As you can imagine, a whole UI rewrite is a big project. The first step for us was finding a new UI framework to build it in, because our existing UI tools are a very simplistic by modern standards, and everything is very close to the metal and there’s no layout engine, etc. Eventually we settled on a library called RMLUI. It’s a high-performance UI engine written in C++, but whose API is based on HTML and CSS to make it much more approachable. With this, we’ll be able to have a much more beautiful, much more stable, and much more moddable UI.

So we decided on that library, and with the dedicated work of a bunch of contributors (notably - lov, ChrisFloofyKitsune, Marek), it’s nearly integrated but it needs to go through some usage tests before it can be merged into the main engine release. Anyone who has experience with HTML and CSS and isn’t afraid of a little lua (or if you don’t know any of those things and feel like learning), please join us in testing things out! This can be entirely new widgets, or rewrites and updates to existing UI widgets, anything you feel like building.

Design of course is no small task, but some very talented designers have been cooking up some major improvements. Not everything is finalized, but it’s definitely far enough along to start building out the fundamentals in code. You can see some of those designs in Figma.

For specifics on getting set up, head to this discord thread https://discord.com/channels/549281623154229250/1228831114143993896