Customising the FiveM pause menu: title, tab names and colours

#Changing the title

Everything written in the pause menu comes from text labels, and FiveM's AddTextEntry overrides any label on the client. The title bar uses FE_THDR_GTAO.

CreateThread(function()
    AddTextEntry('FE_THDR_GTAO', '~p~Night City~s~ Roleplay')
end)

Label text supports the game's formatting tokens: ~r~ red, ~b~ blue, ~g~ green, ~y~ yellow, ~p~ purple, ~o~ orange, ~c~ grey, ~m~ dark grey, ~u~ black, ~s~ back to the default and ~h~ for bold. Keep it short. The header is a single line, and long names are truncated on smaller resolutions.

#Renaming tabs and buttons

local LABELS = {
    FE_THDR_GTAO = 'Night City Roleplay',
    PM_SCR_MAP = 'City Map',
    PM_SCR_GAM = 'Server',
    PM_PANE_LEAVE = 'Back to server list',
    PM_PANE_QUIT = 'Quit to desktop',
}

CreateThread(function()
    for label, text in pairs(LABELS) do
        AddTextEntry(label, text)
    end
end)

Rename, do not repurpose. Players know where Settings and Disconnect live; calling the Game tab "Server" is fine, but renaming Settings to something clever just makes support tickets. If your community is not English-speaking, these labels are also the cheapest way to localise the menu's top level into your players' language.

#The pause menu colours

The menu's blue accent bar, tab highlight and several other elements use HUD colours defined in hudcolor.dat. ReplaceHudColourWithRgba(index, r, g, b, a) overrides a colour for the session, and GetHudColour reads the current value.

CreateThread(function()
    ReplaceHudColourWithRgba(116, 132, 94, 214, 255)
    ReplaceHudColourWithRgba(123, 60, 40, 110, 255)
    ReplaceHudColourWithRgba(142, 170, 120, 255, 255)
end)

Matching the pause menu accent to your map is what makes the two feel like one product. If your server uses a coloured minimap, take the accent from the map's road or label colour; the themes in the minimap catalogue each have a clear accent colour that works well here, and the studio lets you build a map around your own brand colour.

#Opening the menu from a script

ActivateFrontendMenu(menuHash, togglePause, component) opens a frontend menu. For the normal multiplayer pause menu use the hash of FE_MENU_VERSION_MP_PAUSE. The component argument selects the tab; -1 opens the map directly, which is handy for a phone GPS app or a "show map" button in your own UI.

RegisterCommand('bigmap', function()
    if not IsPauseMenuActive() then
        ActivateFrontendMenu(GetHashKey('FE_MENU_VERSION_MP_PAUSE'), false, -1)
    end
end, false)

Close it with SetFrontendActive(false). The older SetPauseMenuActive native is deprecated; the native reference points to ActivateFrontendMenu and SetFrontendActive instead. To check what state the menu is in, GetPauseMenuState() returns 0 when inactive and higher values while starting, ready or shutting down; IsPauseMenuActive() is enough for most checks.

#Replacing Escape with your own menu

Many servers open a custom NUI menu on Escape (with settings, the map, a report button and disconnect) and leave the vanilla pause menu one click away. The pattern is to disable the Escape control every frame and react to its disabled press.

local ESC = 200

CreateThread(function()
    while true do
        DisableControlAction(0, ESC, true)
        if IsDisabledControlJustReleased(0, ESC) and not IsPauseMenuActive() then
            TriggerEvent('myui:openMenu')
        end
        Wait(0)
    end
end)

Control 200 is INPUT_FRONTEND_PAUSE_ALTERNATE, the Escape key. Control 199, INPUT_FRONTEND_PAUSE, is the P key and still opens the vanilla menu, which is exactly what you want as a fallback. Add a "Map" button in your menu that calls ActivateFrontendMenu as above, and make sure your NUI releases focus correctly, or players get stuck with a cursor and no way out.

DisableFrontendThisFrame() blocks the pause menu entirely for a frame. Use it only for short moments such as a cutscene or a character creator where opening the menu would break the flow, never permanently.

#The header details on the right

The right side of the header shows player details. These are drawn by the frontend header movie, which scripts can address with BeginScaleformMovieMethodOnFrontendHeader. The method names available depend on the header movie itself, and community resources that show three custom lines there (a job, a character name, a server rank) do it by streaming a modified pause_menu_header.gfx together with their script. That works, but like any streamed Scaleform replacement it is tied to the game build it was made from and conflicts with any other resource streaming the same file. Title, tab labels and colours cover what most servers need without that maintenance.

#Conflicts and load order

Labels and HUD colours are global per client, so the last resource to set them wins. That is the source of the classic "my title keeps changing back" report: vMenu, some framework HUDs and several all-in-one "server branding" scripts set FE_THDR_GTAO or colour 116 themselves. If your title flips after a few seconds, another resource is overriding it later.

• Search your resources for FE_THDR_GTAO and ReplaceHudColour and keep one owner.
• If you cannot remove another resource's call, set yours slightly later, for example after your framework's player-loaded event.
• Keep branding (title, colours, labels) in one small resource with a config, so a rebrand is a one-file change.
• Restart that resource and reopen the menu to test; labels apply the next time the menu is drawn.

A compact branding resource usually ends up with three blocks in one client file: a table of labels passed to AddTextEntry, a table of HUD colour overrides passed to ReplaceHudColourWithRgba, and optionally the Escape handler. Everything runs once at start except the Escape loop. Players on the server never notice any of it, which is the point; they just see a menu that looks like it belongs to your server rather than to a default install. The wider picture of branding the map itself is in branding your server map.

#The map inside the menu

The map tab is the pause menu's most used feature, and it shows the same textures as the radar at a different zoom, so a custom minimap changes it too. How the pause map works, how to read and set the waypoint from it and how its textures relate to the radar is covered in the pause menu map. Blip legend headings shown next to the map are set with text labels as well, described in blip categories and the legend.