Kicking off the StatScreen project.

So most of you probibly ended up here after hearing about this project on InputMapper somewhere, my other free time project.

Basically, what gave birth to this this is the same thing that gave birth to InputMapper. A desire for a feature that I couldn’t find elsewhere and the ability to program it myself.

I recently built my first ground up PC in a while, and for my first time I decided to get a nice NZXT windowed case. Now I have the modding bug and have been wanting to make a PC stats dedicated screen inside the case and while the hardware has alwayse looked slick, the UI alwayse seems to be hacked together and usually nothing more than a NZXT CAM windows dragged onto the screen and maximized. I wanted something with a slicker UI and most importantly I dont want to ever have to worry about it or be inconvenienced by it with quirks like my mouse ending on the tiny screen, or a window accidentally opening over there etc.

So the goal of this software and project is to create a ground up UI and tool set aimed specifically at modders with screens inside their cases to display stats.

Some basic functionality will be:

• Preventing the mouse from ever being able to move onto the screen with a hard edge that the cursor can glide across just like a normal monitor edge.
• Relocate any window or dialog that attempts to open on the screen to the actual primary monitor.
• Always on top, alwayse 100% screen coverage UI, no taskbar, no window controls, just a clean fullscreen UI.
• And of course Stats!

I plan to make this plugin driven with 2 types of plugins behind it. Stat grabbers that users can write to get data, initially Ill probibly start off with System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter and Open Hardware Monitor as sources, but being plugin driven users can write fetchers to get from stuff like json, xml etc. The 2nd type of plugin will be the Gauge plugin. Gauges will have some customization options like colors and size etc, but being plugin driven users can also write their own gauges and they can be pretty much anything because the Gauges will likely just inherit UIElement meaning they dont have to be an actual gauge, you could put a animated logo, web-page, movie, anything you want.

I haven’t thought far enough ahead to decide if this have any kind of pricing structure or what, or if it’ll be free, MIT, commercial, ad-supported; I don’t know yet. It probibly really depends on how much feedback I get on it and if enough people seem interested in it. My initial guess is it will have a splash screen on startup and a watermark for free users then a small price to remove them. That way I think that keeps everyone happy and hopefully allows me to recoup any costs or cover some of my labor.

So thats about it for now, keep an eye out here for news and updates as development begins.