Injection Points

[Captain-Of-Coit]

Currently, we only support Panels

But of course, we'd like to support different types of injected UIs.

Some ideas:

• Settings Settings (The settings panel in the pause menu)
• New Game Settings
• Tool Selectors (The little menu in the center-bottom of the Game UI)
• "Apps" or whatever they're called, the things on the bottom-right, like the Radio
• Infoviews

[SwiftCobra]

I would like to inject a button to activate a mod in a menu like the road menu.
I envision it being a button that sits next to buttons such as straight road button, curved button, etc

I would also like to have my mod not go into a button but be activated programmatically.
Use cases: On Specific Type of Entity Selected, a mod panel opens, on deselect it closes (Similar to info views).

[Captain-Of-Coit]

On important note on this:

Injection points are supposed to be chosen based on what type of functionality you (as an mod author) want to expose to the players.

In the case of the panels, they're a bit unique as they're a "everything-goes" injection. As a mod author, you should be able to basically do whatever you want in there, but it'll always open up a panel.

For the "new game settings", you as a mod author would only pass in what options you want to expose, and the UI would be rendered for you, so people won't make the UI too different from the built-in one.

So, maybe one way to approach what injection points to offer, is to first figure out what common functionality can even be grouped.

The panels are easy, as again, they're a "everything-goes" injection. But the other things might be harder to figure out.

The goal here is to make the player able to "know" kind of where some mod functionality would go, without thinking about it too much. So if they want to change some mod settings, they know the settings for this mod would go into the X menu, or something like that.

[optimus-code]

So my ideas based on my current experience playing with a HookUI fork and trying new injection points:

• InfoPanel - Used for information only displays like the the games info mode. This menu would be an icon only menu that opens an info mode panel (using the current HookUI button but a more vanilla menu)

• AdvisorPanel - The expandable foldout panel system launched from the advisor menu, to me this is a plausible place to have either game-relevant settings for mods or help and advice like the game provides. They could launch one of those white tutorial windows that point to elements in the future.

• ToolBarStart - This is the icons on the toolbar at the bottom, this denotes the start of the toolbar and could be used for things like Traffic Management mods, Tool systems, prop line tools, things like that. Additionally could provide a hook injection point for the Tool System UI.

• ToolBarEnd - This is the icons on the toolbar at the bottom right of the screen, these would launch either generic systems such as First Person Camera, or optionally the tabbed windows you find for the financial views etc.

• MainContainer - Any kind of component that needs to be in the main container (so hides when the user goes into the pause menu), no specific toolbars to access.

• Custom - This would go into the container above MainContainer, for any UI mods than need to operate on the screen as a whole, i.e. out of game.

• Options/Settings - Despite the game having interfaces for this, adding rich interfaces where an item is added along with a working options tab would be great.

Most of these are demonstrable in the Cities2Modding fork of HookUI.