How to Build a Custom HUD for a GTA Roleplay Server With AI

The HUD is the first thing every player sees and the easiest way to make your server feel custom. A good GTA roleplay HUD shows health, armor, hunger, thirst, stamina, sometimes stress and oxygen, plus money, job, and a speedometer all in a clean NUI overlay that matches your server's identity. A bad HUD silently eats frames. The difference is almost entirely in how often you update the UI and how much work you do per frame.

This guide covers building a HUD as an NUI overlay (HTML/CSS/JS) fed by Lua data, wired to your framework's status events. PlayDeck teaches you to build this with AI: you describe the bars, layout, and theme you want, steer the AI as it writes the HTML/CSS and the Lua that pushes data, and most importantly learn the performance habits that keep your HUD under a fraction of a millisecond on resmon.

Understand how a FiveM HUD actually works

A HUD has two halves. The NUI side is a web page (HTML/CSS/JS) declared in your fxmanifest as ui_page; it draws the bars and listens for messages. The Lua side reads game and framework state GetEntityHealth, player armor, and your framework's hunger/thirst metadata and pushes it to the page with SendNUIMessage. The page receives that message in a window event listener and updates the DOM.

Hunger and thirst aren't native GTA stats; they come from your framework. QBCore broadcasts hud:client:UpdateNeeds and stores hunger/thirst in player metadata; ESX servers commonly use esx_status, which ticks status values you read each update. So your HUD subscribes to the framework's status events rather than inventing its own. Knowing this split web for drawing, Lua for data is the key mental model, and it's the first thing PlayDeck has you internalize before the AI writes a line.

Build the NUI layout and bars

Lay out the bars in HTML and style them in CSS radial rings, flat bars, or icons with fill. Keep the markup static and animate only the fill width/height and color via CSS transitions, because changing layout properties forces expensive reflows. Use a dark, semi-transparent panel or glassmorphism if it fits your server, but remember every blur and shadow has a render cost on lower-end machines.

Drive it with a single message format from Lua one object containing health, armor, hunger, thirst, stress, money, job, and speed so you update the whole HUD in one SendNUIMessage and one JS handler. Hide bars contextually (only show the speedometer in a vehicle) by toggling a CSS class, not by rebuilding the DOM. When you describe the layout to an AI, give it the exact bars, order, and theme; it produces clean HTML/CSS you can restyle, and you keep the data contract to one message.

Wire it to framework status and update efficiently

The most important code decision is your update loop. Do not run a tight while-true loop calling SendNUIMessage every frame that is what tanks FPS. Instead, update on a throttled timer (every 200-500ms is plenty for status bars) and only send a message when a value actually changed. Cache the last sent values and skip the message if nothing moved. For speed, you can update a touch faster, but still throttled.

Read health and armor from the ped, hunger/thirst/stress from framework metadata or status events, and money/job from your framework's player data callbacks. Subscribe to the framework's 'needs updated' event rather than polling where you can. The result is a HUD that idles near zero cost and only does work when something changes. This change-detection pattern is exactly the kind of optimization an AI applies well when you tell it to update only on change and throttle the loop.

Disable the default HUD and ship it clean

To replace GTA's default HUD elements, hide the native components you're overriding with DisplayHud/DisplayRadar and HideHudComponentThisFrame for the specific pieces you're replacing but keep the minimap if your server uses it. Add a config so server owners can toggle which bars appear and reposition the panel, since not every server uses stress or oxygen.

Test on resmon (txAdmin's resource monitor) in real play driving, sprinting, taking damage not just standing still. A HUD that reads 0.00ms idle but spikes while moving means your update loop isn't throttled. Once it's lean and themed, it's a great first commercial script: small, visual, and universally needed. Sell it on Tebex under a Cfx.re license with escrow never by copying another creator's UI.