The ARES heads-up display (HUD) is designed to be highly configurable to suit a wide range of usage needs. This chapter will walk you through the process of tweaking it to your liking.

How the Interface Works

The HUD consists of 4 primitives, 124 single-surface mesh rectangles, and 128 eight-surface mesh strips.

The majority of these links are assigned to specific system functions, such as displaying the compass or the menu system. These assignments are documented in detail in The ARES Operating System: Interface Architecture. Not all links have fixed assignments—many are reserved for HUD-based user applications, such as wizards, mantra, or wander. In the future it will be possible to play board games, manage HCS inventory, and control a wide range of Nanite Systems equipment by installing HUD applications.

Building the Interface

The ARES interface is generated by two programs in the system services rings, called _interface and _variatype. These two scripts set the size, position, color, rotation, and textures of most parts in the HUD. _interface is responsible for the majority of UI elements, and also handles certain "real-time" widgets like the compass, altimeter, speedometer, and target tracking. _variatype is mainly responsible for managing the text you see in menus and alert messages. (This is similar to, but more sophisticated than, XyzzyText.) In some versions of ARES, the _variatype daemon also manages the device bar.

Refreshing the UI

Like most programs in ARES, _interface and _variatype read their configurations from the LinksetData database. LinksetData entries are not continuously monitored for updates, so when you are customizing your settings, you will be using the following commands after every change:

1. Save changes to your local.db file (the importance of local.db is explained below)
2. @db load local.db
3. @service interface reconfigure

Sometimes you'll need to replace interface with the names of other daemons, such as status, repair, or variatype. These exceptions will be noted below.

General workflow for customizing ARES

Customizing ARES consists of modifying database entries, and then restarting the affected daemons. For safety we recommend the following process.

Accessing user memory: To edit any of the files in your ARES installation, you need to access the inventory of Link #3, which is the user memory prim. Here are the steps:

1. Press Ctrl-3 to open the Edit window. (On Mac, the Ctrl key is labeled Command.)
2. Press Ctrl-Shift-E to turn on Edit linked mode.
3. Click the model badge at the bottom-middle of your ARES HUD. (this was Part 1 in Tutorial: The ARES interface)
4. Switch the Edit window to the Content tab. (If you do not see the tabs, click the thin, wide button with a down arrow, at the bottom of the Edit window, to expand it.)

Look through existing .db files: Scroll through the contents of user memory until you find relevant <name>.db files. For this chapter we're mainly interested in two files, local.db (where you'll be storing your modifications) and interface.db (which contains default UI settings).

Make sure you save everything you do in local.db: Almost all customization in ARES is done with the database management utility, @db. Although it is faster to make changes to your configuration by directly telling @db to make them, these changes could get lost or reverted when you install a new version of the OS. Therefore it is a good idea to write your settings in a special notecard (we recommend the name local.db, and a file with this name has already been provided for you), and use db indirectly by using the @db load <filename> command.

Import your local.db file: This can be done with the command @db load local.db so long as you have permission to modify the database. (See Operating ARES: Security for more information on security permissions.)

Restart affected services: Although there are a few parts of ARES that check the database before acting, the vast majority of ARES software requires that you run a special command to force a configuration refresh, as it would be prohibitively expensive to monitor the database for updates. In this chapter, the most important command of this type is @service interface reconfigure.

Keep going: You probably won't get every change you want implemented right away. Experimenting, repeating, and tweaking are all part of the process.

Interface Settings

For a visual glossary of the elements of the ARES user interface, see Tutorial: The ARES interface (HUD).

Screen Coordinates

ARES uses screen coordinates measured in pixels to position and size UI elements. For sizes, these are expressed as:

For positions, these are:

Higher depth values are further away, and will cause elements to become layered behind each other. This is usually 0.

An up value of 0 is the vertical middle of the screen.

A right value of 0 is the horizontal center of the screen.

Interface Assets

ARES makes reference to several image files, stored in link 2 (the System Services ring) to build and display the user interface. After any changes, you must run @service interface reconfigure to reload them. These files may be replaced in the event of an OS update, so keep backups handy.

Except where noted, all images should be white on a transparent background.