Custom UI Theming (Table/JSON Driven) | Aeronautica | Page 1

toxic steeple Feb 2, 2025, 12:39 AM

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Note: I have zero clue how hard-coded colors are in aeronautica, I will be making generalized assumptions based on my own projects lol

Several games and pieces of software implement what is known as custom UI theming, or in other words, you can customize the color of the GUI to whatever you want. A couple examples would be texture packs in Minecraft, website theming via an extension like Stylus, or even Moon Animator 2 themes.
I could easily see Aeronautica having a similar feature, all this would be able to do is change the color of UI, not the shape or anything. Imagine like if you want to burn your eyes out, you could create a light mode theme, or you could make a black and green theme for military aircraft/night vision.

Pros:

I could see this being useful for people with very bad screen contrast or who just enjoy brighter or more colorful color schemes
When working on my own projects, I've found that when implementing/cleaning up GUI building scripts, I tended to create a table of colors that I can quickly retrieve values from (I.e., frame.BackgroundColor = UI_COLORS.BackgroundColor). This made color adjustments very easy as well as having the side-effect of custom theming being pretty much built in (just swap out the UI_COLORS table).
A lot of the fundamentals to implement this are already in the game
- JSON is already used for aircraft livery configs
- There already exists a color picker
- A settings menu lol

Cons:

Rewriting an entire codebase to use variable colors can be pretty annoying, especially if GUI isn't generated via a script (React-lua/Roact, Fusion, Instance.new spam (oh no), etc)
An entirely new section of the settings menu would have to be implemented as well as a settings based* color picker component
A bunch of annoying edge cases (some player accidentally sets all their UI to white and now they cant see anything)
UI theming is a rare feature in Roblox games (no idea if this is a con or not)

I believe UI theming would be a cool feature™️ for Aeronuatica, I don't want this to be urgently implemented or anything, I mostly made this suggestion because it seems nobody else has suggested this lol. Mockup below for those not interested in yap.