Create Help Messages for Your UI Controls

What Are We Talking About?

You know when you hover over a control, hoping to get a little message about what that control does and why it may be useful to you? That’s what we can create with the Set Control Help command. It is a really easy command that is added for any UI control and creates a message to display in the info bar at the bottom of the Kontakt window automatically while you are hovering over it.

How to Add a Help Message

In the example below, a basic performance view was created (see this article) and a simple knob was added (see this article) to control a group volume parameter. The extra control is the set control help command. The command is only looking for two parameters (<variable>,<text>), which is easily added. The first is the variable of the knob you want to display that message (in the case below, that is $Vol) and the second is the text you want to display in the info message, wrapped in “quotations”.

Below, you can see how the text “This is the Volume Control for Group 1.” has been added to the set control help command, targeting the $Vol knob.

on init 

	make_perfview
	set_ui_width_px(580)
	set_ui_height_px(300)
	set_ui_color(9767676h)

	{knob}
	declare ui_knob $Vol (0, 629000, 1) 
	make_persistent($Vol)
	move_control_px($Vol, 100, 140)
	set_control_help($Vol, "This is the Volume Control for Group 1.")

end on

You can see the help message at the bottom of the Kontakt Window.