July 2026
For Rugby League 26 I decided to start getting the common elements from all out games converted to NoesisGUI and the one I am most proud of is the controller select screen, allowing for the visual feedback to show what side you are on and this took me a lot less time then I expected it.
The UI artist wanted a liquid gold look for the button within our proteam mode, I wrote the HLSL shader and got it into game and allowed the buttons to accept shaders, the whole row of tiles have a different permutation of this shader, and it makes for a unique experience.
For the competition hub it got a full rewrite and a restructure to allow it to be easier delt with. Some of out competitions have Fixtures then those fixtures have 8 pool and it because overwhelming very quickly from a data side.
For the competition hub I only cache current step and forward and back (round wise). So if you are on round 2, round 1 and 3 are loaded and if you move to round 3 round 1's data will be unloaded to make room for round 4 and it allowed for a smoother experince and we bulk load the textures since it is a finite amount of textures (in the image case it is 18 one per team)
Within this project all hud elements had to be rewritten from scratch, and many more added
Elements
Score Hud + themeing logic percompetition
Player plates
Quick Substitutions
Quick Tactics
Wipes
Player Statistics when doing a Try
Match Intro
Match Lineup
Match Summary
Pause Menu
Bunker
Online Name Plates (infront of the wipe per Sony Compliance)
When it came to the loading screen, we ran into a 'texture leak' problem it was detecting the images we were using as leaking, since we did an allocation check when we leave the Frontend side of things and going into gameplay since it was expecting everything to be destroyed, the way we got around this was by setting up textures 2 empty textures lets say 512x512 and before we left the frontend we overrode the texture's data with the texture that wanted to go into those slots, then we could "unload" and pass full ownership the loading screen