A bit of extra info
Some of it may be duplicated in another topic, but I hope it will come in useful. This is for A1 again, but I suspect most of it can be easily applied in A2 as well.
There are two files that you’d be working with most of the time if you're creating or modifying a GUI: “gui_racename.cfg†and “gui_racename.sprâ€, located in the “misc†and “sprites†folders respectively.
Open the cfg file and take a look inside. The cfg file has all the gui components (texture pieces) and their locations on the screen. The location of each component is defined by the first two numbers (x and y position). The size of each component is defined by the two numbers that follow (height and width).
Each menu -- minimap, info panel, special weapon panel, cinematic screen and buttons panel -- is given a back area called the “PanelAreaâ€. For example, the federation special weapons panel (called the speed rail in the cfg) has a back area of:
speedPanelArea = 146 327 247 40
Thus, the special weapons panel is located 146 “pixels†from the left of the screen and 327 “pixels†from the top of the screen. The panel size is 247x40.
NOTE that the speed rail components are now defined relative to the origin of the back area. So, the two texture components that make up the speed rail are
speedBackgroundPanel_0 = 0 0 128 40
speedBackgroundPanel_1 = 128 0 119 40
The cfg file assumes that the screen resolution is 640x480. However, when you’re running the game at any other resolution, the position and size of every component is scaled to fit the screen. The important thing to take from this, and this only becomes apparent in retrospect, is that your gui textures will be drawn at a higher resolution than the resolution of the positioning screen, and that the width and height specified in the cfg is NOT in necessarily in pixels.
The original guis are drawn at 1280x1024. I made Future Tense GUIs at 1024x768. The gui will look best at only one resolution. As such, you should decide what resolution you want to run the game at and draw the guis at that resolution. If you plan on running the mod at 1280x1024, notice that this resolution does not have the same screen aspect ratio as the positioning resolution. In this case, I think that it would be better to draw the guis at 1280x960 to avoid having jagged-looking textures.
If you are adding just one compoent, you don't have to worry about the texture resolution so much, but should still try to make sense of how that works.
Take a look at the sprites file as well. The structure there is similar to any other sprites file (ei, weapons, gui_global etc). Once you have all the textures that you’ll need for your gui, you’re ready to start coding. Use real pixel dimensions in the sprites file and scaled pixel values in the cfg.
Its not too complicated