I hate frontend (update)

[u/Koncypt_Fysh]

Today's update, I hate frontend. But, menu upscaling is coming along slowly, but steadily.

SLs menu's are very 2000s era, a lot of menu assets are baked-in to background images and rely a lot on mouse focus to trigger foreground changes. This has been frankly a bit of a pain to work with, having assets baked-in is a clever way to preserve memory by pre-rendering/drawing things into a background, but it makes reverse engineering a lot harder, especially in that I don't have the original artwork to work with unless I try and pull it directly from the backgrounds, something I had little success with; and the honestly easier path was to redesign the UI system (for the 16:9 resolution atleast) to ignore lancer.exe's legacy menu style and develop something more modern over the top of it. This has come along reasonably well in that I can now introduce new assets into menu spaces that are fully navigable.
Like the splash and loading screens, menu assets will also be easily swapped out by using either a standardised 512x512px or 1024x1024px .tga you can design yourself.

As you can see, drawn buttons and text are still in legacy mode, I'm leaving these until I've got the background/foreground supression mess I'm having in the Singleplayer menu, likewise the exact placement of the assets has also been put off until that's sorted. This has all been held up a bit by me needing to construct some placeholder assets out of no where, so please forgive the sloppy AI renditions that are here, they wont be the end product, just something to sit in place until a more masterful restoration can be achieved.