Halo Theme Desktop Hud

This very impressive picture looks like a simple screenshot of your HUD from Halo 3’s Valhalla multiplayer map. But it’s not. If you take a closer look, it’s actually a fully-functional PC desktop.

The radar monitors your outside temperature. The player indicators are links. The grenade icons launch programs. The ammo counters in the top-right show your unread emails and rss items. The health bar shows whatever music you’re currently playing.

And neatest of all, the ammo counter on the battle rifle itself displays how much juice is left in your battery, should you use it on a laptop.

Good news is that rigging one of these desktops up isn’t as hard as you think, so if this takes your fancy you’ll find a how-to guide after the jump.

Reader rykennedyan’s desktop is an impressive recreation of a first-person view from the popular Halo FPS shooter—with system stats and information completely blended into the desktop.

The desktop is created entirely with customized Rainmeter configurations sitting on top of a Halo 3 wallpaper. Here’s his overview of the configuration:

* Grenades – Each grenade launches a specific application. I currently have them set to, from left to right, Pidgin, Steam, Foobar, and Firefox.
* Power Drainer – Opens a Shutdown menu. You can choose Shutdown, Restart, and Sleep
* Health Bar – Displays current track progress, with artist and title above it.
* Battle Rifle and Ammo Count – Displays current unread message count from Gmail and the Battlerifle opens Gmail.
* Ammo Clip – Top clip is download traffic; bottom clip is upload traffic.
* Radar – As of now, all this does is download and save an image for the local radar from Weather Underground. I’m currently editing a GIMP script which will automatically crop and edit the picture to display properly upon download. What you see here is the intended look. It also displays the current temperature.
* Time and Game Type – Display current time and date.
* Blue Score and Red Score – Display current CPU and RAM usage.
* Player Callsigns – These behave just like my TweetScanner skin.
* Battlerifle Ammo Count – Displays current battery status; it displays 0 in this picture because I’m using my desktop which is not on a battery.
* Also, the visor outline is done in Rainmeter as well.

If you’re looking to get your hands on it, head on over here to find out how.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Halo News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.