Download and Installation

Download

The latest version of CortUI is 1.75 and can be downloaded here (634 KiB).

It is compatible with Allegiance R4 and generally works with Allegiance R5 and the Allegiance Direct3D alpha. However, a higher number of crashes has been reported when used there (see INSERT TICKET LINK HERE).

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 running it, 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!

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 there. CortUI will show up in the list as Free Allegiance CortUI, right next to Allegiance itself.

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.