tags: widgets, modding, lua, beyond-all-reason
Practical BAR Widgets: What's Actually Worth Running
Widgets can make or break your BAR experience. Here is what came up recently and what you should actually keep enabled.
Metavolution's Custom Mod Experiment
The modding scene in BAR is starting to coalesce around something real. Metavolution has been pushing a custom game mode that blends UnBAcom and experimental units together. Watch a replay if you want to see where community modding is heading. The vision is clear - a game mode the devs always wanted but never shipped as official content. This is the kind of bottom-up creativity that keeps BAR alive between updates.
Area Reclaim Display and the Cameraflip Problem
If you run the area reclaim display widget with cameraflip enabled, the cost numbers render upside down. It is a known edge case. Flip your camera, get inverted numbers. The fix lives in the widget itself - the glRotate call does not account for the flipped camera state. If you use cameraflip regularly, either patch the widget or swap to a different reclaim overlay until it gets sorted upstream.
Mex Placement Widget and Camera Math
The mex placement widget borrowed camera direction math from the Zero-K codebase. It grabs camera angles with Spring.GetCameraDirection, runs atan2 on the x and z components, then rotates the overlay to match your view. The rotation itself works fine - the issue is that the same math path does not handle every camera mode cleanly. If your mex markers look slightly off when you are at weird angles, that is why.
What to Actually Do
Keep the widgets that give you information without breaking under common camera setups. Check your widget folder after every BAR update since the Lua UI layer shifts. If something renders wrong, the problem is usually a single rotation call that needs the camera's flipped state factored in. The modding community catches these fast.
Creed
"Creed of Champions is a great place to learn and play BAR in a friendly atmosphere. Training sessions, team gameplay, even some non-BAR stuff. Large cross section of abilities, time zones, and game mode interests."