I would LOVE the ability to make our own custom HUDs for our maps. I was the one who voted "other" as rather than asking valve if they could make that for us, I'd prefer to know how to do it ourselves, I have a custom gametype I'm working on for
cp_confinement and am forced to use a CP icon for my intel, and game_text for scoring as you can see in the
Current Hud Screenshot. Making graphics is not a problem, knowing how to implement them in game is another thing.
If we could do this ourselves, it would be just one step closer to being able to bring the wide variety for maps we had back in TFC, which is what made that game great!
I'm no programmer, but what I would like are new entities where we could modify the hud...
info_hud - would have fields for red vtf and blu vtf, and X and Y position. mainly used to create the stylized frames around the main hud elements.. This entity is required for any other info_hud entities to work, and disables standard CTF/CP/PL huds.
info_hud_ctf - entity that would add a round ctf pointer to the hud, has fields for X and Y, and an option to show it as neutral unless it is being carried (basically allowing the team color to be changed on the intel status, for neutral intel games). Also has a carried XY field, which will only show when the connected intel is being carried by the player). Most importantly it is connected to a named intelligence in order to function, to allow multiple intelligence if desired.
info_hud_cp - entity to add cp icons to the Hud, must be connected to a capture area to display, has options for materials for each team, including all locked states. all materials for all the states can be changed with addoutput commands. also has X Y and scale parameters.
info_hud_pl - this is trickier probably, as it would likely need to work as a path the cart icon would follow, to allow for circular payload hud setups... I don't know how that would work but it could possibly get its shape based on a simple custom model or something. but even without that, this would allow adding payload huds on custom X Y coordinates and scale to your custom Hud
info_hud_text - this works much like Game_text does when it comes for custom scores but uses the TF2 font, is limited in amount of characters, possibly only numbers, possibly text size (or scale) options... optionally this could be replaced by some kind of progress bar for each team, like the PLR hud without the carts and speed zones... this is just a way to allow custom scoring.
all of these entities (except the base info_hud entity, as only one is needed and should always be drawn on the bottom) would have an index field that would specify what level it should rendered at in relation to info_hud entities should they overlap. This also limits the amount of entities that can be rendered. 1 being on the bottom 9 being on the top, maximum of 10 custom hud elements displayed at one time (9 + 1 base layer from the base info_hud)
