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What Is Xhud?
From conception, Xhud has been about optimizing the USER in a competitive environment.
This is achieved through the meticulous attention to detail of every aspect of the HUD and how it contributes to user performance in high intensity situations. Throughout the iterations of the HUD, it has been used by myself and top-echelon players, crash-testing and fine tuning the design. This is very much a passion project as, from scratch, a rough estimate of time spent developing the HUD so far would be in the hundreds of hours from just myself, excluding my prior experience in the development of other HUDs.
Although file size is generally overlooked on modern hardware where multi-terabyte storage is commonplace, in Xhud it is treated with exceptional consideration as the very first interaction the user makes with the HUD. By minimizing file size we remove practically all thought from the decision making process of installing the HUD. At only 6 MB, the HUD can slip into bloated gamer HHDs, be sent between friends over Discord, or be stored on the cheapest thumb drive you could find the night before a LAN. Xhud is roughly 10% of the size of similarly featured HUDs, and half the size of JUST the custom killfeed icons used in nearly all HUDs (Xhud includes a custom optimized version).
To be clear, file size is never the deciding factor on the design of a feature, but it is always minimized wherever it can be done without compromise. The way I minimize file size is typically through cutting bloat, tailoring something to its application, or through an understanding of material data formats. For more information on this topic, check out this wiki page.
The first time you launch the game with Xhud installed, it asks you to select a resolution from the list of supported resolutions. Then, it remembers your selection and you're ready to play or customize the HUD using the in-game customization menu.
This is a simple and non-noteworthy process, and that's because of the extensively designed and tested Log-Base system responsible for the memory of the user's resolution and customizations, originally developed using Animation-States before adopting a more reliable process refined from JarateKing's bleeding edge Basefile Script Integration. For more information on the system developed for Xhud, check out this wiki page.
A benefit of this design is the portability of your customized version of the HUD. All of your customizations are stored in only couple-hundreds of bytes in a text file and generated by the HUD, so sending this file to friends over Discord, distributing it to fans, or transporting it to a LAN is incredibly easy.