to get this disabled so that the regular viewport is available.
A very nice man working on the fantastic Jastain Summer mod sent me their modified mainmenu code. Have tinkered with this and managed to break my mod about 8 times.
I know I'll get there in the end. I always do but its so frustrating that something so simple as modifying a menu could be so damned hard and unintuative.
Ok a little tip for anyone planning to release a free game that you hope the modding community will keep alive...
DON'T HARD CODE SIMPLE STUFF LIKE MENU MODIFICATION!
OK rant over and it's back to work for me.
2 comments:
Did you ever get the main menu fixed? I've tried to for my own mod and it sucks.
Never mind I found your tutorial post
http://alienswarmsp.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-change-alien-swarm-main-menu.html
Post a Comment