GX Compass

A client-side planetary compass and clock for Space Engineers, drawn straight onto the HUD.

Always know which way you're heading on a planet — with a readable backing plate, a matching UTC/Local clock, and full control over color, size, and position. Because it's a client plugin, it works on any server with no world mod and no Text HUD API required.

Purely cosmetic — it changes nothing about the world, blocks, or other players.

Features

• Planetary compass — a smooth heading readout while on or near any planet, tracking your ship, rover, or character.
• Cardinal or degrees — 16-point letters (N / NE / E …) or a numeric degree scale.
• UTC + Local clock — day/night time of day, split on either side of center. 12 or 24 hour.
• Readable anywhere — a tinted backing plate keeps it legible over bright sky and dark terrain.
• Make it yours — RGB color picker, plate color + opacity, and move / resize the whole thing.
• Zero-config — sensible defaults out of the box; tweak anything in the settings dialog.

Install

1. Install Pulsar (the Space Engineers plugin loader).
2. Enable GX Compass in the plugin list and restart when prompted.
3. Load a world near a planet — the compass appears at the top of the HUD.

Open its settings from the Pulsar plugin list to recolor, move, or resize it.

How it works

The plugin renders on a Harmony postfix of the in-game HUD draw (MyGuiScreenHudSpace.Draw) using the game's own MyGuiManager text/sprite drawing — so it needs no world mod and no Text HUD API. Heading is a direct tangent-plane projection (local up, world north on the horizon, a single atan2); ticks are placed by a true perspective term; the clock is derived from the live sun vector and the player's longitude.

Building

• Visual Studio 2022 with the .NET Framework 4.8.1 Developer Pack.
• Space Engineers installed (the project references the game assemblies via $(Bin64)).
• Open ClientPluginTemplate.sln and build. The post-build step deploys the DLL to Pulsar's local plugin folder. When published via the PluginHub, Pulsar compiles the ClientPlugin project from source at the listed commit.

Credits

• Built on the client plugin template.
• Inspired by the original HUD Compass by Zkillerproxy — this is an independent implementation, with thanks for the idea.

Reporting issues

Open an issue on this repository with what you saw and how to reproduce it.