StubbornElements.md

Stubborn Elements

Some elements are very difficult to edit, and require some uncommon methods or workarounds to edit.

Dashboard Dimmer

The dashboard dimmer is an element on the mainmenu that appears when you press the play button and open the play list. It dims out most of the screen (but leaves a bit at the bottom, which looks bad in most huds). It's difficult to edit because it doesn't appear in any files, at first it doesn't seem to be overrideable in mainmenuoverride.res, and only gets loaded (from code) when either the play menu or the console is opened.

The solution is to add this to the mainmenuoverride.res:

	"DashboardDimmer"
	{
		"wide" "0"
		"tall" "0"
	}

And add this to valve.rc / your autoexec.cfg:

// remove dimmer
wait 5; showconsole; wait; incrementvar mat_antialias -100 100 1; hideconsole; wait 5; incrementvar mat_antialias -100 100 -1

The idea behind this is to:

1. open the console, which loads the dimmer element
2. change the mat_antialias value, which reloads the mainmenu
3. the reload checks mainmenuoverride.res and applies the wide and tall for dashboarddimmer to the now existing element, effectively hiding it
4. hide the console since it was only needed for loading the dimmer element
5. change the mat_antialias value back to what it was before

Chat Background Alpha

The chat background is normally difficult to control its alpha. Because its alpha channel is overridden in order to make it appear and disappear, very few ways to change it will stick. The solution is a technique called "animation locking" that involves constantly animating it to have the alpha value you want.

An example animation to remove the chat bg is:

event AnimLock
{
	Animate HudChat bgcolor "0 0 0 0" linear 0.0 0.0
	Animate HudChat bgcolor "0 0 0 0" linear 0.0 100.0
	Animate HudChatHistory bgcolor "0 0 0 0" linear 0.0 0.0
	Animate HudChatHistory bgcolor "0 0 0 0" linear 0.0 100.0

	RunEvent AnimLockLoop 1.0
}

event AnimLockLoop
{
	RunEvent AnimLock 0.0
}

The main way to trigger an animation lock is to run the animation on MenuOpen or MenuClose because it can be triggered through scripts:

event MenuClose
{	
	...
	
	StopEvent AnimLock 0.0
	RunEvent AnimLock 0.0
}

And include this in all class cfg files, so that it gets executed on start:

// trigger the MenuOpen and MenuClose animations immediately
voice_menu_1; slot10

Alternatively, a less reliable method that doesn't require editing cfg's would be to make it trigger whenever you do damage:

event DamagedPlayer
{
	StopEvent AnimLock 0.0
	RunEvent AnimLock 0.0
}