VECTOR HUD 1.1.1

Glide path is now an actual pathfinder

The glide guidance no longer scores 59 forward-integrated arcs and picks one — it runs a 3D A* search over a lazily-built voxel field (2-block cells) in a configuration space of position and heading. It can turn, and then turn again beyond that turn, which the old sampler could not express at all.

The old objective also rewarded staying far from everything, so a route threading a 6 m gap scored 0.50 while a route fleeing that gap scored 1.00 — the exact manoeuvre you wanted was structurally penalised. Obstacle clearance is now a cost, not a prohibition: a tight gap answers "expensive, but passable".

Redundant waypoints are pulled out and the result is smoothed. The search runs on a receding horizon with a 140 m provisional goal, so gently changing course no longer throws the whole corridor away.

The corridor is readable at range

The far end of the corridor used to fade to 6% alpha — invisible exactly where you needed to plan. Gate alpha at the far end is now 52%, the fade is linear instead of curved, and 16 gates are drawn instead of 12. Path lines gained a bright core, a halo and a dark backing stroke, and got thicker (2.0 → 2.4 px; provisional 1.3 → 1.8 px). The ambient floor rose from 0.40 to 0.62 so the corridor still reads at night. Look-ahead extended from 6 s to 8 s.

Warnings share one central band — in three lanes

Warnings used to be drawn by whoever raised them, wherever that instrument happened to live: creepers on an overhead flag, terrain beside the attitude ball, ground clearance beside the tape. They are now all in one band above the reticle, but the band has three lanes, so position tells you what kind of trouble it is before you read the words:

• FLIGHT — straight above the reticle. Where you are going: terrain, ground clearance, impact.
• SELF — upper left, toward the life-support instruments. Health, fire, falling.
• THREAT — upper right, toward the radar. Creepers, projectiles, something behind you.

Several warnings can now stand at once instead of the strongest one silencing the rest, and size carries urgency: 18% / 31% / 55% of screen width by severity, instead of one fixed 57% for everything.

Readouts moved under the reticle, where they belong

Things you read and judge are no longer shouted. Ground clearance (AGL) with its bar, glide ratio (L/D), the path instruction, and terrain range now sit in a small single row beneath the reticle, in type roughly a quarter the height of a warning. Each cell appears only while its source has something to say, and the row rebalances around the centre line. Your eye moves about 30 units vertically and never leaves the centre of the screen.

Real depth, without moving anything

Instruments now sit on five depth layers. Depth is carried by chromatic aberration — the fringe reverses sign across the focal plane, so which side the red edge falls on tells you front from back — plus line weight, brightness, and a very small size change. Scale bars sit behind, the live value in front; warnings sit deepest. No perspective divide is involved, so nothing is pushed off-screen and the default layer is pixel-identical to 1.1.0.

Fixed: crowded fights dropped the wrong targets

Overhead health bars and lock rings had a draw-side limit but no collection limit. The bar list was ordered far-to-near for correct stacking, and the limit cut it from the front — so in a crowd the 24 bars you kept were the 24 farthest ones, and the enemy in your face had none. Lock rings were cut in raw scan order with the same result. Both lists are now sorted by distance, cut to the nearest 24 bars / 16 rings, and only then reordered for painting.

The holo map reaches higher

The terrain table sampled 10 blocks above and below you. On a tower, or in the air, that window missed the ground entirely — at 100 m above terrain it held nothing at all. It now covers 24 blocks each way, 49 layers instead of 21.

Measuring the real cost turned up a second problem: at ground level the table was already producing 6,286–7,690 faces against a 6,000 cap, and faces fill from the centre outward, so the outer ring was being silently dropped. The cap is now 14,000. Vertical scale is compressed to 0.70, so covering 2.33× the world height only costs 1.55× the screen height.

Now on 1.21.4

Fabric 1.21.4 joins the list. Porting needed six substitutions, one of which changes meaning rather than just spelling: getTopY became getTopYInclusive, which returns one block lower, so every height comparison needed a +1.

Only show the HUD when you are wearing something

Three people asked for the same thing in different words: bind the HUD to a piece of equipment, so it only appears while you are wearing it. requiredArmor takes an item id — set it and the HUD only comes up while that item is worn. requiredArmorSlot narrows it to head/chest/legs/feet if you want. requiredTeam does the same thing off a scoreboard team instead, for anyone driving this from a datapack or another mod.

Empty by default, so nothing changes unless you set it.

A note on how this ended up reading equipment rather than a player tag, since that was the obvious first idea: getCommandTags() returns an empty set on the client, always. The HUD is client-side, so a tag-based gate would have compiled, thrown no error, and silently never worked. Worn items are visible to the client, so that is what the gate reads.

themeByArmor maps an item id to a theme, so different gear can bring up a different palette. bootSpeed (full / fast / off) controls the 1.8 s assemble animation — useful if the HUD is coming up every time you put something on.

Theme keys renamed

The key written into your config was an old internal codename. Keys are now apex, draft, monocle, scan, nano. The names you see on screen — APEX, DRAFT, MONOCLE, SCAN, NANO — have not changed. Existing configs are read, migrated, and rewritten on first launch, so your chosen theme is kept.

Fixed: the packaged licence

The LICENSE file inside the jar was still the CC0 template from the project skeleton. It is now the VECTOR HUD licence agreement (free to play and stream, modpacks fine with credit and a link, no reuploading, no asset extraction).

Platforms

1.21 / 1.21.1 Fabric · 1.21 / 1.21.1 NeoForge · 1.21.4 Fabric · 1.20.1 Fabric · 1.20.1 Forge.

26.2 stays where it is for now — that branch does not yet carry this release's work, and shipping it under a newer number would hand 26.2 players an older mod.