wiki:DownloadAndInstallation

Version 24 (modified by MrWabbit, 15 years ago) (diff)

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Download and Installation

Requirements

CortUI is compatible with the Allegiance R5 client.

CortUI is designed for being installed over a non-modded UI. It might conflict with other UI or HUD modifications.

The minimum resolution is 800x600 (more for certain HUDs, see Features for a list). Use on 640x480 is not supported and will result in various UI elements overlapping each other.

Download

Feel comfortable running a bleeding-edge, but not-quite-release-ready version? Then help testing the latest build: CortUI-1.80-dev-r154.exe. Please comment on existing tickets, or open a new one if I introduced a new problem during development—and don't forget to mention the version you were testing ('dev-r154' in this case)!

The latest stable version of CortUI is 1.77 with these release notes and can be downloaded here (830 KiB). The list of changes can be found on the page VersionHistory.

Note for everyone hosting Allegiance download collections: please just link to this page or the CortUI site itself. I have enough bandwidth and the download is fairly small. If you re-host it, that usually means that I have to deal with old versions floating around--at least subscribe to the Timeline RSS feed if you feel like you really have to.

Installation

To improve the CortUI experience, the installation process has been automated as much as possible. CortUI comes packaged as an installer, a single executable that looks and feels a lot like the one you have used to install Allegiance.

It is generally recommended to back up your Allegiance directory before installing CortUI, although no problems have been reported for years.

After telling you what it is going to do, you are presented with a page offering you various options for customization. These options are explained on the page InstallationOptions and it is recommended to change them to your preferences. You can skip that and use the defaults, but this is the only place where you can easily select the HUD you want to use!

/site/Installer.png

On the following page, the installer will ask you for the path to the artwork directory of your Allegiance installation. It will try to automatically detect this (based on the information Allegiance writes into the registry, which is also what the Allegiance client should use), so you normally don't have to change this. The one exception is if you have multiple installations on your disk (for example because you're also doing development on the client) and want to install to one specific artwork directory.

When that has completed, you can run Allegiance through ASGS as you did before. You can switch between the normal HUD and the software HUD you chose during installation using the ESC menu.

Changing HUDs

If you want to switch to another HUD, the easiest way is to run the installer again and select different InstallationOptions.

In case you feel comfortable with editing configuration files on your harddisk, you can also switch manually. This is covered on the InstallationOptions page as well.

Uninstallation

To uninstall CortUI, simply open the Control Panel from your Start menu and select Add or Remove Programs. CortUI will show up in the list as Free Allegiance CortUI, right next to Allegiance itself.

/site/Uninstaller.png

The uninstaller will remove most traces of the CortUI installation (excluding the backup files from the next section), but it will not go back to whatever UI modifications you had installed previously. The restored UI will be the one included in the Allegiance installer at the time of the last CortUI build.

Restoring files overwritten by the installer

Whenever the installer overwrites configuration files, it first creates a backup copy in the directory 'artwork\mods\CortUI\Backup <date>' of your Allegiance directory. So if you installed CortUI, but afterwards noticed that you had installed another mod or made some modifications by yourself that the installer has overwritten, you can restore them from this directory.

This has to be done manually, however. It is considered a special case and therefore not covered by the installer or uninstaller.