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Bleu's Improved Tooltips

This mod is whitelisted.

mod id 3790290682

Puts the numbers a commander actually needs into the commander tooltips. Research times, ability cooldowns, structure health and armor, and movement speed, on the tooltip you are already looking at — no alt-tabbing to a wiki mid-round.

• Research time — an hourglass and a number on every research and upgrade. Armor 3 reads "40 res, 120 seconds" instead of just "40 res".
  
• Cooldown — a stopwatch on commander abilities: Bone Wall, Power Surge, Nutrient Mist, Rupture, Heal Wave, Cyst, and the rest.
  
• Health and armor — for anything you drop, build or manufacture, on both teams.
  
• Movement speed — for the things that move: ARC, MAC, Drifter, Whip, Shade, Shift, Crag.

All of it sits in one row under the tooltip title, above the description. The card grows to fit, and tooltips with nothing extra to show look exactly as they always did.

Health and armor take the game's own selection-panel colors, so a number means the same thing in the tooltip as it does when you click a structure that already exists. Vanilla's selection panel is brought in line too, where it colored the two figures differently but drew both icons in one flat team color.

ARC stances. The Deploy and Undeploy buttons describe the state they put the ARC into, so Deploy shows armor dropping to 0 and speed to 0 — the cost of deploying, visible while you are choosing it.

Commander ability cooldowns in NS2 are team-global: a Shade Ink puts every Shade on cooldown, so three Shades cannot alternate Ink to keep ARCs suppressed. This mod adds a panel on the right listing what your team has on cooldown, with the game's own dial and the seconds left, for every player on the team, not just the commander.

It also fixes a vanilla bug: only the commander who cast an ability saw its cooldown dial. It is now right whoever is in the chair.

The hive status panel in the top-left corner (Advanced Options, UI, hive status) already shows each hive's health, eggs and type. Three things are added to every hive's row:

• Biomass — one icon per +1 biomass research that hive has completed. A fresh hive shows none, the same way it shows no hive type icon until it is upgraded, and each research adds its own button's art.
  
• Researching — the game's own rotating "working" ring with the DNA glyph inside it, on any hive researching anything: biomass, a lifeform ability, or a hive type upgrade. The same pair you see in the world when you look at a busy hive.
  
• Research in the hive's own row — HIVE RESEARCH DISPLAY moves hive research out of the list on the left and into the hive doing it: the hive's own on one side of its row, its evolution chamber's on the other, with a progress bar and time left. Research elsewhere stays on the left.

All three are visible to every player on the team, not just the commander.

• Simultaneous biomass research. With two hives researching biomass at once the tech map lit up only one icon between them, because the team collapses every hive into a single number before drawing. Two hives now light two icons, three light three.
  
• Supply icons. Tooltips marked supply with a MAC or Drifter while the HUD's top bar used different icons; tooltips now use the top bar's.
  
• Uncolored biomass icons. The biomass icon was drawn bare grayscale on tooltips, the spectator counter and the hive panel. All now take the tech map's color for researched alien tech.
  
• Lost arms lab upgrades. When a team loses every arms lab, or they all lose power, the weapon and armor icons on the marine HUD simply vanished - which looks exactly like never having researched them. They now stay on screen in the alert red the base game already defined for this and never showed, so "we lost it" reads differently from "we never had it".
  
• Exo weapon readouts. Hiding the exo viewmodel hid minigun heat and railgun charge; bars beside the crosshair now show them.
  
• Research notifications going missing. Aliens are shown three at a time, and a fourth pushed one out for good: it finished with no notification and no sound. Every research now waits its turn and is announced.
  
• Biomass at round start. A round could open with the tech map reading biomass 0 until something was built.

Numbers that change during a round are read live rather than printed from a table. Bone Wall's health scales with your biomass level, so at Biomass 9 the tooltip says 900, not 100.

Movement speed is read off the unit's own class rather than from a table, so it is the vanilla unupgraded figure. Mods that compute speed live from game state rather than storing it will read low, or blank rather than guess.

The twelve bead bar in the top left (shown with the map, the buy menu or the tech map) only ever knew whole beads: a bead was empty until its research finished, then full.

Each bead being researched now fills as the work goes in, and several fill at once when several hives are working. The ability icons along the bar light up and carry a progress bar while their research is under way, as they do on the tech map, instead of staying gray until they finish.

Per-bead progress uses Shimizu's approach, with his permission.

• Phase gate arrows on the commander minimap. As on the big map, per your phase gate lines setting.
  
• Marine blips colored by weapon. Each marine's blip takes their primary weapon's color, as on the commander's ammo bars, so a glance says where the shotguns are. With CBM, SMGs are blue. On by default for the big map only. Exosuits keep the marine color; only marines and spectators see it.
  
• Supply on the spectator bar. Both teams' supply now shows there, used against maximum.
  
• Ready state on the scoreboard. Under Shine's tournament mode each team's header is marked ready in green or not ready in red, with a tick or a cross beside it. Both come off at round start, and nothing is drawn on a server without that plugin. Shine only announces readiness when it changes, so a client joining mid pre game may show a team as not ready until the next change.

Options, Mods, "Bleu's Improved Tooltips": switch each optional feature, set the shortest cooldown listed and pick your own weapon colors for the map.

Nothing is hardcoded per tech. The mod reads the same tech data the game itself uses to make a tech function, so tech added by other mods gets improved tooltips automatically, with no patch needed here.

Community Balance Mod is the one mod named anywhere in the code, in a single place: its biomass 5 research is tinted on the hive panel in CBM's own color for advanced alien tech, matching the way CBM marks that hive out. Everything else about CBM tech, including its own icons for it, arrives through the same path as anything else.

Modders can register their own value resolvers for anything they compute at runtime — see the README on GitHub.

The mod does not change gameplay. It reads values your client already has. The two things it does send are the team cooldown list the panel is built from, and each hive's biomass and research for the hive panel, neither of which a client can work out for itself.

It does have to be installed on the server. NS2's default consistency check restricts which mod entry files a client is allowed to load, so on a server running stock settings the server needs this mod too. If you want it on a server you play on, ask the admin to add it.

Source: https://github.com/Bleuitup/Bleus-Improved-Tooltips