Indicators¶

Players need to see when a mod expects CAPIE and CAPIE is not there. A silent failure is never acceptable. Every mod built on CAPIE therefore ships a small, discreet indicator, and the main menu shows one line that says whether CAPIE is loaded.

"This mod requires CAPIE, but it is missing" In the SDK, needs in-game test¶

Inside a campaign the indicator sits where the feature that needs CAPIE would be. For Rename Anything that is the country pencil on the Politics title line: without CAPIE the pencil is hidden and a 16 px warning glyph in the game's orange takes its place. It has no text on the panel, just a tooltip:

Rename Anything needs CAPIE, which is not loaded. Custom country names show as the original. Start the game with the CAPIE launcher.

It is never a pop-up and never a blocking dialog.

The snippet uses signal S1: a text box whose localisation CAPIE overrides at draw time. No trigger is involved, so it is correct the moment the panel opens.

The SDK ships the snippet as snippets/capie_v1_indicator.gui.txt:

instantTextboxType = {
    name = "mymod_capie_status"
    position = { x = 0 y = 0 }
    font = "hoi_16mbs"
    text = "MYMOD_CAPIE_LINE"
    maxWidth = 160
    maxHeight = 18
    fixedsize = yes
    pdx_tooltip = "MYMOD_CAPIE_TT"
}

l_english:
 MYMOD_CAPIE_LINE:0 "$CAPIE_STATUS$"
 MYMOD_CAPIE_TT:0 "My Mod types names through CAPIE. Without it the editors stay read-only."

With CAPIE 1.1 loaded, CAPIE_STATUS reads CAPIE 1.1 in the text colour; without it the SDK's fallback CAPIE missing is drawn in orange. Two details still need a test in the game: whether an empty or single-space result would draw cleanly (for designs that want nothing shown while CAPIE is there), and whether a £ text icon can carry the warning glyph.

Main menu: "CAPIE loaded" or "CAPIE missing" Planned¶

One line in the bottom-left corner of the main menu, in Arial12:

The main menu has no script context: no country, no scripted GUI, no triggers. Only GUI files and localisation apply there. That has consequences:

• The line can only say loaded or missing. Without CAPIE nothing can count mods or compare versions in the menu, so version mismatches are shown in the campaign instead, where the API level is known.
• Adding a line means overriding the whole vanilla interface/frontendmainview.gui. To avoid conflicts, only one item ships that override: the CAPIE script SDK. Total conversions that already replace the menu paste the same small block into their own file.
• Each game patch that changes the vanilla menu file needs an SDK update.

Proposed, subject to change

# PROPOSED. Added to a copy of vanilla interface/frontendmainview.gui.
instantTextBoxType = {
    name = "capie_menu_status"
    position = { x = 12 y = -24 }
    orientation = LOWER_LEFT
    font = "Arial12"
    text = "CAPIE_MENU_STATUS"
    maxWidth = 400
    maxHeight = 14
}

l_english:
 CAPIE_MENU_STATUS: "§OCAPIE missing: a mod in your playset needs it§!"   # CAPIE would override with "CAPIE 1.1 loaded"

Open questions before this can ship: whether main-menu text goes through the lookups CAPIE hooks (proven only for in-game panels), and whether the menu reads its text once before CAPIE is loaded. If the menu caches it, the line would say "missing" until the menu is rebuilt. If the snippet is absent or broken, CAPIE still works, and the in-campaign indicator and the launcher's own message remain.