BetterFloatMenu 1.0.0

BetterFloatMenu - An alternative to Rimworld's FloatMenu system.

<div> <img src="Images/Search2.png" width="40%" height="40%"> <img src="Images/Search1.png" width="30%" height="30%"> <img src="Images/Icons.png" width="25%" height="25%"> <div>

Why it exists

Rimworld has the FloatMenu utility, which is essentially a dropdown. It is used in both gameplay and menus. However, with many mods installed, these menus can become far too large and very difficult to read and navigate as a user. As a mod author, you may need large dropdown menus, but the FloatMenu just isn't good enough. This BetterFloatMenu provides a very similar API as the regular FloatMenu, but offers a better UI, including a search bar.

Installation

Open your mod project in Visual Studio or your IDE of choice.

Add the NuGet package to your .cproj or PackageReference file:

<ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="BetterFloatMenu" Version="*" />
</ItemGroup>

This will ensure that you always have the latest stable version.

Alternatively, you can simply copy the BetterFloatMenu.cs file and put it in your project. This is not the preferred option, since you will not recieve improvements or bugfixes.

Usage

Import the tool: import EpicUtils;

Then you will need to have a list of items you want the user to pick from. These items can be anything you want: pawns, items, maps, colors, names etc.

In this example I will use strings for the sake of simplicity.

// Your list of items. Can be any type.
var rawItems = new string[] { "Bob", "Joe", "Henry" };

You now need to turn these into MenuItems. MenuItemBase is an abstract class, and there are two default implementations provided by default: MenuItemText and MenuItemIcon. MenuItemText will work for most use cases - but you can also create your own implementation of MenuItemBase for full control over rendering.

// Turn raw items into MenuItemBases.
var items = new List<MenuItemBase>();
foreach(var raw in rawItems)
    items.Add(new MenuItemText(raw, raw));
    
// You can also use this utility method:
items = BetterFloatMenu.MakeItems(rawItems, raw => new MenuItemText(raw, raw));

Note that MenuItemText's constructor has two mandatory arguments: the first is the payload (more on that later), and the second is a Label string. Since our payload is already a string in this example, we simply pass raw in twice. If our payload were floats then we would do new MenuItemText(raw, raw.ToString()).

Finally, open the menu:

var window = BetterFloatMenu.Open(items, item =>
{
    // Here item is the MenuItemBase. To extract the payload, call GetPayload, specifying the type of the payload.
    string selected = item.GetPayload<string>();
    
    // Do something with it!
    Log.Message($"The user clicked on: {selected}");
});

// You can also optionally customize the window here...
window.optionalTitle = "My menu";
window.resizeable = true;
window.CanSearch = true;

That is almost all there is to using this utility. There are quite a few customization options in the BetterFloatMenu class - please explore the API to understand them. The code is well documented, and should be easy to understand.