Motd Menu

This library allows plugins to display VGUI Menus as nice web interface in the Motd window. Motd Menus are set up almost identical to regular menus. Additionally plugin developers can decide to display icons on the Motd version of menus.

Menus need to be written with MotdMenu in order to work properly. While a plugin could theoretically render out any menu, i didn't see an easy way to get the MenuHandler.

When displaying a menu in the motd, all menu data is first piped into a database. From there a php script builds the Motd page and it is displayed. Menu actions done in the Motd browser are piped back into the server through rcon and then sent to the original MenuHandler.

This system probably works on other games as well, but I have only tested it on TF2. Vote menus are currently also not supported. Although it would probably be really nice to see vote results visually, I don't like the idea of having a full-screen vote menu pop up.

Features

Motd menus can be turned off in !settings and they also detect if clients disabled html motds. In that case the players will just receive a regular VGUI menu.

Keep in mind that cl_disablehtmlmotd is only checked with 1 player/second, so refreshing that value could take some time. I could query that value more often but I don't think it's worth it.

Users can also choose to have the menu displayed in a bigger motd screen instead of the small blackboard screen TF2 normally uses, but that currently does not affect rendering at all.

Commands

There's one server command sm_motdmenu_callback for rcon - don't use it.

Installation

1. Download the plugin and put it in your addons folder as usual.
2. Loading the plugin now will fail, but generate it's config if missing.
3. Edit the plugin config (see below).
4. Put the web content on your php server.
   Don't use too many subdirectories as the url with additional data added must not exceed something like 150 chars.
5. Edit the web config (see below).
6. Reload the plugin in your server.

One web setup can handle mutliple servers.

If you install a plugin that uses MotdMenu and provides icons, you probably need to put those image resources into the img web directory.

Plugin Config

The Config is located in addons/sourcemod/configs/motdmenu.cfg

• serverid is the name php will know what server to notify. Allowed characters are a-z A-Z 0-9 and _
• baseurl is the public address of where the web page resides. For example https://myserver.net/motdmenu/.
  Don't use too many subdirectories as the url with additional data added must not exceed something like 150 chars.
• database the database entry from databases.cfg to use to talk to the motd.

There are also three sounds in this config, those are basically copies of the menu sound values in the core config of sourcemod, but maybe you want different menu sounds for Motd Menu

Web Config

This config is settings.php. Yes I could have used a key value file you're used to, but storing data in a php script is less likely to leak in case of misconfiguration.

• database is the database to connect to for data exchange. This needs to be the same across all game servers using this web instance. The values are pretty much the same as used in databases.cfg.
• servers is the list of servers to talk to. Every entry in this list needs to be named exactly the same as the server serverid value.
  • name is currently pretty unused, but displayed at the top of motd menus.
  • host is your game servers ip address.
  • port is the game servers port. Usually thats 27015.
  • rconpass is the rcon password. Please choose a strong one so nobody can guess it and break your server from outside.

Developing

Basic usage of motd menus does not differ a lot from regular VGUI menus. There are only a hand full of command that you need:

VGUI Menu	MOTD Menu	Comment
CreateMenu new Menu	CreateMotdMenu new MotdMenu
DisplayMenu Menu.Display	DisplayMotdMenu MotdMenu.DisplayMotd	Only the method map will automatically fall back to Menu.Display if Motd Menus are disabled
CancelMenu Menu.Cancel	CancelMotdMenu MotdMenu.Cancel	Will hide the menu, again should fall back to CancelMenu if not Motd Menu is open
delete menu	CloseMotdMenu MotdMenu.Close	This call is necessary to remove some additional resources the plugin needs to store to make callbacks from the motd browser work

The methodmap tries to hide away the logic for optional includes. So if you include motdmenu.inc optional, the MotdMenu methodmap automatically proxies to Menu if motd menus is not loaded. To not have the include as compile time requirement you'll need to some preprocessor magic.

As a nice little bonus you can provide an image for ever menu option displaying in the MOTD. All you need to do for that is to pass a MotdIconPathProvider to the DisplayMotdMenu/MotdMenu.DisplayMotd call. In this function you receive the info data you pass into the menu item back and can map it to a image path.

// MotdIconPathProvider for a fruit menu
bool GetMenuFruitIcon(const char[] menuInfo, char[] iconPath, int iconPathSize) {
	Format(iconPath, iconPathSize, "img/fruitmenu/fruit_%s.png", menuInfo);
}
void ShowFruitMenu(int client) {
	char translated[64];
	MotdMenu menu = new MotdMenu(FruitMenuHandler, MENU_ACTIONS_DEFAULT);
	menu.SetTitle("%T", client, "pick fruit");
	Format(translated, sizeof(translated), "%T", client, "fruit banana");
	menu.AddItem("banana", translated);
	Format(translated, sizeof(translated), "%T", client, "fruit orange");
	menu.AddItem("banana", translated);
	menu.DisplayMotd(client, GetMenuFruitIcon, MENU_TIME_FOREVER);
}
if(action == MenuAction_Select) {
	// ...
} else if(action == MenuAction_Cancel && param2 == MenuCancel_ExitBack) {
	// ...
} else if(action == MenuAction_End) {
	CloseMotdMenu(menu);
}

I recommend requiring image resources for your menus to be in the web directory in img/plugin/image.png so they don't clash with other plugins but allowing the server admins to exchange images if they so desire.

When your plugin unload it's recommended that you call CloseAllMenus. This will invalidate and close all motd menus currently opened by your plugin to prevent the console spamming useless errors when your plugin reloads.

Dependencies

You'll need smlib to compile the plugin. The web part was written on PHP 7.2.

Plans

The plugin shall grow as my requirements grow, and I'll be using it in my main project from now on.

Suggestions and feedback are welcome, but I don't know if or how fast I'll add stuff to this plugin.

Thank you

Thank you to psychonic for writing Dynamic MOTD, it was a very helpful resource. Also thank you to the sourcemod community and discord guild for answering my questions. Lastly I want to thank Fuffeh for supporting the idea.