EnemyHighlight

Overlay mod for Barotrauma: marks the characters around you through walls and rock, tells you what each one is by its colour, and puts a badge beside the ones something is wrong with.

What it does

• Marks every character you care about — fifteen kinds of target, each with its own switch and its own colour: creatures latched onto the hull, creatures coming for you, creatures minding their own business, machines, husks, pirates, outpost guards, the outpost people worth talking to, the rest of the crowd, pets, other players, your own bots, and yourself. Turn off the ones you do not want to see.
• Five ways to draw a target — skeleton follows the character's actual joints, outline traces one line around the whole body, hitboxes draws every limb, dot marks the middle, none leaves only the labels. Any of them can be filled with a translucent colour, and both thickness and opacity are yours.
• Tells you about the target — name, distance, health bar, health as a number, and an arrow at the edge of the screen for the ones you cannot see. Each is a separate switch.
• Badges for what is wrong with it — bleeding, low on oxygen, stunned, paralysed, burnt, irradiated, under pressure, turning into a husk. The icons and their colours are the game's own, so anything another mod adds shows up too, and a badge appears only once the game itself considers the state visible from the outside. Three more: the job icon, the restraints a person is wearing, and unconscious.
• Limits, if you want them — a maximum distance, only outside a submarine or only inside one, whether the dead keep their marker, and a line-of-sight check that turns the whole thing into an honest overlay that cannot see through walls.
• One key — turns the overlay on and off while you play.

Requirements

• LuaCsForBarotrauma with C# scripting enabled.
• Checked on Barotrauma 1.13.4.0. Nothing is claimed about other versions.

Client-side mod. It works in singleplayer and on any server without being installed there, and it does not sync anything over the network. It only reads the state of the game and draws on top of it: nothing about your character or the world changes, and nobody else sees anything.

Installation

Download the zip from Releases, unpack the folder into Barotrauma/LocalMods/, then enable EnemyHighlight in the game's content package menu.

LuaCsForBarotrauma has to be installed with C# scripting enabled, or the mod will not load at all.

Settings

All settings are in the game options: the hotkey under Mod Controls Settings, the rest under Mod Gameplay Settings, all in one category named EnemyHighlight. Values are stored by the game, outside the mod folder, so updating the mod keeps them.

Setting	Default	What it does
Toggle	F6	Turns the overlay on and off while you play
Show status marker	on	Keeps a small label in the corner while the overlay is on, so you can tell it is on with nothing in sight
Marker style	skeleton	skeleton, outline, hitboxes, dot or none
Fill the body	off	Fills the limbs with a translucent colour under the marker
Line thickness	2.0	Thickness of the marker lines, in pixels
Marker opacity	0.9	How solid the marker is; lower keeps the scene readable behind it
Show name	on	Draws the target's name above it
Show distance	on	Draws the distance below it, in raw game units — 100 of them are one metre
Show health bar	on	Draws a health bar above the target
Show health percentage	on	Draws health as a number; works with the bar off
Off-screen arrows	on	Draws an arrow at the edge of the screen for targets you cannot see
Affliction badges	important	important shows bloodloss, low oxygen, stun, husk infection, paralysis, burns, radiation and pressure; all shows every affliction, including ones other mods add; off shows none
Job badge	on	Draws the job icon beside a person — prisoners are a job as well
Handcuffed badge	on	Draws the icon of the restraints a person is wearing
Unconscious badge	on	Marks a target that is down but not dead
Badge size	32	How large the badges are, in pixels; they share the marker opacity
Latched monsters	on	Creatures clinging to the hull or to somebody
Attacking monsters	on	Creatures whose AI is attacking or aggressive right now
Passive monsters	on	Creatures fleeing, idling, feeding or otherwise not coming for you
Monsters of unknown state	on	Creatures the game gives no monster AI state for, so the mod cannot tell — mostly from other mods
Machines	on	Mechanical characters, such as turrets mounted on a hull
Husks	on	Anything the game marks as a husk, human-shaped or not
Outpost NPCs turned hostile	on	Outpost people who used to be friendly and are not any more
Hostile people	on	Human-shaped characters on no team at all — pirates and raiders in a campaign
Outpost security	on	Guards of an outpost, told apart from the rest of its people
Outpost people worth talking to	on	Everyone the game itself offers an interaction with; merchants, medics and the recruiter get their own colours inside this group
Other outpost people	off	The rest of the outpost crowd, the ones with nothing to offer
Pets	on	Tamed creatures
Other players	on	Characters driven by other people in a multiplayer session
Crew bots	on	Bots of your own team
Yourself	off	Marks the character you are playing; mostly useful for seeing what a marker style looks like
Maximum distance (0 = no limit)	0	Hides targets further away than this, in the same raw game units
Where to look	anywhere	anywhere, outsideSub for open water only, inPlayerSub for inside a player submarine only
Show the dead	off	Keeps marking a target after it dies
Hide targets the game has switched off	on	The game stops updating creatures beyond their disable distance and their last position stays frozen; with this on the mod stops drawing them instead of pointing somewhere stale
Only targets the camera renders	off	Skips targets the game has decided not to draw this frame
Require line of sight	off	Only marks what your character can actually see, so nothing shows through walls or rock; costs a ray cast per target

A target gets exactly one colour. The fifteen kinds are checked in a fixed order — what kills you soonest first, narrow before broad — and the first one a target answers to gives it its colour. Everything else about it goes to the badges, which stack.

The hotkey is ignored while you are typing — in chat, in the console, or in any other text field.

Bind the key with a Latin keyboard layout active. The game identifies keys by the character they produce, so a key pressed on a non-Latin layout has no name it recognises and the binding is stored as None. The mod refuses to act on such a binding and says so in the console; rebinding the same physical key on the Latin layout works.

Known limits

The fifteen colours are fixed and cannot be changed in the settings. The game's settings menu has no colour type at all, and the way around it — three sliders per colour channel — would mean forty-five sliders for fifteen kinds of target. A proper colour picker needs the mod to bring its own menu, which is a separate piece of work and a later release.

No more than eight badges are drawn beside one target. With affliction badges on important this is out of reach; with all a badly hurt target can hit it, and the rest are simply not drawn.

The overlay sees through walls and rock. That is the point of it, not an oversight — Require line of sight turns it off, at the cost of one ray cast per target per frame. It is the only setting in the mod with a price worth mentioning, and it is the last check the mod runs.

The mod reads parts of the game that are not meant for mods — the ragdoll, its limbs and its joints — because that is where a character's actual shape lives. If a game update renames them, the mod will fail to compile and will not load, rather than half-work. It will need a new release.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.