Skip to main content

Prisma UI F4: 1.0 vs 2.0

Status: beta​

Prisma UI F4 2.0 (the CEF-based rewrite) is in beta. The core view lifecycle and on-mesh rendering carry over unchanged from 1.0 and are stable, but the CEF backend itself is new and hasn't had the same amount of real-world mileage 1.0 had. Expect rough edges on Next-Gen/AE in particular (see the known limitation below), and report anything unexpected.

The big change: Ultralight to CEF​

Prisma UI F4 1.0 rendered through the Ultralight SDK, a WebKit-based embedded browser. 2.0 replaces it with CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) - a real, full Chromium build. This didn't require any change to the plugin-facing API: IVPrismaUI1 through IVPrismaUI5, the entire interface surface 1.0 shipped with, are unchanged. An existing 1.0 plugin recompiles against 2.0's header and runs as-is.

What the switch buys you:

  • A real Chromium rendering pipeline instead of a WebKit variant - current JS/CSS, WebGL, and full video/audio support.
  • No Ultralight SDK dependency, and no Ultralight EULA obligations. Prisma UI F4's own license no longer inherits Ultralight's commercial-use cap or its reverse-engineering restriction.
  • Chrome DevTools for debugging your views, opened in your normal desktop browser and attached to the game over a remote-debugging port, replacing 1.0's in-game inspector overlay (CreateInspectorView/SetInspectorBounds still exist for source compatibility, but SetInspectorBounds is now a no-op since there's no in-game window to position).

Under the hood, 2.0 also composites every view as an iframe inside one shared CEF browser (the "shell"), drawn into the game through a single D3D11 Present hook, instead of each view owning a separate render surface. This is an internal detail - it doesn't change how you call CreateView or anything else on the API - but it's the reason all views share one process and one GPU texture pipeline now.

New since 2.0​

These were added during and after the CEF migration, so they only exist on 2.0:

  • V6 - SuppressHUDWidget, SuppressVanillaMenu, CloseVanillaMenu: hide or close pieces of the vanilla HUD/menu system so your own UI can replace them cleanly.
  • V7 - SuppressVanillaMenuIf, EnableActivateChoiceFilter, SuppressActivateChoicePerk: conditional vanilla menu suppression and activate-choice menu control.
  • V8 - EnumerateViewsEx (adds owner-plugin tracking to view enumeration), GetActivateChoiceLabel, TriggerActivateChoice, GetViewHealth, SetViewOffscreenSize.
  • V9 - gamepad/controller support (IsUsingGamepad, GetControllerStyle/SetControllerStyle, NoteInputDevice, GetButtonPrompt, GetGamepadButtonName), SetViewOwnsEscape, and SetViewOffscreenBackground (lets an on-mesh view render transparently over its bound geometry instead of a hardcoded opaque background).
  • V10 - view roles: SetViewRole/GetViewRole, GetFocusedView, IsAnyPanelVisible. Tag a view as a panel, HUD widget, or overlay so other plugins can ask whether an interactive panel is already on screen before opening their own. Give any view that takes input a role; an undeclared view is never counted by IsAnyPanelVisible, so other plugins will open on top of it.

Everything from 1.0 - core view lifecycle, console logging, Papyrus translations, BindUIEvent, and on-mesh rendering via BindViewToGeometry/BindViewToScreenTexture/GetViewSRV/ SetViewOffscreen - is unchanged and works exactly the same way it did before the CEF switch.

Known limitation in this beta​

SuppressHUDWidget and EnableActivateChoiceFilter (V6/V7) only work on Old-Gen (1.10.163) right now. The vtable addresses they hook are hardcoded and haven't been mapped for Next-Gen/AE yet, so on those runtimes both calls just log a warning and do nothing instead of patching a guessed address.

Upgrading an existing 1.0 plugin​

Nothing in your code needs to change. Recompile against the new PrismaUI_F4_API.h, deploy the new framework files (PrismaUI_F4.dll, PrismaUI_F4_Host.dll, and the PrismaUI_F4_CEF/ runtime folder, replacing any old Ultralight libs/resources folders rather than mixing them in), and your plugin runs unmodified.